Tim Kaine

Mr. KAINE

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise this evening, along with many of my colleagues, to speak in opposition to the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be U.S. Secretary of Education. I oppose Mrs. DeVos, whom I had the chance to see at her confirmation hearing before the HELP Committee, for three basic reasons. I think the children and parents and teachers of this country are entitled to a Secretary of Education who is a champion for public education. They can be a supporter of choice, charters, vouchers, home schooling, but 90 percent of our kids go to public schools and they need a champion. Second, I want a Secretary of Education who is pro-accountability and has the idea and view that if any school, whether public or private, receives taxpayer funding, they should be held to the same accountability standards for their students. And third, very particularly, I am deeply concerned about Mrs. DeVos's commitment to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act which, in my view, is one of the best pieces of legislation that Congress ever passed. In my 4-plus years in the Senate, I have not had a single issue that has generated so much effort to contact my office as the nomination of Betsy DeVos. Last week, we passed 25,000 contacts by constituents-- letters, emails, phone calls--and those have continued to ratchet up over the weekend with voice mails and more letters in our system and more emails coming into the office, and we have dealt with some contentious issues over the last 4 years. For example, we shut the government down in October of 2013 because of the inability of the House and the Senate to sit down at a conference table and work out a budget. That is a hugely important issue to the Nation, and especially in Virginia, where we have nearly 200,000 Federal employees. Even a shutdown of the government for 13 days didn't lead to as much contact in my office as the DeVos nomination. I want to spend some time on those three reasons for which I will oppose her, but before I do, I wish to speak about why this is personally so very important to me. It is important to me because of the Commonwealth I represent. It is important to me because of the personal histories of my wife and I and our kids in the public schools of Kansas, where I grew up, and in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is important to me because of my previous public service as a mayor and Governor, where education was the largest line item in the budgets of my city and my Commonwealth. Finally, it is important to me because I have recently been added as a member of the HELP Committee--Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee--that shepherded this nomination through a challenging but very illuminating confirmation hearing a couple of weeks ago. So let me start there. Why does this matter a lot to me? I will begin with Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, when he was Ambassador to Paris in the early 1780s, wrote one of the great early works of American literature: ``Notes on the State of Virginia.'' It was an effort to describe the Virginia of the day but also his dreams for Virginia--his dreams for the Virginia economy and the Virginia society, even looking into the future. Jefferson became the first person to really lay out a vision for compulsory public education in the United States. He had a very detailed plan in that book for the division of the State into small school districts and that education would be compulsory at least for young people--men and women--who were White. He used the phrase to promote his educational plan that is still--a paraphrase of it is still in the Virginia Constitution, talking about why public education was so important. He said: ``Progress in government and all else depends upon the broadest possible diffusion of knowledge among the general population.'' If you want to have a great government, if you want to have a great economy, if you want to have great happiness, what you should do is diffuse knowledge among the general population. It was for that reason that he said we needed a public education system. Jefferson wouldn't have imagined an Internet and search engines, where all knowledge would be digitized and at the fingertips of people all around the planet, but that is kind of what he was talking about. If you diffuse knowledge among the general population, that is the best guarantee of the success of society, and so he laid out this very ambitious plan in the 1780s. Sadly, Virginia didn't adopt it. The first early adopter of a compulsory public education I think was Massachusetts, and other States did as well. Jefferson stayed active in promoting education not just through his proposal for a K-12 system, but he also hatched the idea for the University of Virginia--one of the three things on his tombstone at Monticello: Author of the statute of religious freedom, author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia. He did not even see fit to put that he was President of the United States or Governor of Virginia on his tombstone. Education was what he was passionate about and he founded the University of Virginia. So we had some great educational thinkers in our Commonwealth who understood from our earliest days that education would be the key to our success. Sadly, the great ideas weren't carried into practice, and Virginia, as was the case with many States in the country, ran a very segregated education system. When I was born in 1958--I am 58 years old right now; I turn 59 in 2\1/2\ weeks--you could not go to school in Virginia with somebody whose skin color was different. Women couldn't go to the University of Virginia, and many of our major universities were segregated on the grounds of sex. So we had a tradition where we recognized the power of education, but even though our great Founders did, we really thwarted the dreams and achievements of our students by not allowing them to be all they could be. In 1951, a young high school student by the name of Barbara Johns was attending a segregated public high school in Prince Edward County, VA. She was 16 years old. Her school was overcrowded. It was poorly heated. She saw White students in her community having a great new high school built for them. Some kids in her high school, because of poor transportation, were killed in a bus accident, and in April of 1951 she said: I am tired of this. I am a kid, but I am not going to accept second-class citizenship, and she, encouraged one day with a fake note to the principal of her school to go to the administrative office--and then she gathered all the students in the auditorium at Moton High School in Farmville, VA, and said: We are going to walk out. We are going to walk out of our high school because we are tired of being treated as second-class students and we are going to call civil rights lawyers and ask them to represent us. Barbara Johns and her classmates did that, and the Virginia case became part of Brown v. Board of Education that in 1954 led to the Supreme Court ruling saying that all children were entitled to an education; we couldn't segregate kids based on the color of their skin. It was the only one of these civil rights cases that was actually led by schoolkids advocating for themselves. Barbara Johns shared the same vision that Thomas Jefferson did: Progress in government and all else depends upon the broadest possible diffusion of knowledge among the general population. And she stood up and said: I have the right to it just like everybody else does, and I am not going to take second-class status. Well, the Prince Edward story is one of the most powerful stories in American educational history because after the Brown v. Board decision was resolved, many Southern States fought against integration for a number of years. In 1959, finally, 5 years after Brown, Federal courts ruled that you have to integrate your schools. If you have public schools, you have to integrate them, and Prince Edward County did something that no other jurisdiction in the United States did. They decided, OK, if we have public schools, we are required to treat kids equally based on the color of their skin. I have an idea: We will close all of our public schools. So Prince Edward County, for a period of 5 years, shut down all of their public schools. Do you know what they did? They used county funds and State funds to support vouchers to private schools, and they gave those vouchers to students who were White so they could go to private schools. They called them segregation academies and they set them up all over Virginia. In Prince Edward County, White students, if they were wealthy enough, could go to these academies with some State support, but poor White students and African- American students were deprived of education for 5 years. I think you can start to see why supporting public education today is very important in Virginia because in my lifetime, we didn't. In my lifetime, we closed down public schools rather than let kids learn together if their skin colors were different. In my lifetime, we put State dollars into private schools so they could set up and allow segregation to go forward and avoid the law of the land that kids could learn together because of the color of their skin. This was Virginia at the time I was born. It will not surprise you that a State that didn't want kids to learn together because their skin colors were different and a State that allowed schools to close down was a State with very poor educational performance. The Virginia in the 1950s, forget about test scores, forget about SAT scores, forget about AP exams, we were one of the worst States in the country in the percentage of our kids that attended school. It will not surprise you to know that in addition to having a poor record of attending school, our economy was bad. Those things are directly connected. If you don't value education, if you say kids can't learn together if their skin colors are different, if you say women can't go to major universities, your economy is not going to be very strong. So Virginia was a low- education, low-income State when I was born. Today, it is very different. The officials in Virginia continued to battle to try to resist the integration of schools. My father-in-law, my wife's dad, was the first elected Republican Governor in the history of the Commonwealth, elected in 1969. He came into office in January of 1970. The previous Governors, who had been Democrats, had fought against integration, had used all kinds of tricks and strategies to avoid integrating schools, and my father-in-law, as Governor, took a historic stand. He said: In this Commonwealth, we are putting segregation behind us. We are now going to be an aristocracy of merit, regardless of race or creed, and he embraced a court busing order in the fall of 1970. He escorted my wife's sister into what had been a primarily African-American high school in downtown Richmond, and his wife, the First Lady, escorted my wife into a similar middle school. The picture of my father-in-law Linwood Holton, this courageous Republican Governor, and my sister-in-law Tayloe walking into the school on that day was the front page of the New York Times. It was the front page of the New York Times because in the civil rights era, there were so many pictures of Southern Governors standing in a schoolhouse door blocking kids who were African American from coming into schools with White students. That was a common picture. There is only one picture of a Southern Governor escorting a child--his child--into a school that was predominantly African American with a big smile on his face saying, finally, Virginia is going to embrace the vision of Thomas Jefferson. Education should be for everybody. We shouldn't segregate it based on race. During the time he was Governor, I think immediately before, we dropped the segregation based on gender in our States' colleges. And surprise, with those two moves, Virginia started to move. Virginia started to move from a low-education, poor State to a high- education State that now has top 10 median income. Now we are a State known for our educational system. Now we are a State where we are always in the top five in the percentage of our kids who take and pass AP exams. Our SAT scores are very strong relative to other States. Our higher education system is viewed as very powerful, and it is because we, in the words of the letter of Corinthians, put away childish things. We put away segregation, we put away gender division, we put away using public dollars to support private academies so kids and their families could erase the law of the land, and as we did that, as we embraced the Jeffersonian vision to improve education, the State's economy improved, and now we are the top 10 in the country. In my lifetime, no State in this country has moved further economically from low median income, back of the pack, to front of the pack than Virginia has, and our State has moved because we have embraced that everybody has God-given talent. We have embraced investments in our education system, beginning with this Barbara Johns walkout and then with the courageous Republican Governor and then Governors who followed--Democrats and Republicans, business leaders, teachers, communities leaders. We were late to the game, but we eventually embraced the Jeffersonian vision, and now we have an education system we can be proud of. It is a public education K-12 that educates about 1.2 million kids. We have great private schools. We have a vigorous home school network in Virginia. We don't do vouchers for private schools because of our painful history of the way vouchers were used to support segregation and avoid integration in the 1950s and 1960s, but we have a system that is public and private and home school and charter. It is a system that isn't perfect, it is a system we need to always battle to improve, but it is a system we are so proud of, we have gone from back of the pack to front of the pack. We care about public education in my Commonwealth, and we do not take kindly to people who trash the state of public education today because we know how far we have come. We know how far we have come. That is who my State is. Personally, I went through 13 years of education K-12; 7 public education, 6 Catholic education. My wife Anne was educated in the public schools of Virginia--in Roanoke, Richmond, and Fairfax County--as were her siblings. We have been married for 32 years. Our three children have all graduated from Richmond public schools. They have had wonderful careers. I wrote a piece a few years ago when my daughter, my youngest, graduated called ``Forty Years as a Public School Parent'' because my three children spent a combined 40 years in the Richmond public schools. The Richmond public schools are like a lot of school systems. There are 25,000 kids or so in an urban environment. It is a high-poverty school district; probably nearly 80 to 90 percent of the children in the school system are on free or reduced lunch. It is overwhelmingly a minority school system; three quarters or more of the students are minority. But my kids got a fantastic public education in these public schools of Virginia. They have all graduated and gone on, one to graduate from George Washington, an infantry commander in the Marine Corps; one to graduate from Carleton College, a visual artist; and one is about to graduate from New York University--all built on the foundation of a great public education in the public schools of my city. I told you about my wife being part of the generation of kids who integrated the public schools of Virginia. Then, in the wonderful arc of history, she went from a kid living in the Governor's mansion and integrating Virginia's public schools to a First Lady working on foster care reform and recently stepped down as secretary of education in Virginia. I watched my wife grapple with exactly the same kinds of challenges at a State level that the current Secretary of Education will grapple with at the Federal level. I think I know a little bit about what it takes to do this job and to do it well. In addition to our personal connections in the history of our State, let me talk about my professional connection to our schools and why I view this as such an important position. I mentioned that I have been a mayor and I have been a Governor. I am a little bit unusual. There have only been 30 people in the history of the United States who have been a mayor, a Governor, and a U.S. Senator. There have been a lot of Governors who are Senators, but being mayor will kill you. That is why there are so few who can do all three. But when you are a mayor, as I was--the biggest line item in my budget was public schools. At the time I was mayor, we had about 53 public schools. I had a goal when I was mayor: I would go to a school every week. On a Thursday morning, I would go visit one of our schools to see what is being done. If it was the biggest line item, that means it was the most important thing. I wanted to make sure I understood not just my kids' schools but the schools that all the kids in our city went to. I wanted to know what was working and what wasn't. Then I got elected to statewide office as Lieutenant Governor and Governor. I made a vow when I was Lieutenant Governor. Just like I went to a school a week when I was mayor until I visited them all, I made a vow when I was Lieutenant Governor that I would to go to a school in every one of Virginia's cities and counties to make sure I understood public education in my Commonwealth. I should have thought before I made that pledge because there are 134 cities and counties in Virginia. It took me 4\1/2\ years to travel to every one of our cities and counties to try to understand public education in my Commonwealth. I am not aware of anybody who has made that pledge, and after I did it, I can understand why nobody would ever make that pledge again. But I wanted to make sure that I understood not just the schools my own kids went to but the schools other kids went to all around our Commonwealth. Northern Virginia and its high-tech suburbs, Wise County, where my wife is from, the coalfields of Appalachia, the tobacco-growing regions of Southside Virginia, manufacturing regions south of Richmond, oystermen and watermen and tourism on the Eastern Shore of Virginia--I wanted to see the schools in every part of my Commonwealth. I wanted to see them because I was writing budgets. The biggest line item in the State budget was education. The biggest line item in the city was for education. I didn't want to know our schools just from a budget or just from a newspaper article. I wanted to know them from seeing them. I wanted to know them from seeing what came out of my kids' backpacks every day in terms of the curricula requirements and other things my kids would do in the Virginia public schools. I am saying all this first because I am just trying to convey why this is so important. There is nothing that we do as a society that is more important to our future than the way we educate our young. The most precious resource in the world today is not oil, it is not water; it is talent. The cities or States or countries that know how to raise talent, grow talent, attract talent, reward talent, encourage talent, and celebrate talent are going to be the most successful because they will attract and grow and reward their own talent and bring other people here, but they will also attract the institutions that want to be around talent--great companies, great think tanks, great universities. There is an inextricable causal link between your commitment to a system of public education and the success of your city or your State or your country. There is nothing we do in this Chamber or in the Federal Government that will be more likely to affect our economic outcome than the care with which we direct attention to our education system. The last reason it is important to me is because of my new membership on the HELP Committee. I have had my family background. I care deeply about my State. I professionally worked on education, and my wife has too. But now I have a platform in the Senate. I tried to get on the committee right when I got here. I wasn't able to. I couldn't complain because I got great committees. I am on the Armed Services, Foreign Relations, and Budget Committees. But I really wanted to be on the HELP Committee because education has been at the core of what both my wife and I have tried to do in Virginia for the last 32 years. Now I am fortunate enough to be on the committee. In one of my first meetings on the committee, we had a confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education. We didn't have all the information at the time we had the hearing for Mrs. DeVos, but we had done our homework. I have a wonderful staffer, Krishna Merchant, who had helped prepare me. We had done our homework. We were put under some pretty tight time constraints: We each only got 5 minutes to ask questions. Five minutes isn't a lot of time when you are talking about something as important as the educational mission of the Federal Government to help our society succeed in educating our kids. I decided that in my 5 minutes, I wanted to ask Mrs. DeVos about three things. I wanted to ask her whether she could be a champion for public schools. That is a simple kind of a question. I wanted to ask her whether she believed in equal accountability for all schools if they receive taxpayer dollars. I wanted to ask her about her thoughts on the education of kids with disabilities because I care deeply about that topic but also because I believe that the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act points a direction for the future of American public education, and I wanted to see what she thought about it. I had three test questions. I had three test questions for our nominee, and she did not satisfy me on any of them. Let me start with the first one. Can you be a champion for our public schools? There are 1.2 million kids in Virginia. Ninety percent of the children who are educated in this country are educated in public schools. I am a huge supporter of private schools. I went to Catholic schools for 6 years. When I was Governor, I did a lot of great work with kids and their parents who chose homeschooling as an option. I like options. But just as a matter of fact, 90 percent of the kids in this country go to public schools, and it is going to be at that number or near it for as long as we can see. In Richmond, we have some great private schools. Richmond has 1 million people, and so private schools can set up and find enough students. But there are corners of my Commonwealth where it is very hard to start a private school because there are just not enough students. That is not just the case for Virginia; my colleagues on the HELP Committee from Alaska or from Maine share this. There are parts of their States where, talking about vouchers for private schools, you might as well be talking Esperanto. That is just not going to happen in some of these very rural communities. So you have to have a champion for public schools. In my research on Betsy DeVos, she gave a speech in 2015 that troubled me. It was a speech about the state of American public education. Here are two direct quotes, one of which is not the greatest language for the Congressional Record, but she said that when it comes to education, ``government really sucks.'' She also said public schools are a ``dead end.'' This is not something she said 10 or 20 years ago; this is something she said about a year and a half ago. This is her view of public education in this country. Betsy DeVos never attended public school for a day, never taught at a public school, and didn't send her children to public schools. That is not a disqualifier. I think you can have a great Secretary of Education who hadn't attended public schools, who had come from private schools and had good private school examples to learn from. I think that is fine. But if you have never attended public school for a day, if your children have never attended for a day, if you never taught at a public school, I kind of have the attitude: What gives the right to stand up and say public schools are a ``dead end''? Really? There are 1.2 million kids in Virginia. Ninety percent of kids in this country. Public schools are a ``dead end.'' Government education ``really sucks.'' What gives you the right to say that? So I asked her some questions about these statements. I asked her: Is the morale of the workforce important? How important are teachers? Teachers are very important. Is morale an important thing for teachers? Should they have good morale to do their job? Yes, absolutely. Does the attitude of a leader affect the morale of people who are doing a job in the organization? Absolutely. Well, what does it say to a teacher teaching these tens of millions of kids in this country--or the 1.2 million kids in Virginia--what does it say to a teacher that the Federal Secretary of Education says that government education sucks and public schools are a dead end? I would submit, it transmits a horrible message. I think we need a Secretary of Education who will empower kids, who will empower teachers, who will celebrate what is great about public education, who isn't afraid to point out what is bad about it, who isn't afraid to point out the things that need to be improved. But if you just paint it all with a broad brush and it is all bad, you are going to miss an awful lot of really good things about American public education. I sometimes get down on some of my colleagues on my side about this. There is kind of an anti-business attitude: Businesses are bad. There are some bad businesses, but most businesses are really good. You shouldn't paint with a broad brush, whether talking about business or any institution, but you definitely should not paint with a broad brush and say that public schools in this country are a dead end when you have hundreds of thousands of great teachers and counselors and busdrivers and cafeteria workers and people going to work every day. They are not going there because their salaries are great; they are going there because they care deeply about students, and they want to either teach them or in other ways impress life lessons upon them so their kids can have happy lives. So the first test I found Betsy DeVos wanting in my examination of her in the HELP Committee was that simple one. If you cannot be a champion for public schools, you should not be Secretary of Education. When we were having a discussion in the committee, some of the colleagues who were kind of coming back at us a little bit were saying: Well, OK, we get it. You are against charters, or you are against vouchers, or you are against Betsy DeVos because she wants to expand choice. But most of us are from States that have significant choice. I pointed out that Virginia doesn't do vouchers, but we have a very robust homeschooling network. I have been a huge supporter of it. Choice is fine, but you have to be a champion for public schools, and if you are not, you shouldn't be Secretary of Education. That is reason No. 1. Second, I wanted to interview Betsy DeVos about accountability. Accountability. Should schools be accountable for the success of their students, for outcomes? This is very important, and it is very important to get this right. Sometimes my wife, as secretary of education in a State, would sometimes tear her hair out about the Federal mandates and strings and regulations and rules. The HELP Committee did a good job last year before I was on the committee rewriting No Child Left Behind--the Every Student Succeeds Act--to try to reshift the balance a little bit to allow cities, counties, and States more flexibility in trying to determine how to educate their students, while holding them accountable for outcomes. I wanted to ask Betsy DeVos: Will you hold all schools accountable for outcomes--particularly because when he was a candidate, President Trump said some things about what he wanted to do with public education. President Trump as a candidate said that he wanted to take $20 billion of Federal money and give it to private schools to allow them to run voucher programs of the kind that Mrs. DeVos has promoted in Michigan, Indiana, and other States. That is a lot of money, $20 billion. That is money that is taken out of the allocation for public schools. If you take $20 billion out of public schools, especially in some rural areas--in my view, having done a lot of budgets and worked on this as a mayor and Governor--you are potentially going to weaken the public schools. (Mrs. ERNST assumed the Chair.) I wanted to understand from Mrs. DeVos how we are going to do this. You take the $20 billion out of the public schools; I think that is going to weaken public schools. What I wanted to ask her is, When you give the $20 billion to private schools, as President Trump wants to do--and I asked her this question over and over again. I think I asked her four times. If you give Federal taxpayer dollars to private schools, will you hold them equally accountable to the public schools that are getting this money, equally accountable for the outcomes of the students, for the need to report disciplinary incidents, for working on important issues like education and kids with disabilities? Will you hold any school that gets Federal money equally accountable? I asked her this. She said: I believe in accountability. I said: That is not my question. I believe in accountability too. But I am asking you, Should you hold all schools equally accountable if they receive Federal taxpayer money? Well, I believe in accountability. I asked her again, Should you hold schools equally accountable? Well, they are not all held equally accountable now. I am not asking about what you think about the situation right now. I am asking you what you think is the right policy. Is it the right policy, if we are going to give $20 billion to private schools, to hold all schools equally accountable? Well, I believe in accountability. She wouldn't answer my question. I phrased it a different way. I said: Let me tell you this, Mrs. DeVos. I believe all schools that get Federal money should be held equally accountable. Do you agree with me? She said: No. She doesn't believe that schools that get Federal money should be held equally accountable. I have a big problem with that. The whole goal of the choice movement is to provide choices so that students can learn in environments that are best suited to them. Choice is also supposed to promote some competition that will encourage everybody to up their game. If you hold the public schools accountable while you are taking some of their money away and you give that money to private schools and you don't hold them accountable, you are not promoting fair competition. You are not promoting student outcomes. You are basically taking money away from public schools and giving it to private schools. Again, in Virginia, we had a painful experience with that--closing schools down, defunding public schools, and giving money to private schools. That is a second reason that is very, very important to me. I don't think that she supports the notion of equal accountability for both public and private schools that receive taxpayer funding. If we are going to do the proposal that President Trump says--we haven't seen a budget yet, but we may see one at the end of February, early March. If we are going to suddenly start taking billions and billions of dollars away from public schools and giving them to private schools, I want to know they are going to be equally accountable. The third issue that I asked Mrs. DeVos about was education and kids with disabilities. Let me tell you why this one is so important to me. It is important because it is right. It is also important because it points a path to the future of education in this country. Before the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed in 1975, we had hundreds of thousands of children with a gap between their potential and what they were doing because schools were very spotty, communities were very spotty, States were very spotty in providing meaningful educational opportunities to kids who had disabilities. Generation after generation of kids would go to school, but they wouldn't get an education that was tailored to their needs. They would finish their education not having the skills they needed to be all they could be. If you think about that collective delta between what these kids could do and what they could have done had they had the best education, it is tragic. That was the genesis behind the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975. It is as if we have all these children who are capable of so much more if this society will only work to help them achieve, and the core of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is a simple thing. If a student is identified as having a disability of some kind, the student gets an IEP, an individualized education plan. If you have a diagnosed disability, then you are entitled under Federal law to an IEP where you get an education that is tailored to your particular circumstance. My three kids went through the Richmond Public Schools. One had an IEP for a couple of years. That is pretty common. It is pretty common that you get an IEP, and with a tailored education, you don't need it for your whole 13 years of K-12 education. You need it for a couple of years of speech therapy or a couple of years of something else. Then, within a few years, you are completely mainstreamed, and you don't need IEP anymore. The individualized attention helps you climb up and then be completely competitive with your colleagues and with your peers. There are other students who need an IEP for their entire educational career, and that is fine too. They are entitled to it under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. What it has meant from 1975 to today--it is 40-plus years--is that this massive cohort of kids with special needs are not in the shadows. They are not shunted aside. They are not pushed into classes where the expectations for them are low. Instead, they are challenged to be all they can be, and they are happier, and their families are happier, and society is better off as a result. This is a very important thing, and I know this to be the case. Every family in this country has somebody in the family with a disability--or will at some point in the life of a family--and every person in this country has a friend with a disability. The issues dealing with the education of students with disabilities are important morally, but they are important because this is about our friends and our family and our neighbors. The other thing about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that I find so powerful is I think it has been the best single idea about K-12 education we have come up with. It is better than testing. It is better than choice. It is better than all the other strategies because the nub of the idea is you should have an individualized education. It raises the question, Why do you have to have a diagnosed disability to get an individualized education? With computer technology and so many other tools that a teacher can use in a class of 20 or even 30 students, there is an awful lot that you can do to tailor the education to each individual student. I was a teacher. I ran a vocational school in Honduras that taught kids to be welders and carpenters. We individualized the education. I put together a list of 60 carpentry projects from the simplest one to the most complicated one, and all the students started on the same project the first day of school, but then they proceeded at their own pace. Only when they did the first one to the carpenter's satisfaction could they go to the second one. That meant it was individualized because everybody worked at a different pace until they got it right and they could move to the next one. That is what the IDEA basically is: Education should be individualized to the student, and more and more, that is what we are doing in education all around the country. I asked Mrs. DeVos questions about the IDEA because of the fairness and justice issues for students with disabilities but also because the notion of individualized education is the greatest single idea out there that will ultimately be the idea that I think will be the revolutionary next step in American public education. I asked her a pretty simple question. Once again, if the President pursues his plan to take $20 billion and invest it in private schools, should the private schools receiving those dollars have to follow the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act? Should they have to work with students with disabilities, diagnose the disability they have, and then offer them a fair and appropriate education tailored to that disability? It is a pretty simple question. You get the money from the Feds. Should you have to follow the law? Remember, this is a Federal civil rights law. It applies to every ZIP Code in this country. It applies to every school district in this country. My question of Mrs. DeVos was, If a private school gets Federal money, should they have to follow this important civil rights law? Her answer to me was: I think the States should make that decision. I think that should be up to the States. I said: It is a Federal civil rights law. It applies everywhere. The States should make the decision. We struggled in my State of Virginia with States' rights arguments because after the Supreme Court decided on another really important civil rights principle, you couldn't segregate schools. Barbara Johns' walkout of Moton High School, and Brown v. Board of Education--and now it is the law of the land. You can't segregate kids on basis of race. It is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. The leaders of my State stood up in court for years and said: You can't tell us what to do; education is a States' rights thing. We don't have to follow the Supreme Court. We don't have to follow civil rights statutes at the national level. We believe in States' rights. States' rights arguments have been used throughout our history to rebut the notion that Congress or the Supreme Court can pass civil rights laws of applicability all around the country. I was surprised. I did not know what Mrs. DeVos's history would be, unlike reading her speeches where she says the public schools are a dead end and government is soft. I didn't know what her position would be on the IDEA. When she told me that a Federal civil rights law should be a State decision, I was very, very troubled. I was surprised. I blurted out: Well, what do you mean it should be a State decision? If you are a parent and you have kids with disabilities and the State isn't treating them right, you are supposed to move around the country until you find a State that treats your kids well? You are not entitled to have the law apply to you in the community where you live and you are going to have to move somewhere until you find a State that is going to treat your kid OK? I think it should be a State decision. Later on in the hearing, one of my other colleagues, Maggie Hassan, the Senator from New Hampshire, who has a child with cerebral palsy, followed up on this, and Mrs. DeVos tried to back out of it: Well, I wasn't sure we were talking about a Federal or State law. I was very, very troubled by this. I was troubled by it again because of the peculiar history that we have had in Virginia and other States where people have used States' rights arguments to try to trump Federal civil rights statutes. I would say that the answers to the questions about students with disabilities became kind of a pivotal part of that hearing because both Senators Collins and Murkowski, who have since said they are going to vote against the nominee, at that hearing and then in the markup session we had last week talked about that as one of the things that they found troubling. Another member of our committee, who is supporting Mrs. DeVos, Senator Isakson of Georgia, also found it of enough concern that he had a written exchange with her. He wrote her a letter and asked her a question: Do you really understand what the IDEA is? She wrote a letter back, which I have had the opportunity to review, but I still don't believe that the letter she wrote demonstrates a real understanding for this issue of the rights of kids with disabilities. This is a really important point. Some of the States that have voucher programs--we don't have these programs in Virginia for the reasons I have described, but there are States that do--Indiana, Florida. Some of the States that have voucher programs and receive public money for kids make children sign away their rights under the IDEA as a condition of being admitted to the school. You want to come to our private school and you want to use voucher money to do it? We will let you in, but you have to sign saying you will never take us to court for violating your rights, for not treating you fairly under the IDEA, and only if you sign such a waiver, will we allow you to come to our school. I just don't think that is fair. I don't think that is right. Especially if we are now going to give $20 billion of Federal money to private schools, I think they should have to follow the law. Many private school principals in Richmond--I talked to them about this issue long before the hearing on Mrs. DeVos, and they are pretty candid often with parents of kids with disabilities. My longtime secretary in my office--who has worked for me for nearly 30 years--has a daughter with a disability. She was going to parochial schools for a while in the early grades, but as she was progressing up into late elementary school, there just weren't the programs in the parochial school that were tailored to her particular situation, partly because the school was just too small. In a really small school, it is tough to do education of kids with disabilities. You have to have some particular training to be able to do it. The difference of a small K-8 parochial school and a larger county school is pretty big. The principal was candid and honest in a way that my secretary appreciated and I did too. ``We just don't have the kind of educational program for somebody of your daughter's special needs that the public high school has. You really should think about that.'' My secretary agreed and made the change to the public school. It was actually a better environment because the resources--which are not cheap--the resources to help do disability-specific education were there. Imagine now what would happen if we start to invest money in private schools, and we don't make them follow the disabilities law. Follow this through. We take $20 billion away from public schools. That is weakening public schools' ability to do a lot of things, including educating kids with disabilities. We give the money to private schools. We don't require them to follow the Disabilities Act. So families--like many we know--say, I might like to go to private school, but there is not enough appropriate education, so I am not going to. I am going to stay with the public school. So we have just taken the dollars away from the public school, but all the kids with the significant needs, the needs that are really costly to deal with, are going to stay in the public school. It is a spiral that is a bad spiral. We will defund you, but all the kids with the significant needs that are costly, they are going to stay. That will dilute and hurt the quality of the education they will get, while the private school is getting the money and not having to follow the requirements of the IDEA. They get the money. They don't have to be equally accountable for it. They don't have to follow the requirements of the IDEA. This is very troubling stuff. Those were the three questions I got to ask her in 5 minutes. Can you be a champion of public schools, do you believe that any school receiving Federal taxpayer dollars should be equally accountable for student outcomes, and should schools receiving Federal taxpayer dollars have to follow the requirements of the IDEA? With each of those questions, I was prepared to get an answer I liked, but I got an answer I didn't like. I don't think Mrs. DeVos can be a champion of public schools. She has told me she doesn't think all schools should be equally accountable to receive Federal taxpayer dollars, and she is not committed to schools that are receiving Federal moneys following the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This explains to me why the volume of calls into my office over this have been so high--higher than the government shutdown, higher than any other nominee, higher than any other issue. We have been at war with ISIS for two and a half years. I have been trying to make the case that we shouldn't be at war without a vote of Congress. I get a lot of calls in my office about it, but it is not ringing off the hook like it has been ringing off the hook with respect to the DeVos nomination. While I credit Mrs. DeVos for being philanthropic, and I credit her for caring about kids--that is very sincere. I see that in her philanthropy and her care. I don't see in her an understanding of the role that public schools play for 90 percent of our kids. Using arguments like States' rights arguments, that brings up a real painful history in my State. I don't want to see that return and especially be at the pinnacle of educational policy. I mentioned the volume of calls we are receiving. We all asked ourselves in the office, what has explained this volume? I think the thing that explains the volume is the disability issue. Because a lot of folks with disabilities are not used to their issues ever being made front and center in anything. It matters so much to them. As we said, every family has somebody with a disability or who will have a disability. People know folks with disabilities. But the disability community--which are Democrats, Republicans, Independents and every ZIP Code in this country--they are not used to their issue being the front and center issue in something. They are more used to being ignored or being marginalized. At this hearing, when the disability issue became front and center--I think that is one of the reasons the uptick of concern has been so significant, because people who otherwise are not that into politics or otherwise not that into who is the Cabinet Secretary going to be, there is one thing they do know, which is they want Americans with disabilities to receive equal treatment. They want them to be all they can be. It is good for their happiness and good for our economy and good for our society. I was honored last week to write an op-ed about this issue with a former member of this body, Senator Harkin of Iowa, somebody the Presiding Officer knows very well. Senator Harkin was one of the congressional authors of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Senator Harkin was a champion of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. All the issues surrounding Americans with disabilities were very close to his heart. We really miss that because he was such a champion, and I am not sure anybody can really fill his shoes on that issue. But we wrote an op-ed about this disabilities point in Time magazine that has gotten a lot of attention because it touches every family. I will start to recap a little bit now as I await my colleague who is going to be following me. I will just go back to where I started. This is not a minor matter. It is a little bit unusual to be on the floor at 10 to 4 in the morning. It is a little unusual to be speaking 30 hours in a row. I had some folks ask me: Why would you do 30 hours of speeches on this? I said: Well, don't you think the Secretary of Education is important enough--education in our country is important enough to spend a day and a half, a day and a quarter talking about it? I go back to that Jeffersonian vision: Progress in government and all else depends upon the broadest possible diffusion of knowledge among the general population. The United States, beginning in the early 1900s--then after the GI bill it really accelerated. We became the educational leader in the world. We weren't necessarily that during the 1800s--Germany, other nations, England were--but we really became the educational leader. We made education available to all. The GI bill helped democratize higher education and make it available to many more. Our education system is still one of our crown jewels. The number of foreign students who come to our country to go to college, compared to the reverse, is still a tribute to the fact our education system is so strong. I haven't really talked about higher education at all. That is also within the province of the Secretary of Education. The basic point I am making is, of anything we do that is about whether we will be successful as a country tomorrow, education is key. That is why we are taking 30 hours to dig into issues of concern. I put three questions on the table. The three I put on the table are all about K-12 education. I had colleagues at the hearing who asked searching questions about higher education, the cost of higher education, student loan debt, what is the right way to deal with debt, how do we make college less expensive. These are critical issues too. I am very passionate about a career in technical education. My dad was a welder, and I ran a school in Honduras that taught kids to be carpenters and welders. This is a big and important job. It is such a big and important job, it would be wrong to expect any person to be an expert on all of it. That would not be a fair hurdle to set for somebody. You are going to have to come in and bring expertise in and hire good people to work with you, but I think there are some fundamental threshold questions: Can you support and be a champion for public education? That seems fundamental. Do you believe in equal accountability for everybody that gets Federal dollars? That seems fundamental. Do you believe that kids with disabilities should be able to get this kind of education? That seems fundamental. And in those areas, Mrs. DeVos did not succeed. I voted for a number of the Cabinet nominees of President Trump. I am not standing here taking the position that I am voting against all of them. In fact, I voted for quite a few because even if they would not be people who I would nominate, President Trump is the President. He is entitled to have his own team, but the advice and consent function of the Senate means, in certain cases, if people do not seem to meet the threshold criteria for being able to do the job and do it well--that is how you exercise advice and consent and express opposition to a nominee. That is what I am going to do in this case. I yield the floor. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, this bill has a complex backstory, but it serves a simple purpose--to allow a small daycare facility in Virginia to undertake routine repairs and maintenance. For more than 20 years, the Plains Area Day Care Center in Broadway, VA, has served children from moderate-income families in Rockingham County. This facility sits on a 3-acre parcel that was once Federal land before the National Park Service conveyed it to Rockingham County in 1989 under the Federal Lands to Parks Program. The county in turn leases this land to the center for $1 per year, with a contract that runs through the year 2027. The center is in need of repairs and maintenance, including a new roof; however, it has had difficulty in securing private financing for these activities because of the complex land ownership structure-- Federal land conveyed conditionally to a county and leased to a private company. Due to Virginia's status as a Dillon Rule State, Rockingham County cannot execute a loan either. This bill would specify that the 1989 land conveyance is transferred in fee simple, with no further use restrictions. I appreciate the goal of the Federal Lands to Parks Program to preserve land as open space, particularly after having overseen the preservation of 400,000 acres of open space in Virginia during my time as Governor of the Commonwealth. There are no plans to develop the open space on this site, only to fix the daycare center building--a former Forest Service garage that has been on the site since before its transfer from Federal ownership. My Virginia colleague, Congressman Bob Goodlatte, has introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives. During the 114th Congress, this bill was passed unanimously through the full House as a standalone; reported favorably without opposition by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee; and adopted by unanimous consent to be included in the Senate's bipartisan Energy bill. Unfortunately, it fell just short of final passage. This is a small modification that simply removes unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles and allows the daycare center to continue doing what it has been doing for 25 years. I am pleased to partner with Congressman Goodlatte in this commonsense, bipartisan effort.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, this bill has a complex backstory, but it serves a simple purpose--to allow a small daycare facility in Virginia to undertake routine repairs and maintenance. For more than 20 years, the Plains Area Day Care Center in Broadway, VA, has served children from moderate-income families in Rockingham County. This facility sits on a 3-acre parcel that was once Federal land before the National Park Service conveyed it to Rockingham County in 1989 under the Federal Lands to Parks Program. The county in turn leases this land to the center for $1 per year, with a contract that runs through the year 2027. The center is in need of repairs and maintenance, including a new roof; however, it has had difficulty in securing private financing for these activities because of the complex land ownership structure-- Federal land conveyed conditionally to a county and leased to a private company. Due to Virginia's status as a Dillon Rule State, Rockingham County cannot execute a loan either. This bill would specify that the 1989 land conveyance is transferred in fee simple, with no further use restrictions. I appreciate the goal of the Federal Lands to Parks Program to preserve land as open space, particularly after having overseen the preservation of 400,000 acres of open space in Virginia during my time as Governor of the Commonwealth. There are no plans to develop the open space on this site, only to fix the daycare center building--a former Forest Service garage that has been on the site since before its transfer from Federal ownership. My Virginia colleague, Congressman Bob Goodlatte, has introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives. During the 114th Congress, this bill was passed unanimously through the full House as a standalone; reported favorably without opposition by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee; and adopted by unanimous consent to be included in the Senate's bipartisan Energy bill. Unfortunately, it fell just short of final passage. This is a small modification that simply removes unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles and allows the daycare center to continue doing what it has been doing for 25 years. I am pleased to partner with Congressman Goodlatte in this commonsense, bipartisan effort.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to oppose the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions to be Attorney General. I thought very carefully about this matter and about what it means to oppose a colleague. We had an unusual night last night, where one of our Members was ordered to stop speaking as she explained her opposition. Comments that would have been allowed regarding any other Cabinet nominee were ruled unacceptable because this nominee also sits in this body. I voted to overturn that ruling and restore my colleague's speaking privileges because I was of the opinion that the constitutional duty to advise and consent on nominations should allow for debate. But whatever my opinions about the ruling, I do have to acknowledge that standing on the floor to speak in opposition to a colleague is not an everyday occurrence. We do disagree every day, all of us, even within our own caucuses on matters of policy, but there is something more personal about taking the floor to take a position regarding a sitting Senator who has been nominated for a Senate-confirmable position. I know Senator Sessions well. We served together on the Armed Services Committee. We attend a weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast together. We have taken codel trips together. I consider Senator Sessions a friend, and I respect that he has been repeatedly sent to this body by the voters of his State, but while we can and should be friends, strive to be friends, in this Chamber, we are not ultimately here about friendship. We are here to do people's business. And significant differences in our opinions and convictions are not to be papered over, even when we find ourselves in different positions than our friends. Some Members of this body ran for President, and I did not support them, even though they were my friends. And some people in this Chamber did not support me to be Vice President, even though we are friends. There is nothing unusual about that. We all understand it. We must treat each other with respect and civility. We are still called to, in the words of Lincoln, ``be firm in the right as God gives us to see what is right.'' So based upon how I see the right and on my convictions, I cannot support my colleague for the position because I do not have confidence in his ability to be a champion for civil rights, to wisely advise the administration on matters involving immigration, and to be resolute as the Nation's chief law enforcement official that torture is contrary to American values. This one matters to me a lot. This appointment is very critical. The Attorney General is one of the four Cabinet appointees who are not allowed to be engaged in political activity: Secretary of Treasury, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense. They are beyond politics and supposed to be above politics. They must have an independent gravitas and even be willing to challenge the President. The mission of the Department of Justice cannot be more important. For 17 years, before I got into State politics, I was a civil rights lawyer. I read a book, ``Simple Justice,'' when I was in law school, about the lawyers who battled to end segregated education in this country. Even though I really didn't know any lawyers and certainly didn't know any civil rights lawyers--and was living in kind of an Irish Catholic neighborhood in the suburbs of Kansas City--I decided I wanted to devote my life to this. So I moved to Virginia in 1984 and started practicing civil rights law, and I did it for 17 years. I will always remember--and I bet you will too--my first client, the first case that I had that was really mine. A young woman who walked into my office and told me she had been turned away from an apartment, and she thought it was because of the color of her skin. I was able to prove that was the case, and so we were able to win, but what I remember about Lorraine was how it made her feel. She was my age. She had just finished school. She was looking for an apartment, her first apartment away from home, just like I had done. While my experience getting a job, finding an apartment, getting out on my own had been a positive, her experience had been a negative. And she was going to have that feeling and carry it with her every time she looked for a house for the rest of her life: Am I going to be treated differently because of the color of my skin? What had been a happy occasion for me, as a young man venturing out into the world, had been a sad one and a difficult one for her. That started 17 years of fighting in State and Federal courthouses for people who had been turned away from housing or fired or slander or otherwise treated poorly, either because of their race or their disability or because of their advocacy about important public policy issues. The civil rights laws of this country protect the liberty of minorities of all kinds who otherwise could be tyrannized by the majority view in their community. The promise of equal justice under the law is sacrosanct and fundamental. And in this battle, the Attorney General is the guardian of liberty, or in a wise Biblical phrase, the ``Watcher on the Wall.'' Judges sit in their courts and they wait for cases to come to them, but an Attorney General is charged with going out and finding wrongdoing and making sure it stopped. None of the advances that our country has made in the civil rights field has happened without a supportive Department of Justice and Attorney General. And those of us out in the field, lawyers who were taking cases, but especially the clients who simply seek equal justice under law, they have to view the Attorney General as their champion. In 1963, a married couple in Northeast DC sat down at their kitchen table not far from here, and they wrote a letter to a lawyer in town. I want to read the letter to you. Dear sir: I am writing to you concerning a problem we have. 5 years ago my husband and I were married here in the District. We then returned to Virginia to live. My husband is white, I am part negro and part Indian. At the time, we did not know that there was a law in Virginia against mixed marriages. Therefore we were jailed and tried in a little town of Bowling Green. We were to leave the State to make our home. The problem is we are not allowed to visit our families. The judge said if we enter the State within the next 30 years that we will have to spend 1 year in jail. We know we cannot live there, but we would like to go back once in a while to visit our families and friends. We have three children and cannot afford an attorney. We wrote the Attorney General, he suggested that we get in touch with you for advice. Please help us if you can. Hope to hear from you real soon. Yours truly--Mr. And Mrs. Richard Loving. That attorney, Bernie Cohen, became a friend of mine. And his partner Phil Hirshcop and Bernie took the case of this married couple all the way to the Supreme Court, and 50 years ago the Supreme Court struck down interracial marriage in this country. But the case started with a couple who, having no where else to turn, thought, if we write the Attorney General, surely he will be a champion for us and he will help us redress this horrible wrong. That is who the Attorney General needs to be. The powerful never have a hard time finding somebody to represent them in court, but the poor or oppressed or those who don't have anybody else to stand up for them, they need a justice system that will treat them fairly, and they need an Attorney General who will embody that value. Three areas: civil rights, immigration, and torture. In the area of civil rights, Senator Sessions' record here as a Senator has been troubling to me. In the past, when he was considered for a judicial position, he declared that the voting rights laws were ``intrusive.'' He welcomed the ``good news'' when the Supreme Court in the last few years struck down, in the Shelby County case, parts of the Voting Rights Act. He has not engaged in efforts that many of us have tried to engage in to improve and fix the law. This is an important issue to know about an Attorney General whose Department is supposed to be the chief enforcer of the Nation's voting rights laws. Voting rights are under attack all over this country. The Attorney General must be a champion of those laws. Senator Sessions has opposed protections for LGBT citizens in this body. He voted against the elimination of don't ask, don't tell. He voted against the passage of the Matthew Shepard hate crimes bill. He has publicly stated numerous times his opposition to marriage equality. As far as I know, he has never stated otherwise that he has changed those opinions. The Senator spoke on the Senate floor about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 2000. He said that this beneficial law was ``a big factor in accelerating the decline in civility and discipline in classrooms all over this country.'' This is very troubling to me as someone who believes that act is one of the Nation's preeminent civil rights laws. There are other examples, but I won't belabor the point. The Loving family wrote to Attorney Generally Robert Kennedy to help them battle injustice because they believed he would protect their important civil rights values at stake. I am not confident that people hard-pressed in this country, who feel marginalized, will see the office as a potential ally and champion under Senator Sessions. This is particularly the case when we have a President who has been successfully sued in the past for civil rights violations and who makes prejudicial comments about people based on their gender, their religion, their immigrant status, or their disability. Second, immigration. Our immigration policies are critical. We need to fix our laws. In my time in the Senate, Senator Sessions has been the most vocal Senator in opposition to what I believe are reasonable and necessary reforms. His floor comments and his obvious personal passion around this issue are clear, but I think his policies are simply wrong. Immigration does not hurt our economy; it helps it. Jefferson recognized this in the Declaration of Independence. In his Bill of Particulars against King George, he said: We do not want to live under your tyranny. You won't let us have a good immigration system. Jefferson recognized it, and all through the years, the inflow of talent, the blood of innovation and talent and new ideas from immigrants, has been part of what has made our country great. That is why there is such a consensus in favor of immigration reform from the labor unions and the chambers of commerce. The CBO says that it will increases our net worth and GDP. Immigration does not hurt our workers, as Senator Sessions often claims it does. A reform would help our workers by eliminating the ability of people to live and work in the shadows and be paid substandard wages that undercut the wages of others. Senator Sessions' views on immigration even extend to a critical program like the Special Immigrant Visa Program, which grants special protection to foreign citizens, especially those from Afghanistan and Iraq, who have helped our troops on the battlefield. They signed up to help Americans who are in the service. They put their lives at risk for doing so. Because of that, we have a special program to accord them a welcome that they are deserved in this country. Senators McCain, Shaheen, and I and many others have worked on this program, and Senator Sessions has been a determined opponent of the SIV Program, and I just can't understand why. If we will not help the people who help us, then who will choose to help us in the future? Some of these SIV immigrants were turned away at airports after the poorly conceived and poorly implemented immigration order of President Trump. As we contemplate some of this President's outlandish and discriminatory claims about immigrants and as we deal with the aftermath of this poor order, we have to separate the extreme and the untrue from our legitimate security concerns. A good lawyer often needs to be a check against the bad instincts of his client. In this area, I am not confident Senator Sessions can do that. Finally, torture. Like the vast majority of this body, I believe torture is contrary to American values. That is why I was proud to work with Senators McCain, Reed, Feinstein, and others in 2015 to pass a law clearly stating that torture would not be allowed by any agency of our government--not just the military but any agency of our government. This law passed the Senate overwhelmingly and in a strongly bipartisan fashion. But Senator Sessions was one of a small number of Senators who opposed the law, who opposed a ban on torture. When we met, I asked Senator Sessions why he had opposed the law, why he had opposed this bipartisanship bill. This is a fundamental question for any of us but certainly for an individual who wants to occupy the Nation's chief law enforcement position. His response was not at all convincing. I don't think the Nation should have an Attorney General with an ambiguous record about torture. While most Federal agencies have a general counsel, it is ultimately the Attorney General who sits at the very top of the pyramid of attorneys advising the President in providing this legal advice. This President has--very unwisely, in my view--stated that he thinks torture is both justifiable and effective. I believe we need an Attorney General who will check that instinct and not support it or justify it. I will say this in conclusion: There is an independence that is necessary in this position. It is established in law in this position and three other Cabinet positions. Any Attorney General must be able to stand firm for the rule of law, even against the powerful Executive who nominated him or her. In this administration, I believe that independence is even more necessary. I oppose Senator Sessions, who is a friend, who is someone I respect for this position, because I believe his record raises doubts about whether he can be a champion for those who need this office most, and it also raises doubts about whether he can curb unlawful overage by this Executive. I yield the floor.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I am going to try to be very brief. I am rising to return to the topic of the effort of the CRA to roll back transparency in the oil and gas industry, and I will speak briefly. I know my colleague from Arizona is here and wants to speak too. The issue has been described. It is an SEC rule requiring energy companies to disclose the payments they make to foreign governments for natural resources. The reason is that many countries with abundant natural resources are run by dictators, and there has been a long history of payments by oil companies--American and others--to those dictators that don't get to the people and actually further the corruption of the country. Just one example: An IMF report stated that in just 1 year, 1998, the Government of Equatorial Guinea received $130 million in oil revenue, and $96 million of that went directly into the personal bank account of the dictator, Teodoro Obiang. Meanwhile, hunger in that country is rampant, and that is what led to this. I am on the Foreign Relations Committee. In preparation for our hearing on the nomination of Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, for Secretary of State, I read a wonderful report that was done by Senator Lugar when he was the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. October 2008: Report to members of the Foreign Relations Committee from the ranking member. The title was ``The Petroleum And Poverty Paradox: Assessing U.S. And International Community Efforts to Fight The Resource Curse.'' I read this. I read the book ``Private Empire,'' a recent history of ExxonMobil written by journalist Steve Coll, to prepare for my examination of Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State. This particular report was the basis for the 2010 law that was described by Senator Cardin, and it was sponsored in a bipartisan way. It didn't prohibit any company from doing anything. It only required companies that pay foreign governments to disclose those payments. I voted yesterday against Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State because I believe a public official's duty--especially Secretary of State--has to be to the country. I was worried, based on three areas of his testimony, that Rex Tillerson could not set aside his loyalty to ExxonMobil. He refused to answer questions that I asked him about ExxonMobil's knowledge of climate science, yet their efforts to convince the public that the science was not settled. He told me he wouldn't answer my questions. He did not demonstrate to the committee's satisfaction, in my view, that he could be independent in Russia. For example, he said that ExxonMobil had not lobbied against sanctions against Russia, when we actually have the lobbying forms to suggest they had. In both of those areas, I found his responses wanting, and I voted against him. I will be honest. I asked him about the resource curse question, and today I kind of feel like I got snookered. I said: There is a lot of concern about these countries that let resource wealth go to dictators and further corruption. What are you going to do about it, as the Secretary of State, working on development, for example, of some of these poor nations? And he talked about high-minded values and virtues of the things the United States could do that would battle corruption and increase transparency. He didn't tell me that he had been personally involved in an effort to defeat the legislation that passed Congress in 2010. Now there is press out suggesting that is the case, and he didn't tell me that apparently there was an effort underway to undermine the transparency statute that was so important. I have to put it on the record. Within 1 day--within 1 day of the Senate approving Mr. Tillerson for Secretary of State, the Trump administration has relaxed sanctions on Russia. That happened today. And now, apparently, we are going to vote to eliminate a law that requires transparency among companies like ExxonMobil. I kind of feel like I got snookered at the hearing. What public interest is at stake in rolling this back? I don't think there is any. Some say: Well, look, it is about leveling the playing field. The United States shouldn't be at a competitive disadvantage, but U.S. companies are at a disadvantage. Companies listed on the U.S. stock exchange--wherever they are from--are required to do this transparency, these disclosures, and many are already doing it. Because we have led, the European Union and Canada have said this is a great idea, and they are doing it too. It would be a horrible thing if the United States pulled away from its leadership. In conclusion, I am concerned that in the opening 2 weeks of the Trump administration--despite a lot of promises about what they would do in the economy--what has the administration done about the economy? On day one, they entered an Executive order retracting an FHA mortgage reduction, thereby requiring homeowners with FHA loans to have to pay more for their monthly mortgages. They have done a Federal hiring ban that falls disproportionately on veterans because the Federal workforce is a veteran-heavy workforce. They have done the immigration rules that we have discussed which not only affect immigrants but have a dramatic negative effect on America's technology industry. And then in the first two uses of the CRA procedure since the 1990s, they have eliminated a rule to allow more pollution of streams in poor areas where coal is produced, and now this--allowing companies to escape transparency and make the very kinds of payments that lead to corruption in foreign governments, corruption so severe that a former Republican Member of this body was compelled to write a superb report in 2008 and have bipartisan legislation passed. I urge my colleagues to vote against the CRA repeal of this rule.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to speak on a special day. Today is my wife's birthday. Today is National Freedom Day, when we recognize President Lincoln's signing the 13th Amendment banning slavery. This is the reason we celebrate Black History Month in February. Today, February 1, begins American Heart Month, acknowledging the great heart of the American people, as well as the need for health care. But today, February 1, is also the first day of World Interfaith Harmony Week. In 2010, King Abdallah II of Jordan spoke before the U.N. General Assembly, and he asked the U.N. to declare a week every year to promote understanding and tolerance between the world's religions. In his speech before the U.N., this is what King Abdallah said: It is also essential to resist forces of division that spread misunderstanding and mistrust, especially among peoples of different religions. The fact is, humanity everywhere is bound together, not only by mutual interests, but by shared commandments to love God and neighbor, to love the good and neighbor. What we are proposing is a special week, during which the world's people, in their own places of worship, could express the teachings of their own faith about tolerance, respect for others and peace. The resolution was adopted unanimously at the U.N. General Assembly, and all nations, religions, and peoples were asked to observe it. By happy coincidence, as the Presiding Officer knows, King Abdallah is in Washington right now. He visited with Senators here at the Capitol yesterday and today. Earlier today I met with him, and I told him I would speak in his honor in the hopes that his words might inspire us at a challenging time. The word of last Friday's Executive orders regarding immigration and refugees--orders which implemented the President's campaign rhetoric to implement a Muslim ban--shocked the country this weekend. I traveled to Roanoke and Blacksburg, VA--communities in the southwestern portion of my Commonwealth. I was there to meet with local health care providers and students pursuing health care careers. I had planned the trip to go talk about the Affordable Care Act, but at my first event, two families came to me with a concern. Working together with Roanoke Catholic charities, they had helped settle a Syrian refugee family in Blacksburg 1 year ago. The Syrian family was a mom and dad and four kids. These sponsors told me how well the family was doing and how welcoming this community was in bringing this family to Virginia and taking them in. The employer of the Syrian father runs a construction company, and he hired him to do construction work. He told me, kind of chuckling about it: Senator, not all my workers agree with me on politics, but no one better say a bad word about their Syrian coworker around them. He went on to describe how the employees at his construction firm had done a number of things, including collecting funds to help the children have soccer shoes there, in Southwest Virginia. But they didn't tell me this story because it is a happy story about resettlement of a family, although that is a point of the story. Here is why they came to see me. The community was poised to welcome a second family from Syria--a mother, father, and five minor children-- to meet them at the Roanoke airport tomorrow and help them find a home in the United States. This refugee family they were supposed to meet tomorrow fled Syria 4 years ago. They had been living in a refugee camp in Jordan, undergoing 4 years of vetting in the hopes they could come to America. Now, their sponsors pressed papers into my hand and said: What will happen to this family? Are they now shut out of the dream they have worked so hard to achieve? Are we now shut out from our desire to offer them the Christian hospitality of our community? We have been working to get answers to these questions, but as of today, we know nothing about this family's fate. There are so many questions I struggle to answer in the aftermath of these orders. The orders single out people based on their Muslim faith by targeting primarily Muslim nations and allowing exceptions to be made for Christians and other religious minorities. Why? The orders single out seven countries--countries where citizens have been exposed to genocide and other crimes against humanity--while leaving countries that have actually exported terrorists to the United States untouched. Why? The order was applied to legal permanent residents of the United States until clarified and also to brave people who had helped American soldiers on the battlefield, thereby earning a special immigrant visa status. Why? We can have security procedures that are based on the danger of an individual rather than a stereotype about where they were born or how they worship. I am called to reflect on these events by King Abdallah's words suggesting that the world should recognize this week as World Interfaith Harmony Week. He told us today that the order is being viewed with deep anxiety in his country, which is one of our strongest allies in the Arab world--indeed, in the entire world. I am called to reflect on these events by my own citizens in Roanoke and Blacksburg, working with a church group, who just want to serve others in a way commanded by their faith and by all faiths. At the Presiding Officer's desk, there is a book of the rules of the Senate and there is also a Bible. In a week where all are called to reflect upon their own religious traditions of tolerance and peace, there is wisdom in that Book for our Nation. Exodus 22:21: ``You shall not wrong or oppress an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.'' Leviticus 19:34: ``The alien who resides with you shall be to you as a citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. Deuteronomy 1:16: ``Give the members of your community a fair hearing and judge rightly between one person and another whether citizen or resident alien.'' Deuteronomy 10:18-19: ``For the Lord your God loves the strangers, providing them with food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.'' Deuteronomy 24:17: ``You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice.'' Deuteronomy 26:5: ``A wandering Aramaean was my ancestor, he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien.'' Matthew 2:13-23: Jesus began his life as a refugee in Egypt. Matthew 25:34: ``I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you invited me into your home.'' The traditions of this nation, other nations, religions, and peoples point us in the same direction. Pope Francis reminded us of these very words when he spoke to us in the fall of 2015 and told us--as individual leaders and as a nation--that the yardstick we use to measure and evaluate others is the yardstick that will be applied to us. On this opening day of World Interfaith Harmony Week, I pray that we commit to peaceful understanding and appreciation of people from diverse faith backgrounds. I pray that the unjust immigration orders that target suffering people based on where they were born or how they worship will be rescinded. I pray that Congress and the administration will work together to set up appropriate security procedures that do not discriminate on the grounds of religion or national origin, and I pray that we will be true to our best principles and not sacrifice them for the sake of politics. I yield the floor.

Mr. KAINE

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

Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise to speak concerning the nomination by President Trump of Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State. I believe I am going to be speaking a little bit this afternoon and possibly later. This will just be part of my remarks this afternoon. First, I am going to say some positive things about Mr. Tillerson's career and the importance of the position, but then I want to talk about the reason for my opposition, which has to do largely with my concern about whether he is capable of exercising truly independent judgment on behalf of the United States, particularly given his 41-year career with ExxonMobil. To begin, Mr. Tillerson has an exemplary record with ExxonMobil. I was impressed by it. I have been impressed by his business acumen. I think this one would, frankly, be relatively straightforward if he had been nominated for Secretary of Commerce. I think it would be relatively straightforward had he been nominated for Secretary of Energy. That is an interesting aspect of some of these nominations. I think there are some people who are up who--if they were in other positions, they might be easier, but because of the ones they have been nominated for, it has made it a little more difficult. I put Mr. Tillerson in that category. Secretary of State is an enormously important position. We all know that it is important, but we, even for the public, separate the Secretary of State position from others. There are four Cabinet Secretaries who by law are not allowed to be involved in political campaigns. They can't go out on the campaign trail during election season. They are designated as ``special,'' and I think they are special for a reason--Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Secretary of Treasury, and the Attorney General. The reason these four positions are made separate, in my view, is they are positions that are supposed to have a special gravity, positions that are supposed to be above politics. They are also positions that are supposed to have a degree of independence. An Attorney General needs to have a degree of independence from a President because that individual must weigh in on the legality of actions even of the administration in making decisions. I think the Secretary of State needs some independence and gravitas as well. That is why the Secretary of State position is such a special one. I want to focus on this area of independence and the independence I wanted to see in a Secretary of State Tillerson and that I did not feel comfortable enough after the research I have done and after the hearing itself. It fits into three basic categories--issues with respect to climate, issues with respect to Russia, and issues with respect to the development policy that the United States uses in nations around the world, including very poor nations that are resource rich but often find that their oil reserves or other natural resources put them into kind of a resource-cursed position where, resources notwithstanding, they actually trend toward authoritarianism and keeping their citizens in poverty. Let me start with climate. Climate is an enormously important issue in Virginia, as it is to all States, but to give you kind of the Virginia focus on climate issues, Virginia voters overwhelmingly believe that humans are affecting climate and that something should be done about it. We have 134 counties. The eastern part of Virginia-- Hamilton Roads, near the Atlantic--is the second most threatened area in the United States to sea level rise. So if you go to Hampton Roads, VA--1.6 million people, the center of naval power in the United States and the world--what you find is sea level rise accelerating to the extent that neighborhoods where you could once sell a house, you can't sell it anymore. Flooding that was once every few years is now regular. Even our Nation's military operations in Hampton Roads are jeopardized. There is a main road leading into the Norfolk Naval Base, which is the largest naval base in the United States--the largest naval base in the world. That road is increasingly flooded just during normal tidal conditions. We are not talking about storms; we are talking about normal tidal conditions. The inability to get road access into America's center of naval power is highly challenging, highly problematic. In the future, it is going to be very expensive for us. So the climate change issues in Hampton Roads--whether it is affecting your ability to sell a house, the ability to conduct naval operations--and in many other areas is of deep concern to my State. There are climate issues in other parts of my State, from weather patterns to warming temperatures wiping out species in the Shenandoah National Park because as the temperature warms, the species need to move higher and higher, and at some point they can't move any higher. So there are endangered species in the Shenandoah National Park because of climate issues. The issue is not only important to my State, it is a critically important part of the job. The Secretary of State in the previous administration was involved in crafting the Paris climate accord. Nearly 200 nations agreed that climate change is a huge problem and that we have to do something about it, and each nation came forward voluntarily to craft its own plan so that the world could deal with this problem. The U.S. played a critical role--Secretary Kerry and others--in forging this global coalition around the overwhelming scientific consensus. The Secretary of State in this administration, along with others--the EPA Administrator--will play a key role in determining whether we continue to take seriously climate, whether we continue to take seriously the promises we made under the climate accord, or whether we go backward. I don't want to go backward because it would hurt my State and hurt our country and hurt the world. During my examination of Mr. Tillerson during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was not happy with the answers with respect to climate issues. The overwhelming majority of scientists say that climate change is real and that it is caused significantly by the burning of fossil fuels and the release of CO2. This is not a controversial conclusion; it should not be partisan, either. The first climate bill that was introduced in this body was introduced by Senator McCain in 2004. Then, in 2007, a predecessor of mine, Senator Warner of Virginia, a Republican, and Senator Lieberman of Connecticut, a Democrat, introduced a bipartisan bill. Senator Warner, now retired--John Warner--still speaks regularly on the national security implications of climate change. During the hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I examined Rex Tillerson about the role of ExxonMobil in climate research. ExxonMobil is a company that is chock-full of engineers and scientists. It is one of the most accomplished companies in the world if you just measure it by the extent of engineering and science talent that it has. There has been a series of investigative articles in the last few years in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, and Inside Climate News that get into the question of what ExxonMobil knew about climate science and what they told the public. I wanted to ask Mr. Tillerson about this. Some of the information that I put on the table during that examination: There was an internal letter in September of 1982 from Exxon's Theoretical and Mathematical Science Laboratory. This was during the time Mr. Tillerson was working for the company. I want to read a quote from this letter which I put into the Record as I was examining Mr. Tillerson: However, over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged regarding the expected climate effects of increased atmospheric CO2. . . . There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth's climate. The time required for doubling of atmospheric CO2-- Doubling of atmospheric CO2-- depends upon the future world consumption of fossil fuels. There is potential for our research to attract the attention of the popular news media because of the connection between Exxon's major business and the role of fossil fuel combustion in contributing to the increase of atmospheric CO2. . . . [O]ur ethical responsibility is to permit the publication of our research in the scientific literature; indeed, to do otherwise would be a breach of Exxon's public position and ethical credo on honesty and integrity. In other words, by 1982 the key scientific research organizations within ExxonMobil, which has a sterling cadre of scientists and researchers, said: Here is our view of the scientific research--and not just other scientific research, they did their own studies to replicate it. They concluded that the burning of fossil fuels was going to lead potentially to a significant increase in global temperature, with catastrophic climate effects. There is other information as well that ExxonMobil had within it during Mr. Tillerson's tenure with the company. But by 2000, ExxonMobil in its face to the public was saying something very different. Despite the internal recognition of climate science and the potential effects on the economy and on our atmosphere and despite scientists with ExxonMobil saying we have an ethical duty to share these facts with the scientific community, by 2000, ExxonMobil was publishing, in major publications in this country, op-eds--full-page op-eds in newspapers and magazines. I am going to read a quote from one, an ExxonMobil published op-ed in 2001: Knowing that weather forecasts are reliable for a few days at best, we should recognize the enormous challenge facing scientists seeking to predict climate change and its impact over the next century. Geological evidence indicates climate greenhouse gas levels experience significant natural variability for reasons having nothing to do with human activity. . . . Against this backdrop of large, poorly understood natural invariability, it is impossible for scientists to attribute the recent small surface temperature increase to human causes. So, from 1982, there were scientists at ExxonMobil who were aware of it and were saying we have a duty to share this with the public and with our fellow scientists, but by 2000, in statements to the American public--all during Rex Tillerson's tenure at ExxonMobil--the company was taking a very different position. I summarized this material during my examination of Mr. Tillerson before the Foreign Relations Committee, and I asked him: What do you have to say about this evidence and about the numerous public reports that ExxonMobil knew about climate science but made a decision to tell the American public something different? A pretty straightforward question from a Senator whose State is experiencing climate change, a pretty important question for a nominee who will be in charge of, as Secretary of State, carrying out our obligations under agreements, such as the Paris climate agreement. Mr. Tillerson's answer to me was a little surprising. He said: Oh, I can't answer this. You are going to have to ask somebody at ExxonMobil. He had stepped away from ExxonMobil a few days before the hearing. I was puzzled by it. So I went back to him and I said: Well, wait a minute. I want to make sure I got this right. You were at ExxonMobil for 41 years. That is right. You were an executive at ExxonMobil for more than half of your tenure there; isn't that right? That is right. You were the CEO of ExxonMobil beginning, I believe, in 2006; am I right about that? You are right about that. I am not asking the company's position. You now are no longer at ExxonMobil. I am asking you, as somebody who is going to be in charge of carrying forward America's obligations under the Paris climate accord, whether the allegation that ExxonMobil knew about climate science but chose to say something different to the American public--I am going to ask you if you can answer that question. And he came back again and said: You are going to have to ask somebody at ExxonMobil. I then asked Mr. Tillerson a really important question. I said this: Do you lack the knowledge to answer my questions or are you refusing to answer my questions? And he said: A little bit of both. A little bit of both. And I said to him: You have been there 41 years. I have a hard time believing you don't know the answer to this question. I think you are refusing to answer my question, and he didn't comment on that. I then followed up with one more question to Mr. Tillerson that I also think was important because I am a lawyer, and I just wanted to make sure I understood this. I asked him: Are you sitting here today subject to any kind of a confidentiality agreement that would prohibit you from answering the question I just posed to you? And he said no, that he was not. I asked Mr. Tillerson these questions because I am deeply interested in climate change. It affects my State in a significant way, and it is directly relevant to his job, but I asked him for another reason as well. I am just going to talk for a minute about the reason, and I am going to yield to my colleague from Oregon and return later this evening on the other points. The reason I was asking Mr. Tillerson about this was not just his awareness of science, I was asking him to see whether at this point, as a nominee for Secretary of State of the United States, he could set aside a 41-year loyalty to his previous employer, ExxonMobil, and instead focus solely on his obligations to this country if he were to be confirmed as Secretary of State. I believe he knew the answer to the question I asked him, and he told me he was not under any legal agreement that would bar him from answering my question, but he, nevertheless, refused to answer my question. When I challenged him on it and said: You are refusing to answer my question, he basically agreed that was the case. I think we are entitled to a Secretary of State who can set aside any other loyalty, including an understandable loyalty to an employer of 41 years, and exercise complete and independent judgment on behalf of the interests of this country. The refusal of Mr. Tillerson to answer my questions about a matter clearly within his knowledge, clearly within the job description of Secretary of State and deeply important to my Commonwealth, led me to have significant doubts about whether he could separate his previous employment from his independent obligation to this job, should he be confirmed. I am going to have more to say on a couple of other issues related to this independence point when I return later this evening. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, by 2020, it is estimated that 65 percent of all jobs will require at least some form of postsecondary education and training. The National Skills Coalition estimates that nearly half of all job openings between now and 2022 will be middle skill jobs that require education beyond high school, but not a four-year degree. While the number of students pursing postsecondary education is growing, the supply of skilled workers still falls short of industry demand. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 5.5 million U.S. jobs are currently vacant, in part, because of a shortage of qualified workers. Our current Federal higher education policy must be improved to help solve this problem. Pell Grants, needs-based grants for low-income and working students, can only be awarded towards programs that are over 600 clock hours or at least 15 weeks in length. These grants cannot be used to support many of the short-term occupational training programs at community and technical colleges and other institutions that provide skills and credentials employers need and recognize. When it comes to higher education, Federal policies need to support the demands of the changing labor market and support career pathways that align with industry demand. According the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, shorter-term educational investments pay off--the average postsecondary certificate holder has 20 percent higher lifetime earnings than individuals with only a high school diploma. Today, I am pleased to introduce with my colleague, Senator Portman, the Jumpstart Our Businesses by Supporting Students or JOBS Act. The JOBS Act would close the ``skills gap'' by expanding Pell Grant eligibility to cover high-quality and rigorous short-term job training programs so workers can afford the skills training and credentials that are in high-demand in today's job market. Since job training programs are shorter and less costly, Pell Grant awards would be half of the current discretionary Pell amount. The legislation defines eligible job training programs as those providing career and technical education instruction at an institution that provides at least 150 clock hours of instruction time over a period of at least 8 weeks and that provides training that meets the needs of the local or regional workforce. These programs must also provide students with licenses, certifications, or credentials that meet the hiring requirements of multiple employers in the field for which the job training is offered. The JOBS Act also ensures that students who receive Pell Grants are earning high-quality postsecondary credentials by requiring that the credentials meet the standards under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, are recognized by employers, industry, or sector partnerships, and align with the skill needs of industries in the States or local economies. In Virginia, the Virginia Community College System has identified approximately 50 programs that would benefit from the JOBS Act including in the fields of manufacturing, architecture/ construction, energy, health care, information technology, transportation, and business management and administration. The JOBS Act is a commonsense, bipartisan bill that would help workers and employers succeed in today's economy. As Congress works to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, I hope that my colleagues ensure that Pell Grants are accessible for individuals participating in high- quality, short-term occupational training programs that are leading to industry-recognized credentials and certificates.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, by 2020, it is estimated that 65 percent of all jobs will require at least some form of postsecondary education and training. The National Skills Coalition estimates that nearly half of all job openings between now and 2022 will be middle skill jobs that require education beyond high school, but not a four-year degree. While the number of students pursing postsecondary education is growing, the supply of skilled workers still falls short of industry demand. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 5.5 million U.S. jobs are currently vacant, in part, because of a shortage of qualified workers. Our current Federal higher education policy must be improved to help solve this problem. Pell Grants, needs-based grants for low-income and working students, can only be awarded towards programs that are over 600 clock hours or at least 15 weeks in length. These grants cannot be used to support many of the short-term occupational training programs at community and technical colleges and other institutions that provide skills and credentials employers need and recognize. When it comes to higher education, Federal policies need to support the demands of the changing labor market and support career pathways that align with industry demand. According the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, shorter-term educational investments pay off--the average postsecondary certificate holder has 20 percent higher lifetime earnings than individuals with only a high school diploma. Today, I am pleased to introduce with my colleague, Senator Portman, the Jumpstart Our Businesses by Supporting Students or JOBS Act. The JOBS Act would close the ``skills gap'' by expanding Pell Grant eligibility to cover high-quality and rigorous short-term job training programs so workers can afford the skills training and credentials that are in high-demand in today's job market. Since job training programs are shorter and less costly, Pell Grant awards would be half of the current discretionary Pell amount. The legislation defines eligible job training programs as those providing career and technical education instruction at an institution that provides at least 150 clock hours of instruction time over a period of at least 8 weeks and that provides training that meets the needs of the local or regional workforce. These programs must also provide students with licenses, certifications, or credentials that meet the hiring requirements of multiple employers in the field for which the job training is offered. The JOBS Act also ensures that students who receive Pell Grants are earning high-quality postsecondary credentials by requiring that the credentials meet the standards under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, are recognized by employers, industry, or sector partnerships, and align with the skill needs of industries in the States or local economies. In Virginia, the Virginia Community College System has identified approximately 50 programs that would benefit from the JOBS Act including in the fields of manufacturing, architecture/ construction, energy, health care, information technology, transportation, and business management and administration. The JOBS Act is a commonsense, bipartisan bill that would help workers and employers succeed in today's economy. As Congress works to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, I hope that my colleagues ensure that Pell Grants are accessible for individuals participating in high- quality, short-term occupational training programs that are leading to industry-recognized credentials and certificates.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Madam Clerk, when I was sick, you visited me. I vote no.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise with my colleagues, and I am thrilled to be here with them, to save our health care and to try to convince our colleagues that a repeal of the Affordable Care Act would be health care malpractice, and because health care is one-sixth of the American economy, it would be economic malpractice as well. What I thought I would do basically is just tell two stories. I am going to tell a Virginia story from before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and I am going to tell a Virginia story since the passage of the act. I was first elected to statewide office in 2001, and I became the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. Shortly after, I started to attend, on a fairly regular basis, a most amazing annual event. It is called the Remote Area Medical clinic in Wise County, VA. It is in the heart of Appalachia, in a community on the border of Kentucky where my wife's family is from. This was an annual medical clinic that was set up by some Catholic nuns who were driving a van around trying to offer medical care to people who didn't have it, and they decided they would recruit volunteers. They would set up at a dusty county fairground, the Virginia-Kentucky fairground in Wise, VA, and open the doors on Saturday to people who didn't have health care. It had been going for many years when I first went as Lieutenant Governor. I had heard so much about it, and I was anxious to go see it. Here is what I saw when I first went there. People start to come on about Tuesday of the week when it is going to open on Friday, and they come in groups of three or four families, and then they come in groups of ten or dozens, and then hundreds, and then thousands, to this dusty county fairground in late July--hot in Southwestern Virginia. They gather so that on Friday morning, at about 7 o'clock when it opens, they have gotten a number, they know where they are in the line, and sometime over the course of Friday and Saturday, they will be able to see a doctor, in some instances for the first time in their lives. There are doctors, dentists, medical students, the Lions Club volunteers to give vision screenings, hundreds of volunteers, and thousands of people seeking medical care. The first year I went to this, I was overwhelmed at the magnitude of the philanthropic spirit of the volunteers, and I was also overwhelmed at the depth of the need. Something made it more palpable by walking around the parking lot to see where people had come from. This is a community that is on the border of Virginia and Kentucky so I wasn't surprised to see Virginia license plates and Kentucky license plates. It is kind of near West Virginia so I wasn't surprised to see West Virginia license plates. It is near Tennessee. I saw Tennessee license plates. I saw North Carolina license plates. What struck me as I went through the parking lot was to see license plates from Georgia and license plates from Alabama and license plates from as far away as Oklahoma. We are the richest Nation on Earth. We are the most compassionate Nation on Earth. Yet, in order to get medical care, people would get in their cars and drive for days, and then camp for days, for the chance to see a doctor or a dentist. It reminded me that first year, and it reminds me still, of the way health care was delivered in the poor country of Honduras where I served as a missionary in 1980 and 1981. There wasn't really a health care network. Occasionally, missionaries or others would set up a clinic in a mountain community once a year--maybe less than that--and people would gather, and that was the way we were delivering health care in a successful State, in the most compassionate and wealthiest Nation on Earth. It is just not right. It is just not right. The RAM clinic still goes on. It hasn't gone away, but I will tell my colleagues what has happened since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The percentage of Americans without health insurance has dropped from over 16 percent to about 8 percent. It has almost been cut in half, and the uninsurance rate in this country is at its nearly lowest percentage since we have been able to record that number. That means there is less of a need for the RAM clinics because more people can have a medical home and can seek care. That decline has also been significant because in Virginia, we were about 14 percent uninsured in 2010, and that number has now come down to about 9 percent. So that first story--the story of this RAM clinic, pre-Affordable Care Act, with one in six Americans not having health insurance--we have done a good thing as a Congress to provide access to dramatically reduce that number. Let me tell my colleagues a second story. The second story is just about a family, a story in a letter that I received just a few days ago. It is a different aspect of the Affordable Care Act. It is not so much about the reduction in the uninsured, but it is about more peace of mind and security for the majority of Americans who do have health insurance. Dear Senator Kaine, As a Senator, you have been charged with an immense task. Your constituents rely on you to work on our behalf to uphold and protect the freedoms we enjoy as Virginians and Americans. We also rely on you to safeguard the legislation that exists to keep our family and so many of our friends and neighbors healthy and safe. When I graduated from the University of Virginia, I was fortunate to enter a career through which I received excellent benefits. I taught second grade and kindergarten in both Chesterfield and Albemarle Counties. My health insurance was comprehensive and affordable. I didn't know how good I had it. After years in the classroom, I put my career on hold while I stayed at home with our children. We were so lucky to have been in a position to be able to make that choice. I know that being able to rely on a single income is not a reality for many Virginians. We enrolled in a private health insurance plan through my husband's company, a small business based out of Richmond, Virginia. Our new plan came at a higher cost than my excellent public-school teachers' insurance, but it was comprehensive and it allowed my husband and me, and especially our children, access to outstanding health care. Just this past year, my husband, who was by then a part-owner in the company, left his position to open his own Financial Advisory firm. It was a move that was made easier because we had the option of enrolling in a health insurance plan through the Affordable Care Act, which we did in July of 2016. In addition to well checkups, sick visits, prescriptions for antibiotics, and vaccinations, we rely on our health insurance made affordable through ``ObamaCare'' to, quite literally, save our children's lives. Our oldest son is ``medically complex.'' He was diagnosed with multiple and severe food allergies when he was just 10 months old. Though he was initially highly reactive to over 13 foods, with the help of a vigilant pediatric allergist, multiple blood draws, tens of skin prick tests, and four in- office, hours-long oral food challenges, my son can now safely eat all foods except for nuts, peanuts, milk, and shellfish. Still, we pay a premium for life-saving prescriptions that we hope he'll never need: Epi-pens. He needs one at school and one that travels with him from home to extracurricular activities. Even after insurance, we pay nearly $1,000 each year for these prescriptions. In addition to his pediatrician and allergist, we have been to a psychologist for his anxiety and a cardiologist for a detected heart murmur. More recently, after his pediatrician became concerned about his stagnation on his growth chart, my nine-year old has been subjected to more blood draws, weight checks, countless hemoglobin level checks, and a consultation with a gastroenterologist. Next week he will undergo an endoscopy and a colonoscopy to, hopefully, diagnose a treatable condition that, once known and treated, will enable him to get back on that weight chart and thriving. Because of our health insurance, we have the peace of mind of being able to afford these doctors' visits, lab work, and medical procedures for our son. Our medical insurance through the Affordable Care Act allows us access to the best medical care and professionals in our area. Please do what is right for our family. Please do what is right for your constituents. Please do what is right for our country. Please save the Affordable Care Act. Thank you for taking the time to read one little piece of our family's story. Sarah Harris, Crozet, VA. My first story was about people who didn't have health insurance. My second story is about people who do have health insurance, but the health insurance is now affordable and comprehensive. My second story about the Harris family is also about something else important. Her husband was able to leave a job with health benefits to start his own company, which we want to encourage in this country. We want to encourage entrepreneurs. We want to encourage innovators. Before the Affordable Care Act, somebody like Mr. Harris couldn't leave his job and start a company because he wouldn't have been able to buy insurance that would have covered a child with a preexisting condition. Imagine being a parent with a dream, like so many have, of starting your own business, and realizing you could not achieve that dream and you would have to put it on hold because if you changed your job, you would not be able to get health insurance for your child. I gave a speech about this on the floor last week. I will just conclude and say this. Health insurance is to provide a protection for you when you are ill or injured, but that is not all it is about because if you are a parent, even if your child is healthy, but you do not have health insurance, you go to bed at night wondering what is going to happen to my family if my child gets sick tomorrow or if I am in an accident tomorrow. Who is going to be there? How is my family going to be taken care of? So what the Affordable Care Act is about is, as Sarah Harris said, peace of mind. It is about coverage, but it is also about the peace of mind that you need as a parent to know that your child will be protected if you are ill or if your child is injured. That is what the Affordable Care Act has done for the Harris family of Crozet, VA. That is what it has done for tens of millions of Americans. The Urban Institute indicated that if the Affordable Care Act is repealed without a replacement, or even a delayed replacement, it could cause 30 million Americans to lose their health insurance--and 30 million Americans is the combined population of 19 States in this country. This is not a game. This is very, very serious, life and death, that we are grappling with in this body. My strong hope is that our colleagues will join together and decide that we want to fix and improve the health care system of our Nation but not break it. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to offer this amendment, amendment No. 8, with Senator Murphy and other Senators, to the budget resolution we are currently considering, and the purpose of amendment No. 8 would be to create a point of order against considering any legislation that would either strip Americans of health insurance coverage, make health care more expensive, or reduce the quality of health coverage. Our amendment creates a high hurdle to any legislation that would make America sick again, and basically that is what we are trying to do. If we are going to either strip coverage from people or make health insurance more expensive or reduce the quality of health coverage for Americans that they currently have, we shouldn't make that easy to do. We should have a high hurdle in place so we consider it before we do it. The point of order is necessary because the entire purpose of this budget resolution is not to really address the budgetary matters facing the country. I say that as a member of the Budget Committee. In fact, the budget process was basically ignored in the last Congress. This budget is only before us to set up a pathway to pass a fast- track repeal of the Nation's most consequential health care program in decades, a program that affects millions of people and a repeal being fast-tracked that would strip health care from millions of Americans. I will come back to the health points in a second, but I want to address how we got to where we are on the budget question that was in the province of the Budget Committee. I think it is a little strange that halfway into Fiscal Year 2017, which began in October 2016, we are going to be setting budget levels now. A budget resolution is a tool to set forth the guidelines for spending in Congress. We know, in the history of this body, we are not always successful in passing a budget through both Houses of Congress and approving that budget through a conference process, but at least some progress is usually made; for example, both Houses doing their budget resolutions. As you know, that did not happen in 2016. Last year, our GOP counterparts in each House decided, for the first time in the modern budget era, not to hold a hearing on the President's submitted budget, not to have any activity on a budget in the Senate, either in the committee or on the floor. To begin, I have to ask, if the budget wasn't important enough for us to consider last year, why is it now so important for us to be taking up a budget? The answer is obvious. We are debating a budget for the sole purpose--the sole purpose--of setting in motion a process to repeal health care coverage for tens of millions of Americans. This is really about an attack on people's health care. I and many of my colleagues have said there is a significant need to make improvements to the Affordable Care Act and, more generally, to our health care system. Mr. President, you were a chief executive of a State, just like I was. I learned something in my first year as Governor of Virginia, which was, when I looked at all the bills that were put on my desk for signature, amendment, or veto at the end of my State's legislative session, three-quarters of the bills were not new legislation or not repeals of legislation; three-quarters of the bills were improvements of existing law. That is the work of a legislative body. Overwhelmingly, it should be improvements to existing law. The Affordable Care Act needs significant improvement, just as other health care laws do, just as virtually everything we do needs improvement. There is no reason, while we acknowledge the need for improvement, to repeal a law outright without having a sense of what the replacement will be because, by doing so, what we do is create chaos in the economy, chaos in the health insurance market, and especially chaos in the most intimate and important area of people's lives, their health. Actually, on that subject, there was a wonderful letter that was sent on January 3 by the American Medical Association to the congressional leadership on this very point, don't do a repeal that creates chaos for people. I am going to read some sections of the letter. The AMA supported passage of the Affordable Care Act because it was a significant improvement on the status quo at that time. We continue to embrace the primary goal of the law to make high-quality, affordable health care coverage accessible to all Americans. We also recognize that the ACA is imperfect, and there are a number of issues that need to be addressed. Continuing the quote: It is essential that gains in the number of Americans with health insurance coverage be maintained. The letter concludes, from the American Medical Association, the largest organization representing American physicians: Consistent with this core principle, we believe that before any action is taken, through reconciliation or other means, that would potentially alter coverage, policymakers should lay out for the American people, in reasonable detail, what will replace current policies. Patients and other stakeholders should be able to clearly compare current policy to new proposals so they can make informed decisions about whether it represents a step forward in the ongoing process of health reform. The amendment Senator Murphy and I propose is designed to accomplish exactly the goal, exactly the goal the AMA has specified in the letter of January 3. We would create a 60-vote point of order against any legislation that would, first, reduce the number of Americans who are enrolled in public or private health insurance coverage, so there would be a 60-vote point of order against any proposal that would reduce coverage for Americans; second, the point of order would also lie against any plan that would increase health care premiums or total out-of-pocket health care costs for Americans with private health insurance; and, third, the point of order would lie against any proposed plan on the table that would reduce the scope and scale of benefits offered by private health insurance because the ACA was not only about affordable care and it was not only about coverage, it was also about the quality of care. Could your coverage discriminate against you because you are a woman? Could your coverage expire once you get diagnosed with an illness and now have a preexisting condition? These bill of rights protections for patients were an important and integral part of the Affordable Care Act, and the budget point of order that we would put on the table would establish a 60-vote threshold for considering any legislation if it triggered one of those three concerns: reduction in coverage, increase in cost, reduction in quality. The point of order actually goes right to promises that the President-elect has made. In September of 2015, President-elect Trump said: I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody is going to be taken care of much better than they are taken care of now. He has made a promise to the American public that we will not rush into a new health care chapter that reduces coverage, that reduces quality, or that increases costs. Just 2 days ago, the key spokesperson for the President-elect Kellyanne Conway said: We don't want anyone who currently has insurance to not have insurance. She is not setting a threshold of 1 million people or 100,000 people or 10,000 people or 10 people. She is saying the threshold is this: We do not want anyone who has insurance to have that insurance jeopardized by actions of Congress. This is what a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, without a replacement plan, will mean. It will have three significant consequences, and then I want to finish with some personal stories. First, a repeal with no replacement will inflict a significant wound on the American economy. Health care is one-sixth of the American economy, one-sixth. You cannot inject uncertainty into one-sixth of the American economy without having significant negative effects on our Nation. Congress should be in the business of increasing certainty, not increasing uncertainty, and if we go into the biggest sector of the American economy with a repeal, without any replacement strategy, it is the equivalent of, ``I am now going to jump off a cliff and I will figure out how to land once I am in midair.'' This will be economic malpractice to affect that many people. Second, the effect of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act is sort of an under-the-table tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. Millionaires, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed--there are two taxes on high earners that are part of the financing of the Affordable Care Act, and these taxes on high-earning Americans would expire, and this is hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years of a tax cut. Millionaires would get 53 percent of the tax cuts from a repeal, which is more than double the same group's share of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that were done during the Bush administration. Just to put that in some context, Americans in the top 0.1 percent economically would get an average tax cut of $197,000 if the Affordable Care Act is repealed. That is one way to sort of look at this repeal without a replacement. It is essentially a tax cut for the wealthiest, financed by reductions of health care on the people who are most in need. Third, the impact that is the most significant is the impact on the health care of average Americans. The Urban Institute did a study in December and said: If there is a repeal with no replacement or a repeal with a delayed replacement to something that we know not what it will be, there will be 30 million Americans who will lose their health insurance. About 20 million will be people who got health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and an additional 10 million will be people who will lose their insurance because of the chaos created in the insurance market. I want to put that number, 30 million, into a context because numbers can just sound big and mysterious. Here is what 30 million people is. The number of people who would lose health insurance because of an ACA repeal is equal to the combined population of 19 States: Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, and Arkansas. Nineteen States' combined populations, that is 30 million people, and that is who is going to lose health care coverage if we go forward with a repeal without a replacement. Eighty-two percent of these 30 million who would become uninsured are working families, 38 percent will be between the ages of 18 and 34, and 56 percent are non-Hispanic Caucasians. Eighty percent of the adults becoming uninsured are people who do not have college degrees. There will be 12.9 million fewer people who have Medicaid or CHIP coverage in 2019 if the repeal goes through. These are some sobering statistics. These statistics show that, at a minimum, what we are doing here is very, very consequential and very, very important and should not be rushed into in a partisan 51-vote budget reconciliation process. I want to conclude and tell a couple of stories from Virginians of people who are going to be impacted by this. When we essentially recessed in the Senate on December 9--between then and now--I went around the State and talked to people. I heard a story that I want to share, and then I will tell a couple of quick ones. I met with Ashley Hawkins, a young mother in Richmond, a mother of two kids. We sat around a conference table in a federally chartered community health center in Richmond and talked to stakeholders. Ashley told her story. She had a preexisting health condition. Before the Affordable Care Act, health insurance was unaffordable. After the Affordable Care Act passed, she could suddenly get insurance. Ashley owns a small business. She runs a nonprofit group that provides community arts education that serves others. Because of the ACA, she has been able to sign up on exchanges and get health insurance. Because of her income, she can receive subsidies to make that health insurance affordable. She makes $45,000 a year. Without health insurance, the recent hospital bill for the birth of her youngest child would have been close to $16,000. With the Affordable Care Act, she receives a subsidy, and she is able to access high quality health insurance for her and her two kids for $280 a month. That is the difference between not being able to afford to go to a hospital and deliver a child and to be able to afford, as a small business owner, a health insurance policy that covers her and her two kids for less than $300 a month. This is what she said as we sat around the table and talked about what it means to have affordable insurance. She said: ``It has to do with self esteem and security and well-being.'' Having health insurance is about security, even when you are not sick. Obviously, when you are sick or when you are delivering a child, health insurance is needed. But when you are a mother of two children, even if you are at the peak of your health and even if your children are at the peak of their health, you would go to bed at night--and Ashley described this--wondering: What will happen tomorrow if my child gets sick? What will happen tomorrow if I am in an accident? Not having health insurance for a parent is a continuous agitating voice in your mind, an anxiety creator, about what is going to happen to my family if we get sick or get in an accident, which is something that happens to virtually every family. It has to do with self-esteem, with security, and with well-being. Without the protection for people with preexisting conditions, without the subsidies in the marketplace, people like Ashley will go back to not being able to afford coverage for their families. After the Affordable Care Act passed, I happened to be in a position where I was trying to buy health insurance in the open market without an employer subsidy for the first time in my life. When I say I was doing this, what I mean is that my wife was doing all the work because she is the one who does all the work. She talked to two insurance companies who said: Hey, sorry, Anne, we can't afford your entire family because of preexisting conditions. One company would not cover me. One company would not cover one of my children. My wife said: Hold on a second. The Affordable Care Act just passed. You can't turn somebody down on a preexisting condition now. In each case the insurance company said: I have to talk to my supervisor. They had to call back and say: You are right; we are wrong. We have to provide insurance for your entire family. Can I tell you this? My family is the healthiest family in the United States. At the time my wife was making those phone calls, of the five of us, the only time any of us had ever been hospitalized was in the three occasions my wife went to the hospital to give birth to our kids. We are a healthy family, and we were turned down twice because of a preexisting condition by insurance companies that had to say: We are wrong, and because of the Affordable Care Act, now we can write a policy for your entire family. I had a woman write me a letter--a Virginian from Williamsburg--a couple of years ago who said: My husband and I are self-employed, and we could never afford insurance. Because we couldn't afford insurance, we decided that we couldn't have children. We couldn't pay a hospital bill. This is what the Affordable Care Act has meant to them. We often talk about life and death issues in the sense of illnesses, sicknesses, cancer diagnoses, and preexisting medical conditions. They can be life or death issues, but they can also be life issues, in the sense of this couple who wrote and said that because they could now get insurance as self-employed individuals with subsidies to make it affordable, they are now going to start a family because of the Affordable Care Act. They could start a family. Finally--and I will always remember this because this gives me great motivation--as I was getting outside of my native Virginia and exploring other States on an interesting 105-day summer vacation as part of a national ticket, I went to the Iowa State Fair. I told this story once before on the floor, but I am going to tell it again. A grandfather came up with a little boy in his arms. I said: What is that child's name? Jude. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. There is St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, a place where children have been able to go to get medical care. I knew there must be a story. I said: Hey, Jude, tell me about Jude. Jude was a 3\1/2\-year-old who was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect and by age 3\1/2\--as his grandfather told me the story, now mom and dad were coming around me as well--Jude had to have multiple heart operations at the Children's Hospital in Omaha. The grandfather said to me that Jude would not have been able to have those operations and Jude would be uninsurable for the rest of his life if it were not for the Affordable Care Act. Then Jude's father put his hand on my shoulders. He was a big guy. He said to me: You have to tell me that you will do everything you can to make sure that Jude isn't stripped away and consigned again into the outer reaches of preexisting conditions and uninsurable, with an uncertain future for my son. I made a pledge to him. I said: I am only one person. I don't know what, at the end of the day, I can do, but I can tell you this. I can stand up to make sure that your child and other children--such as Ashley's two kids and the family that wrote me about wanting to have children--will not be left high and dry and without the security of health insurance in the wealthiest and, to my way of thinking, still the most compassionate Nation on the face of this planet. I encourage every Member of this body to ask their constituents for stories like Ashley's, like Jude's, like my family's, and like the family in Williamsburg about how an ACA repeal with no plan would impact them. I will go back to the purpose of the amendment. The ACA is not perfect. We ought to be talking about reform. If Republicans want to call it replace and we want to call it reform or improvement, I don't care what we call it. We should have the AMA, hospitals, patients, and Members of Congress from both parties around the table to lay down what are our concern, what are our problems, and talk about how to fix them. There is so much we can do. There is so much we can improve. But by pushing an immediate repeal through a partisan budget process, we won't have the opportunity to work together to build on that common ground. This is not a game. Sometimes we get into a budget vote-arama, and it has a little bit of a game aspect to it. I have been here until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. when amendments are put on the table, there are 1-minute presentations of why it is good or bad, and we have a vote. It has a little bit of a feeling of a game. This is not a game. This is life and death. Is there anything more important to someone than their health, because their health forms the foundation of their relationship with their spouse or their loved ones or their children? Health is what keeps a parent up at night worrying about the family. Health is what keeps a child worrying about an elderly parent. This is the most important thing to any person in this country, regardless of party, regardless of State, regardless of political persuasion. The worst thing we can do on a value of such importance is to rush and create chaos in the lives of millions of people. So I conclude by saying that the amendment that Senator Murphy, I, and others offer would seek to protect what we have--protect coverage, protect costs, protect quality--by making it harder to enact legislation that would strip these important items away from tens of millions of Americans. We should be sitting down at the table to talk about reforms. So many of us want to do that. But we should not be rushing into a repeal that would jeopardize people's lives. I urge my colleagues to please support amendment No. 8. Thank you, and I yield the floor.

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I have spoken about this previously. The budget that is on the floor really isn't a budget; it is more of a focused attack on health care for millions of Americans. Amendment No. 8, which I have offered with Senator Murphy and others, is an attempt to stop the majority from passing a health care repeal through a fast- track process. The amendment does one thing: It creates a budget point of order against any legislation that would either reduce the number of Americans enrolled in public or private health insurance, increase health insurance premiums, or reduce the scope and quality of benefits provided. I ask for the yeas and nays on the amendment.

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 8, which I send to the desk on behalf of Senator Murphy, me, and other Senators as well.

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive section 305(b) of that act for purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I wanted to indicate how disappointed I am in the provisions affecting miners that have been included in the continuing resolution. While I will vote for final passage of the CR because we must not shut government down, the provisions contained are really an outrage. Sixteen thousand three hundred retirees have received a notice that their health benefits will expire at the end of this year. What the majority has included in the CR is to extend those benefits through April. But what was left unsaid is that now, 22,500 retirees will lose health coverage at the end of April 2017, and 4,000 will lose them 3 months earlier than they otherwise would have. This plan also calls for taking money from a fund created to provide health coverage for retired miners whose employers went bankrupt. It ends the responsibility of the coal companies to contribute to this fund. This is a terrible giveaway cloaked in the provisions providing short-term health care for miners and their widows. The promise that we will deal with those consequences later rings hollow when we have a permanent bipartisan solution before us, the Miners Protection Act. I have supported this and previous versions of this fix since I began my service in the Senate 3 years ago. The majority leader wanted the bill to go through regular order before any floor consideration. Well, this legislation passed the Senate Finance Committee 18-8 and is paid for. I don't understand why we didn't take a floor vote on this bill months ago. It would receive strong bipartisan backing if it could get a floor vote. Many of us talk about helping the working men and women of our country, protecting seniors and respecting the dignity of a lifetime of work. Well, many of our constituents have been hard hit by the downturn in the coal industry. We cannot downplay what coal miners have sacrificed to fuel this Nation for over a hundred years--black Lung disease, physically disabling accidents, whole communities built around coal mining have vanished or are suffering. We say we want to support working families and protect seniors. We say we want to help Appalachia. I don't know what we are waiting for.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise in honor of your service. I just want to tell my favorite Joe Biden story. This is a story the Vice President has heard me tell, but I want it on the Record because everyone should know this story. It is the story of an interaction between our Vice President on one of the most important days of his life and a young man from Richmond, VA, my hometown, on one of the most important days of his life. It was election day 2008, and I was Governor of Virginia. I was responsible for the running of the elections in my State that day when Senator Joe Biden was running for Vice President with our President, Barack Obama. I received a call in the middle of the morning: There was going to be a surprise visit to a polling place in Richmond. After having voted in Wilmington, Senator Biden was going to make a stop in Richmond and wanted to meet some voters before he headed to Chicago to await the election results. We gave him the address of an elementary school polling place that was very near the Richmond Airport, and I raced there with my security detail to get there a few minutes before he arrived for a surprise visit with voters who were going to love having the chance to meet the soon-to-be Vice President. I got there a few minutes before Senator Biden arrived, and I saw a friend who had come to vote. I asked how he was doing. He said: I am doing great. I am really excited about voting today. And it is also a special day because I have a nephew with sickle cell anemia and he is casting his first vote, but he is so sick, he can't even get out of the vehicle. I watched the election officials at the polling place take a voting machine from inside the school into the car so that his 18-year-old nephew could cast the first vote of his life. I saw this young man, the nephew of my friend, and he was very ill. I said to my friend and his nephew: Can you wait here for 5 minutes? Because I think we can do something really exciting. What? Well, just wait. And they said they would. Within 5 minutes, Senator Biden came up to meet voters and shook the hands of those in line. I said: Senator, there is a young man here, and just as this day is very important to you, because I think you are about to be elected Vice President of the United States, for this young African-American male, who is very ill but extremely excited even in his illness to get out of his house to come here and cast his vote to elect the first African-American President--he is sitting there in that vehicle. Will you go and visit with him? I didn't even have to finish the sentence and put the question mark at the end before Senator Biden shot across the parking lot and went up to the vehicle. The press corps was following him. The young man was sitting in the back seat. Joe just jumped in the front seat, closed the door, rolled up the window so nobody could hear the conversation, and the press corps gathered around all four sides of the vehicle with their cameras taking pictures of Senator Biden in an extremely animated and somewhat lengthy conversation with the 18-year-old who had just cast his vote. To me, that will always be the quintessential Joe Biden story. Joe Biden is the Irish poet of American politicians. He and I share a passion for the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats, like our Vice President, was not just a poet. He was a man of the public. He was a public official. People asked him to weigh in on political matters all the time. Once, in the middle of the First World War, somebody asked Yeats to write a war poem. He wrote a war poem, and the poem was titled ``On Being Asked for a War Poem.'' The poem says this: I [often] think it better that in times like these A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth . . . He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter's night. The meaning of the poem is this: I may be a public figure. I may have a public job to do. I may be asked to do a public job and to claim upon matters of public importance. But sometimes even more than the matter of public importance is the ability to please a young girl or an old man--or an ill young man casting a first vote, an important vote. The fact that you took your time on that day of importance to you to shed some light and offer some joy to someone who was struggling--that is the Joe Biden who has us here for 2 hours offering these tributes. I yield the floor.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise to talk about the ongoing discussions about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. I basically want to make the case that this repeal, without a replacement being known, would be malpractice for the health care of millions of Americans as well as malpractice for the American economy. Before I talk about why, I just want to tell two stories. On Monday of this week, I visited Neighborhood Health, which is a community health center in Northern Virginia that serves 14,000 patients. It is not a walk-in clinic; they are sort of a medical home for 14,000 low-income Northern Virginians, mostly working people. Community health centers in Virginia, West Virginia, and in every State are a critical part of the health care safety net. In Virginia, they serve about 300,000 patients and millions nationally. They are medicine with a mission. They don't deny anybody primary health care services because of inability to pay, and residents have equal access regardless of where they live, their culture, their gender, their race, or resources. Many centers, including the one I visited just 20 minutes from here, were centers that were able to build or expand because of the Affordable Care Act. Facilities have gotten better in communities across the country because of the Affordable Care Act. That visit made powerfully clear to me how much every ZIP Code in this country has been affected by the Affordable Care Act because of these centers and other services that are provided. The second story is a story from my recently completed, 105-day, unsuccessful venture as part of a national ticket. I was at the Iowa State Fair. A grandfather was carrying a little boy who looked to be about 3\1/2\ years old. I said: Tell me this youngster's name. The grandfather said: This is Jude. Of course, I said: Hey, Jude, and I said: Tell me about Jude. The grandfather and now the father walked over and started to talk to me, and what they said is this: Jude is 3\1/2\ years old and he has already had five open heart operations at the Omaha Children's Hospital, which is just across the river from Western Iowa, in Nebraska. They looked at me and they said he couldn't have had these operations had it not been for the Affordable Care Act. Had it not been for the Affordable Care Act, he now would have exceeded his lifetime limit of any policy he could ever get, and he also would have a preexisting condition because of his heart condition that would render him unable to get insurance for the rest of his life. They looked at me, and--the father especially is a pretty big guy--and they asked: Will you do all you can--will you do all you can to make sure that this act is not repealed? You can strengthen it, you can improve it, but will you do all you can to make sure it is not repealed? I looked at them and I said--because I believed this even before they asked me the question: I will do anything to my last breath to make sure that we improve this but that we don't get rid of it. That is why I stand on the floor today. Since the Affordable Care Act was passed in March of 2010, 20 million Americans have health insurance and many of them for the first time in their life. That is, I think, the combined population of about 14 or 15 States, having health insurance for the first time in their lives. Now, when you have health insurance, it is not only that you can get care for an illness or an accident, even when you are healthy, you can go to bed at night with the knowledge that if something happens to my wife tomorrow, if something happens to me tomorrow, if something happens to my child tomorrow, they will be able to receive care. The percentage in the Nation of people who were uninsured when the Affordable Care Act was passed was 16 percent. One in six Americans was uninsured. Now it is down to 8.6 percent. That is the lowest level of uninsured we have had probably since we have measured it. In Virginia, the drop has been from 13 percent--we were a little better than the national average--and we have dropped down to 9.1 percent uninsured. We are a little higher than the national average now because my State does not accept Medicaid expansion, but the difference in 6 years is 327,000 more Virginians have health insurance in 2015 than had it in 2010. That is a powerful thing. In addition to having health insurance, families are protected because they can't get turned away because of preexisting conditions, they can't get turned away because they have reached lifetime limits in terms of their medical care, as Jude would have reached by age 3\1/2\. Children can stay on family policies until age 26. Women cannot be charged different health care premiums than men. Insurance companies are required to rebate excess premium payments back to consumers if they overcharge. It is not just about the millions who have health insurance who have never had it before, there are also millions and millions more to receive protections they have never had before. These are important provisions. There has been discussion that I have been reading and following that what some want to do is just repeal the Affordable Care Act, with a vague promise that something will happen down the line. Of course, those who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act who voted against it in March of 2010 have had 6 or now nearly 7 years to come up with what they think would be better, and there has been no consensus about what they think would be better. So the notion of we are going to repeal it and don't worry, we will come up with a better alternative, rings pretty hollow to a family like Jude's parents and grandparents who have a three-and-a-half-year-old-boy who needs open heart surgery. The notion that don't worry, we will find a replacement, we will find a fix--I think we could forgive somebody like Jude's family for not having a lot of confidence in that. If, in fact, we are serious about finding a fix, why don't we go to work finding a fix before we pass legislation to repeal the law. I have said I think it is health malpractice and economic malpractice. Let me start with the economic malpractice. The worst thing Congress can do for the economy is to inject uncertainty into it. I have been a mayor and I have been a Governor and I am a certainty fanatic. What I have learned about the economy is that our strong and resilient business sector--if you give them certainty, they can plan. They may not like a policy, they might not like a budget number, but if you tell them this is the way it is going to be, the ingenuity of our private sector is significant. They are going to be able to plan, they are going to be able to make the best of it, they are going to be able to figure it out, but if you provide uncertainty and don't tell people what you are going to do, that is very devastating. I am on the Budget Committee. I came into the Budget Committee in the Senate, and I told me colleagues on both sides of the aisle: I am a certainty fanatic. We should be doing a budget. We shouldn't be doing a continuing resolution right now. We should be doing appropriations bills because when we tell both our own planners in our own departments and also the private economy: This is what it is going to be for the next year, they can figure it out, they can adjust, and they can do well. When we instead deliver a message that we don't know what we are going to do--oh, there will be a fix, but it will be a few years from now, we can't tell you what it is going to be now, and really we can't even promise we will do it since we haven't done it in 6 years--you inject uncertainty into the economy, and that is the worst thing we can do. I have made the argument that the recovery we have been on economically--which is not a robust recovery, but it is a steady recovery--the principal reason it has been steady but not robust is because of uncertainty, and the principal generator of uncertainty in the United States is this body, Congress. Congress's inability to do budget in regular order, Congress's inability to tackle priorities, Congress's inability to work on big picture fiscal issues generates uncertainty. So now we are talking about a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the single largest sector in the American economy. One-sixth of the GDP of this country is health care. If you tell the entire American economy we are going to go into the largest sector in the economy, we are going to repeal it, and don't worry, we will get to something down the road as a replacement, you will inject uncertainty into an economy in a degree that has never been done by this body that I think will have catastrophic economic consequences even beyond health care. It is also malpractice in the health lives of Americans. The Urban Institute has come out with a study today, an update of a study they did a year ago. There was a proposal a year ago to repeal the Affordable Care Act that President Obama vetoed. They did a study about what would repeal mean. This is what repeal means to the American public as we get ready to celebrate the holidays, a time when we are mindful of the needs of others: The number of uninsured people in the United States, if the ACA is repealed, would rise from its current 28.9 million to 58.7 million, an increase of 29.8 million uninsured in this country. The share of nonelderly people without insurance would increase from 11 percent to 21 percent. Of the 29.8 million newly uninsured as a result of the repeal, 22.5 will become uninsured as a result of eliminating premium tax credits, Medicaid expansion, and the individual mandate, and the additional 7.3 million would become uninsured because of the near collapse of the nongroup insurance market, and 82 percent of the new 29 million who will become uninsured are working families, 82 percent; 38 percent would be ages 18 to 34; 56 percent would be non-Hispanic Whites; 80 percent of adults becoming uninsured are adults who do not have college degrees. There will be 12.9 million fewer people with Medicaid or CHIP coverage in 2019 if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, and nearly 9.5 million people who have received tax credits to help them purchase private nongroup health coverage in 2019 will no longer receive that assistance. This is catastrophic to tens of millions of Americans. I will tell a third story that is a story about me. I have to have the healthiest family in the United States, my wife and I and our three children. The only hospitalizations we have ever had, until my wife recently broke a bone, was for three child births. Our kids are 27, 24, and 21. We are the healthiest family in the United States. I was required once to go out right after the Affordable Care Act passed to buy health insurance on the open market. I didn't have an employer who could cover it. Two insurers turned me down because they said: We can't write a policy for your whole family because of a preexisting condition. One insurer turned me down because of something about me, and one insurer turned me down because of something about one of my children. Again, we are the healthiest family there is. We were able to say: Wait a minute. The Affordable Care Act just passed. You are not legally allowed to do that now. You have to write a policy for the whole family. The insurance agent who dealt with us on the phone said: Let me talk to my supervisor, and then called back and said: You know, what. You are right. We have to write you a policy. This is a law that not only provides health insurance to 20 million people who never had it before but for even healthy families like mine provides benefits to protect against some of the worst and most predacious behaviors of insurance companies. If the act is repealed, this all goes away. Americans agree, repeal is not the answer. A Kaiser Foundation poll that was done in the last 2 weeks showed that only 26 percent of Americans support a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Of the other 75 percent, some think it should stay the same, some think it should be tweaked backward a little bit, some think it should be advanced, but only one in four Americans believe we should repeal this law. Overwhelmingly, what the American public is telling us is, we should improve the law. That is what we should be about in this body. When I was the Governor of Virginia, I noticed at the end of every legislative session there would be 1,100 bills on my desk for me to review, sign, veto, or amend. Of the 1,100 bills, pretty much every year 200 or 300 would be new, but 800 would be improvements to existing law. The job of a legislature is more about taking existing laws and reforming and improving it than repealing or doing something brand new. That is what puzzles me. Why aren't we doing that? Clearly, there is no rush. There is no rush because the discussions are, we would repeal the Affordable Care Act with a promise we will find a replacement in 2 or 3 years. So if the notion is we are going to work for 2 or 3 years to find a replacement, there is no rush, and if there is no rush, why aren't we sitting down right now? Instead of repealing the law, why aren't we sitting down right now? Let's sit down around the table, let's talk about what we don't like, let's talk about what we do like, let's talk about what it means to have 20 million people in this country with health insurance, many for the first time in their lives, and what they might think. Let's get the perspectives of hospitals. Let's get the perspectives of insurers, of doctors, and other medical professionals. That is what we should be doing. What is the rush? I fear the rush is for one reason: a desire to do something before this President leaves office that can be a little bit of a poke in his eye, but it is a poke in his eye politically in a way that takes families like Jude's family or the families I saw at the neighborhood health center in Alexandria and puts deep fear and uncertainty in their lives and also puts uncertainty into one-sixth of the American economy. I know we will be having this discussion in earnest, I suspect a little bit over the next couple of days but more when the year begins, just as we are going to be having discussions about Medicare and Medicaid, with 1.3 million Medicare enrollees in Virginia as of 2015. The CHIP and Medicaid Programs in Virginia have an additional 970,000 enrollees. I read dramatic discussions about these programs as well, these basic safety net programs. I will conclude and say there is no reason we shouldn't be able to sit down around the table and talk about improvements. What I might call a reform somebody else could call a replacement. I don't care about the label, but what I do care about is repealing a law that provides millions of people the confidence that they have health care for the first time in their lives, doing it and having the discussion during the holiday season, doing it in a way that will hurt working people, will hurt working people who don't have high school degrees, doing it in a way that will hurt people who are already sick, who are already dealing with illnesses in their families. I am a student of this body. I am not a historian. I am a student of this body, but my prediction would be this: If this body goes down the path of repealing this important law that provides important protections to millions with no idea about what the replacement is, I think it will be a day we will look back on and those who care about this body will look back on, probably in the not-too-distant future, and will say this will be one of the low moments in the history of the United States Senate. There is no need for it because there are people of good will in this body who are willing to sit down and find solutions and find improvements and find reforms, but nobody seems willing to have that discussion. Let's have that discussion rather than the repeal discussion, and we will serve our constituents better. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. We began Operation Inherent Resolve, which is a war against ISIS, on August 7, 2014. President Obama announced at the time that we were engaging in targeted airstrikes against ISIS because of their advance toward Erbil. There is a U.S. consulate in Erbil, and so that was part of the President's inherent powers to defend the Nation-- to protect our consulate. Within a very few weeks, we had completely protected American interests, and President Obama said now is the time to go on offense against ISIS. The President appeared before the American public in a televised speech the evening of September 10, 2014, and said that we had taken care of the imminent threat to the United States but now we needed to go into an offensive war to ``degrade and ultimately destroy the Islamic state.'' And that description of what the mission is has now been broadened, in the words of current Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, to focus on ISIS's lasting defeat. Since the war against ISIS began in August 2014, more than 5,000 members of the U.S. military have served in Operation Inherent Resolve either in Iraq or Syria. Right now, just as an example, from my home State, there is a carrier, the USS Eisenhower--homeported in Norfolk-- that is in the gulf now as part of Operation Inherent Resolve. The U.S. military has launched over 12,600 airstrikes. We are carrying out special forces operations. We are assisting the Iraqi military, Syrians fighting the Islamic State in Syria, as well as the Kurdish Peshmerga in the northern part of Iraq. Because of the work of American troops and those they are working with, we have made major gains against ISIS in northern Iraq. The territory they control in northern Iraq has dramatically shrunk. We have made major gains in shrinking their territory in northern Syria, and that is to be credited to brave folks like CPO Scott Dayton. But the threat posed by the Islamic State continues, and increasingly, as their battle space shrinks in real estate, they undertake efforts off that battleground to try to destabilize us around the world. This fight against ISIL, which is a key--maybe the key--national security priority involving U.S. combat operations in Iraq and Syria, will likely continue for the long foreseeable future, even after the complete liberation of Mosul and Raqqa, which I am confident will occur. The war has cost $10 billion--800 days of operations at an average of $12.6 million a day. I began by honoring Scott Dayton, but Scott Dayton is not the only military member who has lost his life in this war. Five have been killed in combat in total, and 28 American servicemembers have lost their lives supporting Operation Inherent Resolve. As we speak, there are more than 300 special forces now in Syria fighting a very complex battlefield where Turkish, Syrian, Russian, Iranian, Lebanese Hezbollah, and Kurdish forces are operating in close proximity, as evidenced by recent developments and the growing humanitarian catastrophe in Aleppo. I continue to believe--and I will say this in a very personal way as a military dad--that the troops we have deployed overseas deserve to know Congress is behind this mission. As this war has expanded into 2- plus years--I don't know whether that would have been the original expectation--with more and more of our troops risking and losing their lives far from home, I am concerned--and again raise something I have raised often on this floor--that there is a tacit agreement to avoid debating this war in the one place where it ought to be debated--in the Halls of Congress. The President maintains that he can conduct this war without a new authorization from Congress, relying upon an authorization that was passed on September 14, 2001. When the new Congress is sworn in, in early January--I think 80 percent of those Members of Congress were not here when the September 14, 2001, authorization was passed, so the 80 percent of us who were not here in 2001 have never had a meaningful debate or vote regarding this war against ISIL. I have been very critical of this President. I am a supporter of the President. I am a friend of the President. I respect the Office of the President. But I have been very critical of this President for not vigorously attempting to get an authorization done. When the President spoke about the need to go on offense against ISIL in September of 2014, it took him 6 months from the start of hostilities to even deliver to Congress a proposed authorization. I actually think that is the way the system is supposed to work, that the President delivers the proposed authorization. But I have also been harshly critical of the article I branch because regardless of whether the President promptly delivers an authorization, under article I of the Constitution, it is Congress that has the obligation to initiate war. As the current Presiding Officer knows because he is not only a Senator but a historian, the founding documents of this country are so unusual still today in making the initiation of war a legislative rather than Executive function. Madison and the other drafters of the Constitution knew that the history of war was a history of making it about the Executive--the King, the Monarch, the Sultan, the Emperor-- but we decided that we would be different and that war would only be initiated by a vote of the people's elected legislative body and at that point would be conducted by only 1 commander-in-chief, not by 435. We have not had the debate. We have not had the vote. This has been ironic because for 4 years I have been in a Congress that has been very quick to criticize the President for using Executive action. This is an Executive action that most clearly is in the legislative wheelhouse; yet it has been an Executive action that the body--and I am making this as a bipartisan and bicameral comment--has been very willing to allow the President to make. I introduced a resolution for the first time to get Congress to debate and do this job in September of 2014, 2 days after the President spoke to the Nation about the need to take military action against ISIL. That authorization led to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing and a vote in December of 2014 to authorize military action against ISIL, but that committee resolution never received any debate or vote on the Senate floor. In 2015, working together with a Senate colleague from Arizona, Senator Flake, we decided we really needed to show our opposition to ISIL. Our belief that appropriate military force from the United States should be used against them was bipartisan, and so we introduced a bipartisan authorization of military force on June 8, 2015, in an attempt to move forward with some congressional debate on this most important issue. Aside from a few informal discussions in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there has never been a markup, never been a discussion, never been a committee vote or a floor vote. So 2\1/2\ years of war against the Islamic State and 15 years now after the passage of the authorization in September of 2014, we see that authorization has been stretched way beyond what it was intended to do. The authorization of September 14, 2001, was a 60-word authorization giving the President the tools to go after the perpetrators of the attacks of 9/11. ISIL didn't exist on September 11, 2001; it was formed in 2003. President Obama recently announced that the authorization is now going to be expanded to allow use of military action against Al-Shabaab, the African terrorist group--a dangerous terrorist group, to be sure--but Al-Shabaab did not begin until 2007. So an original authorization that was very specific by this body to allow action against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks is now being used all over the globe against organizations that didn't even exist when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Just to give an example, the 2001 authorization has been cited by Presidents Bush and Obama in at least 37 instances to justify sending Armed Forces to 14 nations. Pursuant to the authorization to go after the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, we have authorized military action in the Bush and Obama administrations in Libya, Turkey, Georgia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, and the Philippines, as well as authorizing military activity in Cuba at Guantanamo to maintain detainees. Just in the last week, the New York Times reported that President Obama is expanding the legal scope of the war against Al Qaeda by easing targeting and restrictions against Al-Shabaab, but again this was a group that didn't exist until 2007, 6 years after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. President, I will conclude and say that having been very vocal about this issue for a number of years, it has been disappointing. Although we are all used to not getting our way in all kinds of ways, it has been disappointing to me that we have not been willing to take up this matter. I do think a transition to a new administration and a transition to a new Congress that will be sworn in, in early January always gives you the opportunity to review the status of affairs and make a decision about what to do. I believe it is time for us to review the progress of the war against nonstate terrorist groups--Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, Al-Nusra. It is time for us to review U.S. military action against nonstate terrorist organizations. It is time for us to redraft the 2001 authorization that has been stretched far beyond its original intent. It is time for us to recognize that this is a continuing threat that is not going away anytime soon. But I guess what I will say is most important is that it is time for Congress to reassert its rightful place in this most important set of decisions. Of all the powers we would have as Congress, I can't think of any that are more important than the power to declare war. I view that as the most important, the most difficult, the most challenging, the power we should approach with the most sense of gravity. That is the most important thing we should do. It should never be an easy vote. It should always be a hard vote, but it should be a necessary vote. I think the inability or unwillingness of Congress to grapple with this sends a message that is unfortunate. It sends a message of lack of resolve to allies. It might even send a message of lack of resolve to our adversary. But what I am most concerned about are people like CPO Scott Dayton, people who are serving in a theater of war, who are risking their lives in a theater of war, who have been giving their lives in a theater of war and doing it without the knowledge that Congress supports the mission they are on. As I conclude, Article I and Article II allocation of responsibilities are not just about what is constitutional. I think it reflects a value, and the value is this: We shouldn't order people into harm's way to risk their lives unless there is a political consensus that the mission is worth it. Anyone who volunteers for military service knows it is going to be difficult, and we will not be able to change that. But if we are going to order people into combat and order them to risk their lives--and even if they are not harmed, they may see things happen to colleagues of theirs that could affect them the rest of their lives. If we are going to order them to do that, then there should at least be a national political consensus that the mission is worth it. The way the Constitution sets that up is the President makes a proposal, but then Congress--the people's elected body--votes and says: Yes, the mission is worth it. Now that we have had that vote, now that we have had that debate and we have educated the public about what is at stake, and now that we have said the mission is worth it, it is fair then to ask our 2 million Active-Duty Guard and Reserves--folks like Chief Petty Officer Scott Dayton, folks like my oldest son--to go and risk their lives on a mission like this. But if we are unwilling to have the debate and have the vote, it seems to me to be almost the height of public immorality to force people to risk and give their lives in support of a mission that we are unwilling to discuss. Again, I offer these words in honor of a brave Virginian who lost his life on Thanksgiving Day, November 24. I hope that the growing number of people who are losing their lives in Operation Inherent Resolve may spur this body to take this responsibility with more gravity. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. KAINE

Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise today to honor Naval CPO Scott Dayton, a Virginian who became America's first combat casualty in Syria. Scott was a resident of Woodbridge, VA, here in Northern Virginia. He enlisted in the military in 1993, in the Navy, and had a distinguished 23-year career, finishing his time in one of the most dangerous billets in the military--as a bomb disposal expert. Scott was working in Syria pursuant to Operation Inherent Resolve, and on Thanksgiving day he was killed. He was a 42-year-old Virginian based out of Virginia Beach, but he was killed working to dispose of bombs about 30 miles from Raqqa, Syria, which is one of the two main headquarters of ISIS. Scott Dayton was a decorated sailor in his 23-year military career. He won virtually every award there was, including a Bronze Star--19 different awards and commendations. Because his death occurred over a holiday weekend, there wasn't a lot of attention paid to it, but it was something I really wanted to come to the floor today to talk about because he is the first combat death in Syria of an American servicemember in Operation Inherent Resolve. I wish we were paying more attention to this, and that is what I want to devote the rest of my comments to.

Mr. KAINE

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