James Lankford

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, in the last 40 years, we have had 21 government shutdowns--21. Twenty-one times, Congress and the President have not been able to agree or the Senate and the House have not been able to agree. As a result of that, Federal workers around the country have faced the consequences of Members of Congress not finding agreement. Help me understand this. Twenty-one times in 40 years, Federal workers who get up every single day and serve the American people and serve their neighbors have faced the consequences of furloughs because Members of Congress could not come to a resolution. It is not that it has gone unnoticed. For a decade or more, there have been solutions that have been proposed. Ten years ago, I had a proposal in the House--actually, Rob Portman had a great proposal in the Senate at the same time to deal with government shutdowns. Let's say when we get to the end of the fiscal year, we will just have a continuing resolution, but then we will cut spending every few months to press Congress to get to their work. The problem was, hardly anyone on the other side agreed with that. We couldn't get any bipartisan support for it. So my colleagues on the other side of the aisle proposed that if we get to the end of the fiscal year, we would have a continuing resolution, and every couple of months, the spending would go up, and it would just continue to go up and up and up until it was resolved. Well, they didn't have anyone on my side of the aisle saying ``We are going to put in a mechanism that just increases spending over and over again without congressional involvement,'' so they got no bipartisan support. An idea was floated to just cut the pay of the Members of Congress. But it really wasn't cutting their pay; it was taking their pay and putting it in an escrow account and just kind of holding it for them, and then when everything was resolved, they would get their money back. So it really wasn't a reduction in pay; it was kind a shell game--push those dollars off to another side and get them all back later just to make it look like you got a cut in pay. But that hasn't had wide support either. A lot of people have real concerns about that because, quite frankly, some Members of Congress are very wealthy; some Members are not. Some Members don't notice their congressional pay; some do. It is kind of a disproportionate piece of leverage to resolve this. What is interesting is that all those proposals acknowledged one simple thing: This is a problem. It needs to be resolved. Federal workers are facing the consequences; Members of Congress are not. About 5 months ago, Maggie Hassan and I--this Chamber knows well the Senator from New Hampshire. She and I started working together on a nonpartisan--not just a bipartisan but a nonpartisan--way to stop government shutdowns. We have two very simple proposals. There are two problems here. We need to stop Federal workers from getting hurt when there is a shutdown and make sure those families are not hurt. The second thing is, we want to actually get to appropriations, not continuing resolutions. When do you a continuing resolution for any length of time, like what we are in right now--we are in our eighth week of a continuing resolution right now. When you do one that long, it hurts temporary workers who are Federal workers. They are laid off in the process. Other folks are not. Many of these agencies need those temporary workers, and those temporary workers are counting on that salary. It hurts contracting because everything can't start in a continuing resolution. You have to wait until there are real appropriations before new programs can start. You can't stop old programs. You can't do purchasing. It creates a tremendous inefficiency in government. Our simple idea was this: Let's find a way to protect Federal workers and get to appropriations. The solution we came up with is pretty straightforward. When we get to the end of the fiscal year, which right now is October 1, if appropriations are not done, there will be a continuing resolution that kicks into effect to protect Federal workers, but Members of Congress and our staff and the White House Office of Management and Budget--none of us can travel. Members of Congress will be in continuous session 7 days a week until we get appropriations done. And one more thing: We can't move to any issues other than appropriations. We are locked into that box. Basically, if our work is not done, we all will have to stay until the work is done. I have had folks say that is not really a big consequence. A lot of folks do that all over the country all the time. If at the end of their workday their work is not done, they have to stay until they get it done. Small business owners know that full well. It is not like you can punch a clock. If the work is not done in a small business, you stay until it actually gets done. Here is the thing. Go back to last December. When the shutdown started last December and we got to an impasse here between the House, the Senate, and the White House, Members of Congress and our staff all left and went home. Federal workers across the country all took a big, deep breath as they walked into the holidays because they were on furlough, but Members of this body walked out. That should never happen--never. What Senator Hassan and I are proposing is very simple. The pressure shouldn't be on Federal workers. They can't vote to solve this. The pressure should be on us. For everyone in this body who says, ``I don't like that kind of artificial pressure,'' why don't you feel what it is like to be a Federal worker for a while and those Federal employees? They don't like that pressure on them. So let's flip it. Let's put the pressure on us, where it should be, and get it off the folks, where it should not be, and let's stay until we get our work done. This idea is overly simplistic, but what is interesting is, for the first time in a decade, there is an idea that has bipartisan support. We have multiple Members of this body who are looking at it, contemplating it, and then nodding their heads, saying: I would rather the pressure be on us than on the Federal workers and their families. Let's solve this. We shouldn't have government shutdowns. We should have arguments over debt and deficit. We should have arguments over the budget. That is why people sent us here--to solve how their money is going to be spent most efficiently and argue about issues on debt and deficit. In the meantime, why in the world would we want to hurt the very people who serve their neighbors, those people being the Federal employees around the country? Let's keep them out of it. Let's keep them still serving their neighbors, and let's keep the fight right here where it needs to be. Let's argue this out until we get it resolved, and let's not quit until we resolve it. It is a simple idea that Senator Hassan and I actually believe will work. In the decades to come, people will look back at the time when we used to have government shutdowns and will shake their heads and say: I can't believe there was a period of time during which the Federal government used to shut down when they argued. Now we stay until we get the issue settled. It is a pretty straightforward idea, and I hope that more of my colleagues will join us in this absolute commitment to solving this for future generations. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LANKFORD

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

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, the United States is always grateful to receive heads of State from around the world. Heads of State from around the world come to the United States because they know we are 25 percent of the world's economy. We are the most powerful military in the world. We are the most moral Nation in the world in how we manage freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of opportunity for all people within our country. When we see a problem in our country, we work to address that. So with that, we are welcoming another head of State to the United States today, President Erdogan of Turkey. Turkey has been a long- standing NATO ally. NATO was formed in the late 1940s. Turkey and Greece were the first two countries that came into NATO after its formation in the 1940s. Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952. We have a very important military base based in Turkey, Incirlik Air Force Base. It is key in the war against terror in that entire region. Turkey hosts the largest Syrian refugee population. Turkey has been very engaged in NATO, filling all of its billets and all of its requirements. They have worked to be a good partner. They have partnered with us in not only the War on Terror in multiple different countries in the regions, but they have been very faithful to engage with NATO as a whole. But something is happening in Turkey that I hope President Trump and President Erdogan had a very frank discussion on because since 2016, President Erdogan of Turkey is shifting Turkey away from NATO toward Russia, toward a more authoritative regime, changing their Constitution to give more power to Erdogan and to whoever his successor is--if there is a successor to Erdogan, if he doesn't maintain power and keep it forever from here on out. There was a mayoral election in Istanbul that Erdogan didn't agree with, and so he declared it null and void and forced another election in Istanbul, hoping to get the outlook he wanted, but the Turkish people actually voted even more so against Erdogan in the next election in Istanbul, putting in someone who directly opposed Erdogan and his party. President Erdogan recently imprisoned an American pastor who had served more than 20 years in Turkey, serving people of all faiths and all backgrounds in the beautiful city of Izmir. He rounded up Andrew Brunson with tens of thousands of other people whom President Erdogan and his government considered a threat, and most of them they have been held without charges for years now. There are thousands of people right now who are still awaiting their day in court from the 2016 coup. Not knowing if any of these folks were actually connected to the coup, they rounded up teachers, journalists, law enforcement individuals--just everyone they could round up that they had any suspicion of and imprisoned them and said: We will bring charges to you later. Thousands are still waiting for ``later.'' I happened to be in Turkey in December of 2016 to personally meet with the Ministry of Justice in Ankara to talk about Andrew Brunson, an American swept up in that time period who had nothing to do with the coup that happened in 2016. President Erdogan solely had the ability to get him released but held him for years with all kinds of wild accusations against an American missionary who had been there for decades. Turkey continues to be able to focus on the Kurdish Syrians just south of their border. I have to tell you, there are a group of the Kurds whom I understand President Erdogan should be attentive to. There is a certain group called the PKK. The United States also considers that Kurdish group terrorists and have for decades. That particular group of Kurds who are in Syria have traveled into Turkey and carried out car bombs and have killed hundreds of people in terrorist attacks in Turkey. President Erdogan has every reason to pay attention to that particular group of Kurds, and I understand his frustration that the United States partnered with them to take out ISIS, but the fact was, Turkey would not come across the border to help us take out ISIS, and so we found partners who would take on ISIS with us--and they did. Now Erdogan wants to push those folks back. His methods are quite brutal in the process. When we went into Afghanistan, we understood that all Afghan people were not our enemy--the Taliban was, al-Qaida was. That was our enemy, and they found their way among the populations. We were exceptionally careful when we went into Afghanistan to protect the Afghan people, yet find ways to take the battles to the Taliban and to al-Qaida. Erdogan's methods were to come across the border with tanks and heavy artillery and start shelling cities in Syria, knowing there were some PKK in those villages, and so they just shelled them all. Erdogan and some of his thugs also came across with some of the other groups who were working with the Turks. We also have footage of them taking prisoners and shooting them beside the road and leaving their bodies there. These people had already surrendered. They were people who had already been handcuffed, and they executed them beside the road. That is a war crime that we should follow up with, and I hope President Trump had a very frank conversation with President Erdogan about following up on war crimes. Just to add to all of our difficulties right now with President Erdogan, in the past couple of years, he has shifted his attention toward Russia and has now completed a purchase of a Russian air defense system. They are the very first and only NATO country ever to purchase Russian military equipment. That equipment is not interoperable with the rest of NATO. This is Russian equipment that is specifically designed to take the fight to the F-35. Turkey believes it is going to purchase the F-35 from the United States, and they also believe they can purchase the S-400 from Russia and have them side by side. Well, they are wrong. Years ago, Congress passed the Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, commonly known as CAATSA. It was a very clear message to anyone who buys Russian military equipment that there are sanctions coming to your country, and it is clear. We have applied those sanctions in the past, and those sanctions need to be applied to Turkey now. In addition to that, Senator Shaheen and I have partnered together to pass a bill to block Turkey from taking any of the F-35s--not trained in the equipment, not simulators, no F-35s can go to Turkey. If they are interested in buying Russian air defense systems, they understand clearly what that means because we have made it clear to the Turks for 2 years now: If you buy Russian equipment, you cannot also have the F- 35. President Erdogan was aware of that. His administration was aware of that, and I hope President Trump made it clear to him today, as clear as this Congress has made it clear, on a bipartisan basis, that Turkey cannot have the F-35 and also have Russian military equipment at the same time. That is incompatible. We will continue to make that very clear in the days ahead in our legislation, and I believe a vote will not even be close to send a message to Turkey that we are interested in maintaining our friendship and our NATO ally, but our NATO ally needs to make a decision if they are a NATO ally or if they are a Russian ally because those two are not congruent. I hope that was the conversation that happened today. We will find out in the days ahead, but even if it was not, I hope President Erdogan and the Turkish Embassy hears it clearly now. This Congress would look forward to partnering with Turkey again in the future, as we have for decades in the past. We have had an economic relationship, a military relationship, and a genuine friendship with Turkey, but we do not know who Turkey is anymore. We don't recognize the Turkey of today from Turkey 5 years ago. We would never come to your country and beat up protesters in the street as President Erdogan's security thugs did last year in the United States. We would never do that to your country. We would never counter NATO just to spite you, and we would certainly stay aligned with a friend who has been a friend for decades. To the Turkish people, our beef is not with you. Our frustration is with the regime that is currently directing your country away from its traditional allies. We continue to reach our hand out to the Turkish people, and we continue to say to President Erdogan: This can be different in the days ahead, as it has been in the past, but some things need to change, and we are not the ones who walked away. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, at the end of World War I--the supposed war to end all wars; we all wish that it did--in the 11th hour, in the 11th month on the 11th day, we declared armistice. The war was over. Armistice Day is still recognized, but it is now called Veterans Day. This coming Monday, on 11/11, as we always do on the 11th day of the 11th month, we will pause as a nation and say thank you to the men and women who serve us in the U.S. military. It is the most moral and the most lethal fighting force the world has ever known, and we are grateful. To the men and women who make up our veterans, those serving Actively, those serving in the Reserves, those serving in our National Guard, and those who have served both at home and abroad, we are grateful for their service. It has been an absolute privilege to serve our veterans in Oklahoma. There are members of my own family, like my Uncle Robby, who is a marine, and my next-door neighbor, who is in the National Guard. Scattered throughout my family and throughout my own neighborhood, I have a chance to smile and say thank you to folks on a regular basis for what they have done in the past and what they continue to do right now. Over the past several sessions of Congress, we have worked to help our veterans and to help those who are serving currently. We have passed legislation like the VA MISSION Act, which dramatically increases veterans' care and gives veterans the opportunity to go to different places in order to get care. Now they don't have to drive across my great State to get to a VA center. They can go somewhere closer to home, where it is more convenient for them, rather than go to a VA center. That is a great asset to them and to their families, who have sacrificed over and over again so that their loved ones can serve. They shouldn't have to sacrifice even more now. This Congress has made major improvements to and has expanded the GI bill. We have improved the onerous disability compensation and appeals process for the VA, which has long been an issue. We have increased the quality of care at the VA, and we have made sure that staff members who work at our VA centers are held to account. By far, the majority of people who serve in our VA centers serve on behalf of our veterans and are passionate and grateful to do that. Yet, for some who cannot get the job done, we shouldn't give our veterans lesser care because of those individuals. Those are all of the things that have been done just to say thank you. Yet it is interesting to me, the number of times I have talked to veterans and have said ``thank you for your service,'' and they have responded with something like ``it is the least I could do'' or ``absolutely'' or ``no thanks necessary'' or ``it was my honor to do it.'' This is a group of individuals who knows what it means to serve. We will continue to say thanks to them. On this Veterans Day, I will pause with a family at a bridge in Oklahoma as the name of the bridge transitions to the Damon Leehan Bridge in remembrance of an Oklahoman who, in 2011, died in Afghanistan while protecting our freedom. Our veterans don't ask for our thanks, but we can't give them thanks enough for what they and their families have done to keep this great Nation secure. Thank you to our veterans. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, a couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege to stand at Iron Horse Industrial Park. It is a brand-new industrial park just outside of Shawnee, OK. It is run by the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and for almost 10 years, they have had the dream of opening up a location in Oklahoma, where there could be foreign trade; different countries could come in to do manufacturing there, and they would be able to work through raw materials and products and sales. It has been a remarkable dream for them. I stood on a platform with the leadership of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, members of the Shawnee community, sitting right next to folks from the Canadian Consulate and a Canadian business owner who is opening up a manufacturing plant in just a couple of months, right there on that spot, to be the first company in that location to start doing international trade in that part of Oklahoma. That location of Pro-Pipe will start manufacturing pipe that they will send all over the place. It is a Canadian company, but it will have about 40 or 45 jobs that are Oklahoma jobs that are there. Now, why do I mention that? I mention that because it was a reminder--again, as I sat on that platform next to Canadians, the Japanese delegation that was there, the Taiwanese delegation that was there, and others from multiple other countries--about how integrated we really are. If I took you to Shawnee, OK, there are some great people--and it is a fantastic community--the first thing you would think of probably wouldn't be international trade, but it should be now. In Oklahoma, our top two trading partners are Canada and Mexico. We have an overwhelming amount of trade just with those two countries. In fact, we exported $2.4 billion worth of goods just to Canada and Mexico last year. We are a very connected economy, and working through the trade issues is incredibly important to us. That is why this new trade agreement that replaces NAFTA, which is now decades old and needs a revision, is so important, because our Oklahoma economy depends a lot on how we trade. A lot of our jobs are connected through agriculture, manufacturing, digital sales, other financial services that are connected through trade to Canada and Mexico. They cooperate with us; we cooperate with them. So a new trade agreement started in the negotiation process. It started in August of 2017. The Trump administration, the administration in Mexico and in Canada all sat down and decided to reopen NAFTA after the Trump administration put tremendous pressure on Canada and Mexico to update this agreement. Initially, everyone said they didn't want to change a thing, and from August 2017 until September of 2018, our three countries negotiated a new trade agreement that all three countries now have come back in their leadership and said: That is a better deal than what NAFTA was. That works better for everyone. It provides new elements on things like digital trade that wasn't an issue in the 1990s. E-commerce wasn't a thing at the time; now, it is. So there are digital trade updates. There are also areas about innovation and intellectual property that help protect inventors in all three countries to protect what they have invented and to make sure the benefits come back to those inventors and back to those countries. There are also new protections for labor. There have been longstanding issues in labor practices in Mexico. This addresses some of those things and some basic human rights elements for Mexico. It also adds new environmental requirements so that we would take on as a whole of North America in the way we do manufacturing, the way we do fishing, the way that we handle marine litter, the way that we handle sustainable forest management, all of those things would be addressed in this trade agreement. It is a very comprehensive agreement--the USMCA agreement--and it is very important that we actually get it passed. I hope you didn't miss the timeline that I laid out. The negotiation started in August of 2017. The negotiation finished in September of 2018. Since October of 2018, that agreement has been waiting on a vote in the House of Representatives. Mexico has already long since passed it. They have not only passed the agreement, they have passed the laws doing the implementing language. They have long since passed it. Everyone is waiting for the United States to pass this trade agreement that will help us in labor issues, help us in manufacturing, help us in ag exports, help us in our digital trade, help us in environmental policy. We are all waiting on the House of Representatives to take it up. We are now past a year that the House has had this. It has to start, constitutionally, in the House, and I cannot say strongly enough how important this is to be able to maintain our momentum in trade with Canada and Mexico that we should not have to wait. Now, some in the House say this is about not giving President Trump a win, so they don't want to vote on it because it will give President Trump a win. This is not about the President of a country. In fact, Mexico has already changed Presidents since the time of this agreement. This is about giving the American people a win. This is, quite frankly, to be selfish, about the people of Oklahoma getting a win. It is additional jobs, it is additional protections, it is additional opportunities to do investment that we would like to be able to see for my State and for the people of my State, so I can't encourage enough the House to take this up. I do want to also compliment the administration for taking this agreement on. Three years ago, no one thought this agreement could be done nor should be done, and now, when it is in the process of being finalized, everyone seems to be nodding their head, saying: That is better. Let's keep going. The administration has also recently struck a deal with Japan. Japan is a trade partner already, just like Canada and Mexico, but we have had some problems with Japan. The United States exported $14 billion in food and agricultural products to Japan just in 2018--$14 billion. But out of that $14 billion, right at half, $7.2 billion of those had a need to address some of the issues about tariffs and about some additional protections. So this new trade agreement that the administration just struck with Japan is exceptionally helpful to us. It takes out half of the tariffs--either reduces them or eliminates them entirely--of our ag trade back and forth with Japan. Why is that a big deal for Oklahoma? You may say Oklahoma is a long way from Japan. It is, except we ship a lot of beef that way, and we could ship a lot more. This agreement specifically deals with things like beef, pork, poultry, sorghum, wheat. Those are products that are all coming right out of my State, and it is exceptionally important that this agreement has been done. Now, this agreement doesn't have to come through Congress. It is an executive agreement. It is not like the USMCA. It is done. So we have already seen a gain in Oklahoma based on that trade agreement in Japan. The encouragement I can make to the administration is: Keep doing this. We have further negotiations we need to have completed in the Pacific. While they have done step one with Japan, there is more to be done with Japan on lowering other tariffs, but we would also like to see a trade agreement with New Zealand. We would also like to see a trade agreement with other partners in the Pacific where we still need trade deals done. Keep going, and keep expanding markets. The big issue right now is with China. Our trade issues with China have been significant. They have been significant for decades. The last five Presidents have all tried to deal with some of the problems with China and trade, their theft of intellectual property, their violations of basic dignity for their workers. The environmental policies they have in China has been deplorable. We should address the issues of trade with China, and we should address how we can further not only cooperate but deal with some of the inequities of workers and deal with some of the inequities of environmental policy and certainly deal with the theft of intellectual property. As China is one of the worst human rights violators in the world, in our trade negotiations, we should talk about things like free press, freedom of religion, and opportunities for the Uighurs, who are literally bound up in concentration camps being reeducated to be more Chinese rather than being able to live out their faith as Muslims there in China. There are many issues we need to deal with that go beyond just dollars. It is how we actually interact with each other. So for the administration, as they are finalizing the final moments of how they are going to deal with a trade deal with China, I continue to encourage them to keep doing the work. The last five Presidents have all tried to resolve issues with China. Keep going. We have to be able to get this done, but hold China to account on human rights issues, while we are also dealing with economic issues. This is our moment to address those critical needs. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I encourage my colleagues to pass this amendment that has been called up and that we are going to vote for here in just a few moments. Senator Cortez Masto and I worked together on this. She has been the lead on this whole issue. I am proud to cosponsor it with her. This is a basic study of how we can make sure that the food benefits the USDA is choosing to provide and that together we are providing as Federal taxpayers to Indian reservations is actually getting to people who need it the most. At this point, the USDA program is set up so that people have to come to a central distribution area to get access to food. Many elderly and disabled cannot go to a central distribution area to get access to food. If we are going to have a food program like this, let's make sure we are actually getting food to where people need it the most. There are other programs that are in the Federal program right now, like Meals on Wheels and other programs that are designated, where we can partner with groups to make sure food gets there, but there are other programs, like this program, the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, that may not be getting to where food is needed the most for the most number of people. I think other programs will need a study like this as well. We have other child nutrition programs, for instance, that happen in the summertime, where children, just as in this program set up on Indian reservations, have to come to a central location to get access to food. Many children don't have the ability to get transportation to get food. So those individuals and those families who need the most help are facing yet another hurdle to get help. This is a study, and I think it is the first step to make sure that what we do is done well, is done efficiently, and that the intended outcome to help people is accurately occurring. I thank Senator Cortez Masto for stepping up and for her leadership for this. I am proud to be a cosponsor with her. I look forward to our colleagues voting for this, getting the results of this study, and actually making sure that in the days ahead, food assistance is getting to places where people need it the most. With that, I yield back.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, let me take you back to December 2016. We are all getting ready for Christmas. It is a month after President Trump is elected. He will not take his office for another month after that, but in Turkey they are reeling from a coup attempt that happened in October. Hundreds of people were killed--chaos. Turkish President Erdogan overreacted, locking up hundreds of thousands of people, including one of our pastors, Pastor Andrew Brunson, and implementing martial law, which was kept in place for years after that. Rapidly changing the Constitution, he has transitioned himself from a President duly elected and operating a free democracy that has been Turkey to radically changing the direction of the country in the future. A long- term NATO ally is going through real turmoil. In October that coup happened, and all the transition was occurring, but by December, as I mentioned before, they were rocked again. On December 17, 2016, a bus was stopped at a red light near a campus in Turkey when a car bomb exploded, killing members of the Turkish military. Thirteen people were killed and 55 were wounded in that blast. Forty-eight of those killed and wounded were off-duty military personnel, most of them privates and corporals. The same day, at another location in a different part of that community, still in Turkey, there was a soccer stadium attack that happened. In that attack, 44 people died and more than 150 people were wounded. Three days later--actually two days after that, December 19, 2016, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey was assassinated in Ankara while he was giving a public speech. Most Americans don't know this because we were getting ready for Christmas, and we were watching the transition of President Obama to President Trump. There was a lot of chaos that was happening in that region at that time. I happened to be in Turkey when all of that was going on, meeting with Turkish officials, trying to negotiate for the release of Andrew Brunson, working toward our ongoing relationship and trying to figure out what direction Turkey was going to go because they have been a longstanding ally to the United States and a NATO partner, but they certainly were not acting like it in 2016, and now, in 2019, they are certainly not acting like it. The car bombs I mentioned and the terrorist actions that happened might surprise some Americans to know weren't led by ISIS fighters fighting in Turkey. The innocents who were killed that day were killed by Kurdish terrorists--Kurdish folks who had been listed in the U.S. listing of official terrorist organizations, a group called the Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK--the abbreviation in that language. The PKK has been listed as a terror organization by the United States for decades. Let me give some context. In the course of the dialogue I have heard in the last couple of weeks about the Kurds and about the Turks, everyone wants to seem to oversimplify this issue. Everyone wants to say who are the good guys and the bad guys, and they are missing the point in the history of what is happening in this region. The Kurds have 25 million people. It is the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East. They live mostly in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Armenia. They have all different political parties, and they have all different backgrounds. For over a century, they have worked to have their own nation. Interestingly enough, after World War I and all of the changes on the map after World War I, the Kurds were promised their own country, the country of Kurdistan, because they were a minority population for a long time in that region. So they worked for and pressed for their own country during that time period. Yet, when the boundaries were drawn at the end of World War I, after they had been promised that they would have their homeland, instead, a larger Turkey was drawn, and the Kurds were just listed as a minority group inside of Turkey. They face incredible persecution within Turkey. They are not allowed to call themselves Kurds. Instead, they are called mountain Turks in that area. They are not allowed to wear certain garb, and they are not allowed to practice their customs. They are oppressed in every area. They have worked for a long time and have asked: How can we have a free people's area? For the Kurds who live in northern Iraq, it is one of the freest areas in all of the Middle East. They have the freedom of religion and a free capitalist economy. It is a thriving economy in northern Iraq. They have democratically led elections, and they worked with us to overthrow Saddam Hussein after Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds to death in that Kurdish region of Iraq. They were gassed by Saddam Hussein. They have been forced out of their homes and have been isolated, and for decades, they have worked to have a free country. In 2017, the Kurds who were in northern Iraq had their own referendum to be able to establish their own place. They made a bold move and said: The world will not acknowledge us; so we will acknowledge ourselves. So, in a bold referendum in September of 2017, 90 percent of the Kurds voted to form their own country out of northern Iraq. Quickly, the Iraqi Government moved into that zone and squashed them. In the middle of the conflict that we have talked about before with ISIS, ISIS moved into areas in Syria and in Iraq and pressed in against the Kurds in order to attack them. When the Kurds were not able to establish their homeland, ISIS was determined to establish its own caliphate and its own land by beheading people and by murdering thousands of people. As they moved into the Kurdish area, the Turks on the other side of the border simply watched the refugees flee across the border, for ISIS was not killing Turks. It was killing Kurds, and they didn't care. The Turks would handle the refugees as long as ISIS was doing their bidding in Syria. You see, this is a complicated issue for us because there are sections of the Kurds that have fought for democracy for decades. Many of them have been doing it in exactly the right way--in having referendums, in organizing and working with U.N. officials, and in working with the countries around them to demographically establish an area in which they would be free to live and to worship and to function in a capitalist economy. That has been the Kurds' desire. There has also been an offshoot of the Kurds, called the PKK, that has for decades carried out car bombs and attacks, many of them in Turkey, where hundreds of civilians have been killed. President Erdogan, of Turkey, has determined that all Kurds are the same and has ruthlessly lashed out at them. Now, I think about how we operated in Afghanistan and how differently the United States really thought about military warfare. As the Taliban and al-Qaida rose up in Afghanistan, we engaged in the most Surgical way we possibly could with violent Taliban members and with members of al-Qaida and took the battle specifically to them while we established a friendship and a longstanding partnership with the Afghan people. We don't look at all Afghans in the same way, in some blanket declaration. We understand that there is a violent faction that has to be addressed for world peace and that there are others who just want their children to grow up and go to school. We have engaged them in a way that is very different than how Turkey is currently engaging them in the Turkish population. As the battle raged in Syria and finished out with the civil war in Syria and the fight with ISIS off the Kurdish areas, everyone knew, when this calmed down, that at some future date, the Turks would start going after the Kurds. It has been known for years. In fact, in 2016, when I was in Ankara, Turkey, at that point in December, and watched all of this chaos occur, that was the ongoing dialogue among Turkish leaders at that time--that they were going to go after the Kurds. Over and over, this has been the repetitive statement to the administration and, quite frankly, to the previous administration. In a series of phone calls in which President Erdogan talked to President Trump and said, ``We are crossing the border and going in,'' it left President Trump in a very difficult situation. Does he leave our American men and women--a very small number--in a forward operating base to sit there while tanks roll by and the battle rages between the Kurds and the Turks? Do we use them as some kind of tool to try to stop this? Do we get out of harm's way? Secretary Esper just made a statement last weekend that was very clear: The Turks didn't ask permission to cross the border. They said, ``We are coming,'' and notified us in advance so that if we wanted to move out of the way, we could, but either way, they were coming. We have moved our forces into other areas and combined them into bases. Just recently, within the last couple of days, when the Turks started getting closer to our combined forces in northern Syria, we responded by putting up Apache helicopters and F-16s in order to fly by the Turks and say: Don't you dare come near American forces. At the same time, we are trying to do everything that we can and should in order to stop the bloodshed between two allies. I have been amazed at the number of people who have stepped up and said that President Trump is to blame for all that is happening with the Kurdish people and the Turks. They have ignored the basic history of what has happened in that region for a very long time--for over a century--with regard to the ongoing battle between the Kurds and the Turks. We should do everything we can to push back on this, because, for a large group of the Kurdish population, especially those in northern Iraq, they have been very close allies and friends and tenacious fighters against Saddam Hussein. They left their own place of safety in northern Iraq to help us fight the fight in Syria--to protect other Kurdish people, yes, but also to help protect the entire world from the ruthless nature of ISIS. We should engage and do what we can to help stop the bloodshed. As I mentioned before, when we moved into Afghanistan, we did it as surgically as we could. When Turkey moved into the Kurdish regions, it unleashed artillery fire against civilians and pummeled homes and businesses in the Kurdish towns of people who meant them no harm as they crossed the border into Syria. So what do we do? How do we respond in the days ahead? There are a few things I would bring up. One is the ``what I wish.'' I wish the administration had been more clear with Turkey and her leaders and would have said: If you do this, it is not that we will impose sanctions, but here is exactly what the sanctions will be. We need you to know it, and it is going to happen as rapidly as possible. I wish that we would have moved all of the ISIS fighters out of the region. There are ISIS fighters who are currently imprisoned in northern Syria who are waiting to return back to their home countries, for many of them are foreign fighters from other places. Yet their home countries are not willing to take them back. So they are currently imprisoned in Syria. I wish, before the Turks crossed the border, that we would have done more to help to protect those prisoners and make sure they didn't get freed. Many of them did get freed, and the entire region will suffer the consequences of some very bad actors who will get back to the battlefield again because of that. I wish there had actually been coordination. Clearly, the administration did not coordinate with the State Department, the Department of Defense, and with other Kurdish leaders with regard to what was happening in the region and did not make sure we were securing those fighters and preparing for that moment. Instead, it was a rapid transition and a hurried process to move Americans out of harm's way in between two allies who were fighting each other and to try to shift them to other places and be able to stabilize them in those locations. There have been a lot of hurried responses that could have been done differently but were not. The ``now whats'' are pretty clear, though. President Trump has launched out and stated very clearly that there will be strong sanctions against military leaders within the Turkish Army and the key leaders in the government. He will try to put sanctions down as rapidly as possible on those individuals. He has also announced a 50-percent steel tariff on Turkey. You may say that it is no big deal, except for the fact that steel is a major export for Turkey, and it is a punishing tariff on it as a country. He has also started laying down additional sanctions on Turkey and has said all of the trade agreements and conversations are currently at a standstill. Turkey's economy is on the razor's edge because Erdogan has so mismanaged its economy for so many years. We have no beef with the Turkish people, but, currently, Turkey is being led by a leader who is leading their country into economic ruin and leading their military across foreign borders to haphazardly kill civilians. We should not tolerate that, and we should engage. We should make it very clear that there will be consequences. We should work with the U.N., as we already have started, and be more aggressive, by which, if there is someone to stand between two warring parties, it will be the U.N. peacekeepers who will do that, not American men and women who are sitting out there in a forward operating base. We should continue to sanction Turkish banks--those banks that did business with Iran. When Iran was sanctioned, Turkey continued to do business with some of those banks. We should increase our sanctions there. We should be extremely clear that Turkey will not get access to the F-35s. I cannot imagine how much stronger the response of the American people would be right now if it were American F-35s that were flying across the Syria-Turkey border to bomb our own allies the Kurds. We should make it very clear that there is no foreign military sales to Turkey, and we should continue to cut them off. We have to be clear in the consequences. We have to be rapid in the response because, right now, people are dying in northern Syria. Those same families and those same individuals put their own lives on the line to stand up against ISIS, and they stood with us in multiple areas. They have a great propensity toward freedom and toward democracy, which desperately need to grow in the Middle East. The chaos that is ensuing is the chaos of war. It is the pain of over a century of the mismanagement of this entire region. We need to stop the bloodshed first and continue to negotiate with every possible lever that we can to make sure we can bring a sense of calm to the chaos that is starting and do so with the greatest pressure on the Turks and on President Erdogan, who clearly hasn't gotten the message yet as to what the will of the American people and this Congress really involves. This is a changing situation. It is not simple, but it is one about which I will come back and try to inform in every way that I can. In order to bring justice to the process, I will encourage this body to smartly and quickly engage, to help impress upon the Turks to back off the bloodshed, and to bring war crimes against any Turk or any individual we can identify who is killing prisoners and attacking civilians. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, the Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations just finished a major research project. I happen to sit on that committee led by Rob Portman. He has done a phenomenal job of trying to pull all the information together to study government shutdowns. Government shutdowns are not new to us. We hear about them a lot lately, but in the last 40 years, we have had 21 government shutdowns-- 21. We have seen this issue over and over again; that when we get to a point of contention and argument, we end up shutting the government down to be able to resolve it. So the point of discussion is not just here in DC; it is all over the country. The question is, How does that really affect the country and how does that affect the U.S. Government? The basic study PSI did to go back and look at this was they found that the Federal workforce in the last shutdown lost 57,000 years of productivity, if you spread out all the Federal workers who were furloughed, the time they were furloughed, and the time that was lost. The total economy lost about $11 billion in productivity during that time period, and the Federal taxpayer lost right at $4 billion in lost money that is just gone. The cost of shutting the government down, the cost of reopening, the cost of pay during the furlough time periods when there weren't actually people there--$4 billion lost to the taxpayer. Yet we will probably have another one at some point and probably have another one, and it seems they just keep coming--21 of these in the last 40 years. There is a group of us who have continued to push this. Rob Portman has done it for years, several others of us have worked on other projects to try to figure out how do we resolve this issue of government shutdowns. Maggie Hassan, a Democratic colleague from New Hampshire, and I a year ago started talking through how we could get to a bipartisan solution to end government shutdowns. We have a very unique proposal to go with this. It is a proposal that is not trying to be novel; it is not trying to be cute. It is trying to solve the problem. Our issue is that we have very serious differences when we get to budget areas. It is $1 trillion in total spending that we are talking about when we do the 12 appropriations bills. It is no small argument. But we should be able to resolve these things in a way that actually works and is effective. So here is our basic idea. The process works, supposedly, where you do a budget that determines an overarching number that everyone agrees to. This is what is called the top-line number. Then you take that top-line number in the House and the Senate in their Appropriations Committees. It gets broken up into 12 smaller bills. Those are called the appropriations bills. Those 12 bills all have to be passed by the House, by the Senate, and then they have to conference them together and get that finished by the end of the fiscal year. It sounds like a good theory. That was the plan, at least, that was made in 1974, when this was designed. But the plan that I just laid out has worked only four times since 1974. So if you think every year that the budget process didn't work again, you are correct. It didn't work again. It has worked only four times since 1974. What Maggie Hassan and I would like to insert into this process is the ability to have serious, hard debate on difficult financial issues where we have disagreements but contain the fight to Washington, DC, to do two things: Make sure that we get to the appropriations process, that it is done well, and to hold the Federal workers and Federal families and the rest of the country harmless as we argue through this. Here is the simple idea: If we get to the end of the fiscal year, if we do not have any 1 of those 12 appropriations bills done--and we should have all 12 of them done. But if even one is undone when we get to the end of the fiscal year, there is a continuation of spending exactly as it was the year before. It just continues to run the same as it was the year before so that Federal agencies, Federal workers will continue to operate as they normally do. But because there is not an appropriations bill done for the next year, while Federal workers are being held harmless and agencies are being held harmless, Members of Congress and our staffs and the Office of Management and Budget of the White House would lose all travel ability. We would have no official travel ability at all. We couldn't go home and see our families, couldn't travel on codels, couldn't do other responsibilities. We would be here in Washington and be in session in the House and the Senate every day of the week, weekdays and weekends included. It is literally the equivalent of when my brother and I would get into an argument when we were kids, which clearly didn't happen often. But when it did happen, my mom would say to my brother and me: The two of you go into one of your rooms. Work this out. When you get it worked out, you can come out. That would basically put Washington, DC, inside the box. The rest of the country is not in it, but Washington, DC, would have to stay here, and we would have to work out our differences. When it is worked out, then we pass appropriations bills. The other feature that is added to it is that we can't move on to other things. We couldn't get distracted and say that we are just not going to do appropriations bills and then just stay here and do other things. We would have to do appropriations bills during that time period. This is a simple idea, though most people I have talked to have said: That is too simple. That would never work. As I have talked to my colleagues in the House and the Senate, just about all of them have cringed when I have said that we are going to be here weekdays and weekends and keep going on one topic until we finish that one topic. It is our constitutional responsibility to take care of the American people's tax dollars and to make sure it is done correctly. We can move on to other things when we fulfill our constitutional responsibility on that. Just about everyone I have talked to has said: That is an idea that I could vote for, that I can support. I bring it up to this body to tell people that we are still negotiating the final language of this bill. If there is an idea that people have to say ``I have one thing to ask about it,'' bring it. If you have one thing to suggest to change it, bring it. But in the next few weeks, before we get to the November 21 deadline, which is the new deadline now for spending--before we get to that spot, I want this issue resolved. I want government shutdowns off the table. I never want to see on any of the news channels ever again the countdown clock to when the government shuts down. That hurts the American people; it hurts American companies; and it certainly hurts the Federal families who go on furlough during that time period. Let's stay in the ring, boxing it out, and let's hold everyone else harmless as we go through the process. I encourage my colleagues to bring their ideas, and let's get this resolved in the next few weeks. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session and be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for 10 minutes each.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I move to proceed to executive session to consider Calendar No. 417.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I send a cloture motion to the desk.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Thursday, September 19; further, that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, morning business be closed, and the Senate proceed to executive session and resume consideration of the McGuire nomination.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, on September 17, 1787, this great experiment was finalized to try to form what they considered a more perfect Union, and the birth of our Constitution happened. This was a radical experiment in self-government, and most of the rest of the world at the time stared at those whom we now call our Founding Fathers and thought, that will never work. It wasn't a parliamentary system. It wasn't a monarchy. It was a representative republic, and it was pulling something out of the thoughts and the hearts of people to say: This is inherently what we think would work. It began with the simple concept of checks and balances--that one person would check another person who would check another person. They were able to put that into a governmental structure that had three coequal branches--an executive, a legislative, and judicial branch--so that we don't have one over the other. The three stand on equal footing. Each of them watches the other. It was a unique system of putting a legislative branch together that had one body made up of the House of Representatives that would be large, boisterous, and up for election every two years. The most painful parts of government--that are required of government--are put into the hands of the people who are closest to the people. Those are the power of impeachment, the power of the purse, and the power of things that need to be done by government but can be done only by people who are closest to the government. Then they were able to create a Senate with longer terms, closer to the States, and a larger perspective on how we would structure together to make sure that we protect the rights of the individual States and the uniqueness of, at that time, those 13 States all joining together. It was a radical idea and a complete shift from where we had just been. As Americans, occasionally we forget that this wasn't our first time to try to put a government together. Prior to 1787, we had Articles of Confederation that basically had 13 different States that were very loosely connected to each other, that continued to spar with each other, and that didn't cooperate together. Eventually, they determined that we had to do something different. After our practice round of the Articles of Confederation, we put together this Constitution. But even after the Constitution was put into place, when the very first Congress came into session, they immediately began work on 12 amendments that, at that time, they called the Bill of Rights. That is right; there were 12 amendments. We are so used to hearing about the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights, but they started with 12. They debated and they edited and they worked it through, and those 12 ended up becoming 10. Those 10 amendments were added as our Bill of Rights, but we continue to be able to edit and to be able to work together as a country. Eventually, we fought a civil war--one of the most tragic parts of the entire history of our Nation. Yet this Constitution still kept us together at the end, and we still function together. Since the original 10 Bill of Rights, we have added 17 different amendments to the Constitution. This enduring document, after more than two centuries, continues to be the foundation of every single law in the United States. It is unlike many parts of the world even still today. In much of the world, they change constitutions every time their Monarch changes. They change constitutions every time their government changes. And when an executive branch decides they don't particularly like what is happening in the legislative branch, they just demand a new constitution and shift the laws of the entire country. We don't. We started with a Constitution and started with the simple principle that the law matters. We continue to build on that basic law. When our preferences change, the law still exceeds our preferences. And if there is a change that we need to make in law, we agree together to make a change in law. We still continue to respect the uniqueness of, now, all 50 States and of local authorities. We still have counties and cities and parishes and municipalities. They oversee school boards. They make day- to-day decisions. They provide local first responders, garbage collection, recycling, public transportation, parks and recreation. They manage utilities. They decide street names, deal with local roads, street signs, and zoning laws. It is all done locally; it is not done federally. The Federal Government has nothing to do with that. Then, larger than the local municipalities, we have the States. They establish local governments. They establish public schools, issue teaching certificates, and licenses for professionals like doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists--as many types of professions as they choose. They decide the time, manner, and places of elections because those are the responsibilities of the States. They determine motor vehicle registrations, driver's licenses, marriage licenses, business licenses. They regulate commerce within their State. Our simple system is not only broken up into three different branches of government, but it is also broken up into local governments, State governments, and unique responsibilities for the Federal Government. That begins with our national defense, which is uniquely a role that we can do together as a Federal Government. Then there are interstate commerce and managing treaties with foreign entities. It is the responsibility of the larger government. This unique experiment that was radical in its day is still the envy of the world to this day, and there is a reason we pause each year in September and remember Constitution Day. I think about how often we celebrate the Declaration of Independence every Fourth of July and think about Thomas Jefferson--his writing and all of the editing that then happened with his document after he wrote it. We sometimes lose track of a day in September when we can pause and think of that second document in our founding after the Declaration-- the U.S. Constitution--that remains the foundation of every law that we still continue with today. We could not be more grateful for a stable foundation for our Nation. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I know of no further debate on the motion.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, 18 years ago today, in my office in Oklahoma City, a fellow staff member poked her head into the office and said to me: There is a freak accident that has happened in New York. A plane flew into the World Trade Center. She went down the hallway and pulled in a rolling cart--the younger generation will have no idea what that is--but a rolling cart with a TV on top of it, and we plugged it in and watched it. As the second plane flew in, both of us stood there silently, thinking: That is no accident. That is murder on a massive scale and terror like I have never witnessed with my own eyes. What I didn't know at that moment is how many thousands of lives would be affected and how much our Nation would be changed. That morning, 18 years ago, seven Oklahomans died, but our Nation was forever changed. Common terms we think about today like ``TSA,'' or ``terror watch list,'' or ``Department of Homeland Security,'' or ``Global Entry,'' or ``body scanners,'' or ``PATRIOT Act''--those didn't exist on September 10, 2001. They have all come since then as our Nation learns how to do more security, learns how to engage, and has learned a painful lesson that what people think in an isolated village in a remote country--what they think matters to us because what they may carry out, if left alone and ignored, could kill our family members and our fellow Americans. Almost 3,000 Americans died that day, but since that time period, we have pushed back not against the people of Afghanistan or the people of Iraq, not against Muslims or a faith but against a specific ideology that intensely hates the freedom of America and who intentionally plans to kill Americans they have never met. We learned a new ideology as a nation that day; that we have to not only take it seriously but that we must not wait until they carry out a fight. If they are planning it, if they are preparing it, if they have the capability, we should assume they are actually going to do it. Since that time period, American men and women have taken the fight to people who want to come and kill more Americans, but it has also been at a great cost of American blood and treasure: 4,432 Americans have died in Iraq; 2,353 Americans have died in Afghanistan. Fifty-one of those are my fellow Oklahomans in Afghanistan; 72 of those are my fellow Oklahomans in Iraq. Today, I pulled out of my closet a specific tie that I rarely wear. It was a tie given to me by a Gold Star Wife who never ever wanted to be a Gold Star Wife. She just wanted to be the wife of Chris Horton, whom she intensely loved, who went to Afghanistan to serve his country in the Oklahoma National Guard and died for our freedom. Two years later, she handed me this tie and said: He hated wearing ties, but you have to wear them all the time. Just remember him. We, as Americans, will not forget, and we have not forgotten. There are flags out all over America today just to remember. There are moms and dads who really hugged their kids tight this morning before they left for school, and the kids didn't even know why. They just did. There are places where people are gathering to pray for peace because as a nation we are a nation of peace, and we have no desire for war. In fact, we detest the pain and penalty and blood and loss of war, and we have no desire to be at war across the world, but it came to us, and we look forward to the day when guns are silent again and this finally concludes and a time of peace can be restored again. Today, though, we are just a nation remembering and praying for that time of peace that will come, and we are telling Gold Star families and families who have sent their loved ones around the world to places they had never seen before: We have not forgotten, and we are grateful that we serve together as a nation. I yield back.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, August is coming quickly. It is the time that we have a gap in the legislative calendar. As this body knows well, Congress is in session for 11 months of the year. We have one month in which we are not in Washington, DC, which gives us the opportunity to be home and to, quite frankly, catch up with family but also to be able to travel around our States, see what is going on in our States, and talk to folks. I happen to live in an unbelievably beautiful State. In August, Oklahoma is crazy hot and humid, but it is a great time to get a chance to see people and to see what is going on. In just the few weeks around this time period, I have already been to Ada and Durant and Calera, and I will be heading quickly to Chickasha, Lindsay, Lawton, Vinita, Miami--that is not ``Miam--ee''; the correct pronunciation is ``Miam--ah''--Afton, Grove, Jay, Chelsea, Hennessey, Enid, up to Kaw Lake, and, of course, all around the Oklahoma City area and all around Tulsa, to spend as much time as I can with as many different people as I can to find out what is going on in Oklahoma. I get this one precious month a year to make sure I have focus time in the State to see as many people as I can. I got to thinking about this and the privilege that I have really had in being able to travel around my State and see so many people and so many places, to get on Route 66, travel the State from east to west, and see exactly what is going on. I have had the opportunity to be out at the E.W. Marland Mansion in Ponca City. I have had the opportunity to be at Roman Nose State Park in Watonga. I have climbed up to the top of Black Mesa in Kenton, and I have been to the lowest point, by sea level, in far southeast Oklahoma in Broken Bow. I have been out to Mount Scott in Lawton and have climbed on its tumbled rocks. I have been to the Blue Whale in Catoosa. I have had the great privilege of getting a chance to walk around through the Gathering Place in Tulsa. This is an absolutely spectacular park and gathering place. In fact, USA Today just named it the No. 1 new attraction in America. For folks who have not been to Tulsa or for the folks who have been to Tulsa before, they need to go back and just enjoy the Gathering Place. I have had the opportunity to walk the streets around Black Wall Street and to visit with the fine folks who are there. I have had the opportunity to be in Davis at Turner Falls and the Arbuckle Mountains, and, of course, Falls Creek. I have had the opportunity to be in Hochatown, which is down near Broken Bow Lake, and the chance just to enjoy the time there, around the tall trees, in beautiful southeast Oklahoma. I have had the opportunity to visit Lake Murray State Park in Ardmore and visit the Ole Red restaurant in Tishomingo. I have driven the Talimena National Scenic Byway in the fall and have seen the spectacular scenery in those mountains. I have been to the Robbers Cave in Wilburton and the Ouachita National Forest in McCurtain County. I have had the opportunity to walk around through the Heavener Runestone area and see the Norse Viking carved stones that are there in eastern Oklahoma. I could see, most definitely, by far, amongst those high trees and those rolling hills, that I wasn't the first person to go there. I have been to the Round Barn, off Route 66 in Arcadia. I have stopped to get a great hamburger at Pop's, which is there on Route 66. I have quietly stood at the national Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial in downtown Oklahoma City, and I have seen the amazing western art at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. I have walked through the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. You can't go through Oklahoma without stopping at Cattlemen's Steakhouse and enjoying a great steak or without driving out west to see the Stafford Air & Space Museum. People who travel to Washington, DC, go to the Air and Space Museum, and I will often smile at them and say: Do not miss the Air & Space Museum that is in Weatherford, OK, because the Stafford Air & Space Museum has a remarkable collection from a fantastic Oklahoma astronaut. The Great Salt Plains in Jet and the Oklahoma Territorial Museum in Guthrie are also really remarkable places. I do have to brag about a spot because, on my 50th birthday, my wife surprised me by our taking a trip to the Little Sahara State Park and the sand dunes in northern Oklahoma. We rented dune buggies and drove them as hard and fast as we wanted on that day. It was a great day to just enjoy Oklahoma. It was just like the day I was able to drive to Pawhuska and eat at the Pioneer Woman Mercantile restaurant and just enjoy the downtown area. It is really a fantastic State, and the people and the places that I miss while I am here in Washington, DC, for 11 months of the year I look forward to getting a chance to see when I get back home in August. With as much work as we have to get done here--and we still have a lot of work to get done--we will spend some time on the phone, we will walk through legislation, and we will continue to do writing. Yet, thankfully, I will be able to write and spend time on the phone while I look out my windshield and enjoy some Oklahoma scenery at the same time. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, in April of this year, Border Patrol agents in South Texas, in McAllen--one of the most crossed areas for illegal traffic in the entire southern border--saw a group of individuals walking north who had already crossed the border, and they broke and ran. They assumed these individuals were illegally present in the United States, and they started moving to try to interdict them. They searched through a very large and very overgrown field. I can tell you that that area is very, very rough terrain. It is very isolating, and the brush is exceptionally heavy. On a day in April, even in South Texas, it is extremely hot. As they searched through the field looking for individuals, they happened to hear a child crying in their search. They encountered a 3- year-old boy who had been abandoned by the human smugglers when they broke and ran. This young boy, 3 years old, had these shoes on, and on his shoes were written a name and a phone number across them. That is the only identifying thing they have. They tested the phone number, by the way, and the phone number didn't work. Those human smugglers--moving people into the United States, using children as the vehicle--are prone to just cast that child aside if they slow them down. The Border Patrol agents who encountered this child wearing those shoes, took him back to the office. Those Border Patrol agents personally bought him new clothing. The fellow agents entertained him. You can see him playing PAW Patrol back in the station. They spent time comforting him and trying to figure out who he was and where he was from. Border Patrol agents alternated taking care of him, personally buying supplies for him until they can transition him into Health and Human Services' care. That is what is really happening on the border every single day. Border Patrol agents are dealing with children that cartels are using to move adults into the United States. Yes, there are some family units who are moving in, but every single family unit that moves into the United States is being ushered in by a cartel that works the border, and they are choosing the time and the place to move those individuals. These officers are risking their lives every single day. They are working with families every single day to try to figure out who is a family unit and who is a child that is just being smuggled to be used as a vehicle to get across the border and how to separate the two. Then, once they identify the child, they try to figure out this: What do we do now with this child that we have? Where are you from? Several months ago, most of the children who were moving across were 10, 11, and 12 years old, and they could interview those children. The cartels have figured that out now, and they are sending more and more children who are infants, 1, 2, and 3 years old, who don't know where they are from and don't know their names or their background or any other details. It is becoming more and more difficult for the Border Patrol agents to figure this out. In fact, Border Patrol agents just like this are now actually bringing their own car seats or finding other people from their churches and other places that would donate car seats because when HHS needs to transport them out of a bus, they don't have car seats there. So they are paying for car seats to help some of these abandoned children be able to get to a place of safety. These are the folks who are being criticized. These are the folks who some of my colleagues, even as recently as this week, said they need to get 40 hours of sensitivity training because they are so insensitive to what is happening on the border. These are the folks putting their own personal finances and their lives on the line and who are working every day to solve some of the problems that we have. For the past several years, there have been disagreements on the solutions and wide disagreements on Federal law enforcement and what they are doing along the border. There have been a lot of folks casting blame on Federal law enforcement and on the President, instead of actually trying to figure out what the problem is at the border. Why is this happening? Why have our numbers so rapidly accelerated? This past weekend, I visited the border with some of my colleagues. I went with Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa and Dr. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. We went to the Rio Grande Valley Sector. That area of the border is a thin slice of the border between the United States and Mexico, but in that area, in that one zone, 40 percent of all illegal traffic moves across the border. The most heavily trafficked area of that zone is the McAllen Sector, and that is where we went. Across that one area, in that one small segment of the border, they have between 1,500 and 2,000 individuals illegally crossing the border every single day. That is one small sector of a 2,000-mile-long border. Just this year, in that one small sector, they have had individuals from 63 different countries cross the border illegally--63 different countries. I hear a lot of folks say: It is all people from Central America who are crossing across the border to flee. That is not true. There are 63 countries just this year, just around McAllen, TX, not including the whole rest of the border. You see, the cartels sort individuals by country and by background. They send Indians in one direction. They send Pakistanis in another direction. They send individuals from Bangladesh in another direction. They send folks from Honduras and Guatemala in another direction. When I walked into one of the five stations that we visited all through that area this weekend, just to do a quick pop-in to see who was there at that moment, half of the adults who were there--these were single adults--were there from Venezuela and half of them were from Cuba, because that is how the cartels sort individuals. Just in that one station in McAllen, we have had individuals from Pakistan, Yemen, China, Venezuela, Bangladesh, and Syria, in addition to many countries from Africa and Asia, and obviously much of Central America as well. Those individuals are moving across the border in very high numbers. Ninety percent of the apprehensions that have happened this year--90 percent--have been from countries other than Mexico. Just as recently as 2014, only 1 percent of men who crossed the border had a child with them. Now the number is 50 percent of the men crossing the border have a child with them--50 percent. The numbers have dramatically changed, and what is happening along our border is significant. The men and women who are actually working every single day to protect what is happening at the border are also processing trade that is happening. These same individuals are processing 650,000 trucks coming into this area, 2.2 million pedestrians, and 9.3 million passengers coming across in different personal vehicles. There is a lot going on. So when I went down to the border this weekend and visited the five different facilities and then spent much of the evening and deep into the night riding along with Border Patrol, where one set of agents switched vehicles to go with a separate set of agents to ride along through the border just to get a feel for what was happening, what I experienced was exceptionally painful. What I saw were places that were crowded, spartan situations, and in my mind it echoed that for months the administration and the committee that I serve on-- members of the Homeland Security Committee--have said for months that there is a humanitarian crisis on this border. But it didn't seem that anyone was listening until recently, as if all of this had been created recently. Now, suddenly, people are turning their attention to what is happening along this border and saying that there is a serious humanitarian problem. And we said: Welcome to the dialogue because we have been saying it for months. Cartels are making millions and millions of dollars exploiting children. They are smuggling children and families across the border. It now costs $8,000 to cross a single individual cross the border. You pay a toll to the cartels, both to the traffickers and smugglers who are moving people--that $8,000 and, then, an additional fee to actually physically cross the border at the time of the cartel's choosing in that area. But if you bring a child with you, it is half price. It is $4,000. The incentive now is that it is cheaper to cross this area if you bring a child because the cartel knows they don't have to sneak you over the wall. All they have to do is get you to the border and drop you off. We watched as a family unit and a group of families were sent in one direction and Border Patrol interdicted them, and then a mile away, three single adults made a sprint for the border. They went to the wall with a makeshift ladder and started working their way up the ladder, but because it took extra time for them to do that, Border Patrol was able to get to their location, interdict, and arrest them. Cartels time it to move a set of families one direction to get all the Border Patrol gathered around them to hopefully sneak in people who most likely have a criminal record who can't just go through the normal system. They can't just match up a family with them. They have to move them separately and, at the same time, moving large quantities of drugs across the border not far away from there. On the date I was there, this picture was taken along the border not far from where I was. This was taken at 3 o'clock in the afternoon with a group of four individuals carrying large bags and boxes across the border. Now, I can't tell you for certain what is in those, but I have a pretty good guess that at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, four individuals bringing almost identical bundles across the border, it is a pretty good guess those are drugs. This still photo that was snapped at 3 o'clock in the afternoon during a weekend was a reminder again of exactly what is happening at the border. As cartels line up, families go this direction, single individuals with a criminal record go this direction, and then we move drugs a different direction to see if we can't work our way through it. Why is this happening? This is happening because Customs and Border Protection is spending all their time on humanitarian work now. Now 60 percent of the work of each individual agent is spent on humanitarian work processing families. They are doing the work; they are engaged in the process; and they are committed to taking care of people. When 60 percent are in town taking care of the humanitarian work, that leaves only 40 percent to patrol the border. Where there used to be literally 60 people who would travel in this region of the border, now there are 20 to cover all of those miles. The cartels know it. So the more they can send families up through this section and the more they can cause chaos inside, the greater likelihood they can move drugs across the border freely. How does this happen? This happens because the cartels can work to get a message to Central America and say: We have a way to get you into the United States, and we can get you in quickly. Bring a child with you--you pay them $8,000 or $4,000 if you bring a child--and we will work you up. They make promises to them of what will happen. Many of these people are from high poverty areas of Central America, and they will work them toward the border and drop them off at that spot. It costs even more if you are not from Central America. Some Chinese individuals who have been moved across our border paid as much as $30,000 to the cartels--$30,000 to pay the price to move them through Mexico and then cross the border at a time of their choosing. This is something that is making a tremendous amount of money for the cartels, and if we don't engage on solving this issue, we are allowing it. We need to realize our laws are broken. They are not only broken for immigration and what is happening, they are also not only breaking our hearts for what is happening with the humanitarian crisis and what is actually occurring, but it is becoming a critical issue that we have to respond to, and we should. Let me show you this next shot. This is what it looks like now along the border. As I traveled through the different locations to see what was happening in the five different locations, some of them are gut- wrenching and difficult because for the Border Patrol, they are a police station, basically, along the border. Border Patrol--they don't do detention. When you go to a police station--and I hope you only go legally to a police station--but when you go to a police station, they are not there to hold people. They are there to write up all the reports. They are there to go through processing, but they are not set up to hold people for long periods of time. That is not what a police station does. Border Patrol stations are like police stations along the border. They are really offices, and they manage that, but now they have also become places where they have to hold children and adults by the thousands. Thousands of people are crossing the border, and they are trying to figure out how to manage it. Some of the facilities are exceptionally overcrowded. There is a facility that many people have seen the pictures of. They effectively call it the ``kids in cages'' facility. I will tell you more about that in a little bit. That location was designed for 1,500 people total. It had 1,590 the day I was there. It has had as many as 3,000 in that facility, though, within the last couple of months. It is miserably overcrowded. There are people packed in together. Those individuals are getting meals, showers, toilets, access to supplies, and snacks. All the basics are being provided. The Border Patrol is trying to figure out how they manage this many people when none of them were trained on how to detain people because that is not their task. Border Patrol has now set up this facility called a soft-sided facility, where they have moved 1,000 family units away from that larger, what they call the central processing facility. They moved it away from the central processing facility a few miles away, and they set up a massive series of tents--air-conditioned and a lot more space. This happens to be in one of those where it was actually teenage boys in this particular area. This is what detention looks like now along the border. They are sitting there watching, actually, ``Puss n Boots'' on the TV. There are people lying around and getting a chance to get some space, recreation space, and plenty of activity that is going on there. This is what Border Patrol is currently doing to try to manage it. What does that look like, and how will things work? When you check in at the Border Patrol station, wherever it may be, whether it is in the central processing facility that is so overcrowded or whether it is out at the soft-sided facility, when you get there, the first thing they do is they actually swap clothes with you. They have clothes they bought with their budgets. They allow you to pick different types of clothes to wear. The Border Patrol and their families take the clothes to those individual migrants. They have washing machines there set up, and they will personally wash all their clothes for them while they get a shower and they get cleaned up because many of these folks have not showered and cleaned up for a month. So the first step is, they help them get all cleaned up and put fresh clothes on, a fresh shower, and hot meals. They have hot meals every single day. They also have snacks and supplies. This is, again, in that same soft-sided facility. This is just one of their supply rooms where you get a feel for snacks and drinks and water and toiletries. Back over in this area are large quantities of hygiene products and clothes--all kinds of things that are all piled up that they have gathered to help take care of individuals. One of the things I heard so many times is, these kids can't even brush their teeth because Americans are so mean and because the Border Patrol is so ruthless to them. I went to five different facilities, and in every facility, I asked to see their supply room. In every facility, I saw these. That looks like toothbrushes to me. In fact, in the central processing facility that has had so much attention in the media, I asked the director there, and they said they actually have had 87,000 toothbrushes there. There has always been toothbrushes and toothpaste. There has always been soap and water and ways to clean up. The challenge is, some of these folks come from very remote villages, and guess what, they are not used to brushing their teeth every day. That is not a normal hygiene habit for some people in some places they come from. So when the media comes to them and says: Have you brushed your teeth today, and they say no, it is not because they didn't have a toothbrush available. It is because, no, they didn't brush their teeth today. I actually watched an interview where they went to a child and said: Have you brushed your teeth, and they said no. Their response on Twitter was: How atrocious. We are better than this as Americans. Well, this was what was in the storeroom and what they have been offered. Interestingly enough, even as I walked through the central processing facility that is way overcrowded, I saw people lined up at the sinks brushing their teeth. We are providing supplies and resources to these individuals. That is a normal habit. This was interesting to me. As I walked through the facility--and this was in that central processing facility that was so crowded. As I walked through, there was a Coast Guard individual here because, yes, the Coast Guard is coming to help the Border Patrol because they need additional manpower. This is a Coastie who was coming through the facility that found a young girl who was just crying on her own. She was alone--one of these kids who has just been dropped off. He was walking through the facility, walking her around, holding her while she cried, and they had just stopped for a moment to watch TV. This is what is actually going on at the border. Now, are there facilities that are overcrowded? Absolutely there are, and the people who struggle with that the most are actually members of the Border Patrol, and they have been exceptionally frustrated that they are not getting more support and more ability to transition people out of their facilities into actual detention facilities. You see, the famous ``kids in cages'' facility that President Trump has taken so much heat for is actually a facility in McAllen, TX, they call the central processing facility. It was stood up in 2014 and 2015 when President Obama was facing a rush of children coming across the border with no place to put them. So President Obama's team, Jeh Johnson, as the Secretary of DHS, built a facility in McAllen to hold children there. That is the facility President Obama is getting blamed for--I am sorry, President Trump is getting blamed for--that President Obama and his team actually designed and built. Now, is it a great facility for children? No, I don't think it is, nor is it the Border Patrol's fault, though, that it is a bad facility. They are using what they have to manage the crisis that is happening in front of them. I am tired of hearing people say President Trump is trying to throw all these kids out and treat them so miserably, when that is not the case. They are scrambling to figure out what they can do and how they can manage and take care of the kids and the families they have and how they can sort out and try to figure out what to do. So let me talk through the solutions here. How do we solve this crisis that is going on currently with thousands and thousands of people who are illegally crossing the border every day? Well, some of them, we can start getting the message out, which has already happened, that America is open to immigration if you do it legally. We have 1.1 billion people who go through the legal permanent residence process every single year. We have 700,000 people every single year who become citizens of the United States through a naturalized system. We have 500,000 people every day who legally cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Half a million every day legally do it. One of the places I stopped to see was the legal border crossings at the international bridge, and I watched individuals drive in and show their papers and go through the simple process. They show a passport, show their visa, whatever it may be, and drive across the border. Thousands of people line up to do it and millions a year in each facility. I watched as people crossed the border on a pedestrian bridge, and as they crossed it with their paperwork, they were brought in. As they walk up to the bridge, they say: ``I am asking for asylum.'' They walk across the border on the international bridge and are taken into an air-conditioned room to start processing their asylum request. That is happening every day right now. Yet everyone in the media is saying that is not happening. The first thing we can do is start getting out accurate information of what is actually occurring at the border. The second thing we can do is--one of the primary issues the Border Patrol asked for over and over again, fund ICE. Now, why would the Border Patrol ask for more funding for somebody else? Because ICE is the primary entity that actually does detention. Border Patrol is the police station. ICE does detention. When individuals are picked up at the border by Border Patrol, they are processed and immediately delivered to ICE. ICE then does detention for those individuals. They have facilities scattered all over the country where they can house individuals in consistent housing, with plenty of space and set up perfectly for that with well-trained individuals to detain folks to go through that process. Border Patrol's No. 1 request is: Please stop asking us to do detention. We don't have facilities for it. Clearly, that is why everyone is packed in. Allow ICE to do this. Now, why doesn't ICE have funding? Well, because it has been one of our biggest battles with our Democratic colleagues who are obsessed with defunding ICE. Over and over again they say they want to abolish ICE, defund ICE, and get rid of ICE. What is really being stated there is there is no place to do detention when that occurs. Let me give you an example. In 2018, the request for ICE was $3.6 billion. Actually, what we could get at the end of it was just over $3 billion. They were $600 million down from what they said they needed. In 2019, the request was $3.5 billion. What they got was $3.1 billion-- again, much less than what they needed. When the crisis began to hit in its highest proportion and we finally got a humanitarian relief package to these individuals on the border to try to get additional support, including building the soft-sided facility, my Democratic colleagues held out and refused to do any funding for ICE. In the humanitarian package, there was zero funding for ICE detention--none. Border Patrol said that is the prime thing we need to actually solve this problem. What we need, more than anything else, is to allow these folks to move out of these temporary facilities into long-term facilities so we can actually get them in better housing situations, but when we debated our way through this, our Democratic colleagues held firm and said: No funding for ICE detention. That perpetuates this problem on the border. We have to solve this. They should be able to have the additional funding that they need so that we can get these kids and families into better locations for their housing and not temporary, stopgap locations. The next issue we need to address is, we should move asylum officers to the border. This is one of the prime things that Border Patrol wanted. Many of these individuals come and say: I want asylum. Let's walk them through the process. Let's get there. The problem is that the vast majority of individuals who request asylum do not qualify for asylum. They come into the United States because they want to connect with family members who are here or for economic or other opportunities. I completely understand that. We have a legal process to do that. But someone can't just come across the border and say: I have a cousin who lives here and I want to come, and that qualifies as asylum. That is not asylum. Only 15 percent of the people crossing the border who are asking for asylum actually qualify, but individuals wait up to 2 years for a hearing to find out if they qualify. So the legitimate individuals who desperately need asylum, who have to get through that process as rapidly as they can, cannot do so because 85 percent of the people are clogging up the system, asking for things that are not asylum. We should move asylum officers closer to the border to do faster processing so we can help individuals who are seeking asylum to get it and also identify people who are gaming the system and say: You cannot just game the system. You have to go through the process legally. Additionally, we have to deal with this 20-day release issue. Right now, the rule is that a family with a child or a child can only be held for 20 days total. They can be held for only 20 days, and after that, they have to be released into the country. The cartels and human smugglers know that rule, and that is why we have seen an increase from 2014 from only 1 percent of the men bringing a child to now 50 percent of the men bringing a child, because they know that if they bring a child, they will be released within 20 days. Here is what is different, though. In 20 days, we can do our record checks in the United States to see whether this person has a criminal record, but when we contact any of the 63 other countries that these individuals are coming from, just in that sector, most of those countries can't respond to us with their country's criminal record within 20 days. What is really happening on the border is individuals are coming across with a child. They are being detained for 20 days while we request criminal records from their home country. They are still there when on the 21st day we have to release them, and 10 to 15 days later, we get word that the individual actually had a murder warrant in their home country. That really happened just a few days ago. Also, a few days ago, we released an adult with a child and then found out a few days later that their home country was seeking them because they were a pedophile in their country. But we had just released that adult with a child into our country because we have a 20- day restriction and we can't wait until we get criminal records from another country. That is absurd. We are encouraging the trafficking of children by saying that you can get into our country no matter what if you just bring a child, and we are encouraging people with a criminal record to come in and bring a child because they know that is their fast track to be able to get in, because their home country can't fulfill our request fast enough. Why would we do that as a country? Why would we knowingly, willingly do that? We can solve this problem. It is a horrible humanitarian crisis. We need to pay attention to it and be logical about this. Stop saying ``abolish ICE'' when what we really need is the ICE facilities to help us to detain people in the best possible of environments while we find out who they are, what their records are, who is related to whom, and what their background is. Stop ignoring the obvious things. We have some people coming due to poverty. We have some people coming to smuggle drugs. Until we can sort that out, we should figure out who is who. That doesn't seem irrational to me. We should also find a way to process asylum requests faster than we are so that individuals pursuing asylum can go through the system and get processed and individuals who are gaming the system do not get to game the system. We can do better, and we have to do better. I would encourage us to be serious about immigration in the days ahead. This Congress can solve this issue, but it won't because it is just a political game. When it is about scoring political points rather than solving a humanitarian crisis, people in this body have to decide which one they want to do more. I will never forget last year, sitting with a bipartisan group of my colleagues, and as we discussed solutions to immigration, one of my Democratic colleagues said out loud: I haven't decided what I want to do on this yet. There is an angel on one shoulder saying this problem needs to be solved, and there is a devil on my other shoulder saying this is the greatest political weapon I have against the President. Why would I give that up? And I haven't decided which way I am going to go yet. I looked at them and said: Here is a basic rule of thumb I live by. When there are an angel and a devil talking to you, go with the angel every time. This is something we should do, and we should stop playing political games and trying to hurt the President and ignoring the obvious solution we all should see. This is not a partisan issue; this is a humanity issue. Let's solve it together. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, according to the Treasury, since 1960, Congress has acted 78 times to raise the debt ceiling. Let me run that past you again. Since 1960, we have had 78 debt ceiling increases, under Republican Presidents, Democratic Presidents, Republican Congresses, and Democratic Congresses. There has been a steady increase over and over again with the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling was originally designed to provide a moment of fiscal restraint for Congress, a moment for Congress to look at the debt and determine whether to increase debt again or to determine how to restrain ourselves. Going back to post-World War II, we had an enormous debt left over after World War II. That was the triggering mechanism for them. Throughout the Korean war, for instance, they didn't raise the debt ceiling. They found ways to find fiscal restraint because they had so much debt. That doesn't even seem to be the conversation anymore. Now debt ceiling conversations are about what bill will we get it into to make sure it passes so we can just keep going. That moment of determining how we can deal with fiscal restraint seems to be gone. Let me state just how severe this has become. Right now, our current debt to GDP--that is, gross national product--our debt compared to our gross national product is at 78 percent. That is an enormous number. That means, if you take all of the American economy, every single person in the entire country, group it all together, what they receive in pay, what they make, and put it all together, it would take 78 percent of every single person in the country to pay off our debt for an entire year. If we were to maintain that debt-to-GDP ratio at 78 percent, just not get worse than where we are at $22 trillion right now, we asked the Congressional Budget Office how much we would either have to raise in taxes or cut in spending each year to not make it worse. The answer that came back from the Congressional Budget Office was $400 billion, but the hard part about that--not that $400 billion is not bad enough-- we would have to cut or raise in taxes $400 billion every single year for 30 years in a row. That is not the original $400 billion but a new $400 billion every year for 30 years in a row just to keep us at a debt-to-GDP ratio of 78 percent. That is not going to happen. There is not the will in this Congress to reduce $400 billion this year much less do it every single year for 30 years in a row. So my simple push is this. We have to get to a real conversation about what we are going to do about our debt and how we are going to respond to this. I have committed, around any kind of debt ceiling conversation, that the conversation should not be about just raising it and going on; it should be about how we are going to address our debt. I cannot support a debt ceiling that just raises the debt ceiling without any consideration about what we are going to do to actually pay off that debt or how we are going to get on top of it. We have a broken process. We are not dealing with debt when we talk about debt ceilings anymore, and we are facing a September 30 deadline. There is already an ongoing rumor and conversation around the hallways about could we have another government shutdown. In the last 40 years, we have had 21 government shutdowns--21--under Republican and Democratic Presidents and under Republican and Democratic Congresses--21 government shutdowns. The one that happened earlier this year was the longest one in history, but that doesn't mean it is the longest one that will ever happen. There may be a longer one coming. The challenge is, how do we solve this issue about debt? How do we deal with some of the simple processes like government shutdowns and how do we stop those? Government shutdowns actually cause more spending to happen because it costs so much to prepare for it. When it happens, there is a greater cost, and when restarting it, there is greater cost again. All of that is lost money. It is just a waste. So Senator Maggie Hassan, the Democratic Senator from New Hampshire, and I have worked together to put a simple proposal together to stop government shutdowns. This is not rocket science. Most Americans can't leave their work and walk away, especially if they are small business owners. They can't walk away from their jobs unless the job is done. That is just the nature of it. So our simple idea is this. If we get to October 1--and the end of the fiscal year ends on September 30--and the work is not done on all the appropriations bills, we would have what is called a continuing resolution kick in. The funding would continue to go the same as it did the year before. It basically is putting everybody on hold but is still moving. That would protect Federal workers and make sure Federal workers and their families are not affected by the government shutdown. It would protect the taxpayers, making sure they are not having to deal with ``I can't get a permit'' and ``I can't get an answer on the phone from a government agency because there is a Federal shutdown.'' So the Federal workers and American people would be held harmless, but Members of Congress, our staffs, and the staff of the White House Office of Management and Budget, in both the House and the Senate, would all be here in Washington, DC, with no travel. Now that may not seem like a big issue. You may say: So what. It would mean we are in session every weekday, every weekend, and cannot leave to go back and see our families. We cannot do our work that has to be done in the States, and we have work to do in our States as well. We cannot go on any kind of codel travel. We cannot take any other travel of any sort, and every day we have what is called a mandatory quorum call in the Senate and in the House. We are in session weekdays and weekends continually until the budget work is done. I had folks say: Well, that doesn't seem like that big of an incentive. I can assure you, the most precious commodity to Members of the House and Senate, our staff, and to members of the Office of Management and Budget is the same precious commodity every American has. It is time-- time. If we lose the time so we can't do all of the other things we need to do until we get the budget work done, we will get the budget work done because there are a lot of things on our schedule, but our first priority should be the budget work that needs to be done. This puts us in a position to basically do what my mom did to my brother and me. When my brother and I had an argument, my mom would lock the two of us in a room and say: You guys work this out. When you are done, you can come out of the room, but you guys keep talking until you settle it. Quite frankly, my mom would be a pretty good role model for this Congress. Lock us in the room, keep us debating until we solve it. We had the longest shutdown in American history this past time, and it started right before Christmas. What did the Members of Congress do? They left. They left. They went home for Christmas. They went away. While Federal workers did not have their paychecks coming in, Members of Congress left town. It is as simple and straightforward as this: Federal workers should be held harmless, and Members of Congress should be kept to stay and work it out. Senator Hassan and I continue to work through this. We gained wide bipartisan support. It went through the first of two committees--10 to 2 as it passed the committee. Now it has a second committee to go through before it comes here. We want to build bipartisan support to say: We will have disagreements on budget. We will have disagreements on spending. But we should keep debating until we solve it. But do not loop the Federal workers and their families into this, and certainly don't harm the taxpayers in the process. We look forward to trying to get some things resolved in this place and to keeping the debate going until we do. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

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

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I rise to talk to this body again about healthcare and the cost of healthcare. This has been an issue and an ongoing dialogue for a long time around the Senate and around Congress. It is an issue that was supposedly settled when the Affordable Care Act was passed, but, ironically enough, my Democratic colleagues have now joined Republicans in saying they want to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. They are not using the term ``repeal and replace''; they are just saying they want to do Medicare for All. Built into that is completely taking out the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with something different. So, ironically, in some ways, we are in the same spot. We have both come to the same realization that the Affordable Care Act didn't pass-- it actually did pass, but it is not working. So now the challenge is what to do with healthcare. We are now trying to break into pieces what we can actually do together to get this done, beginning with the cost of prescription drugs. I continue to hear from Oklahomans all over the State about how hard it is to deal with the cost of prescription drugs, how rapidly the costs are increasing, and how sporadic the cost changes really are. They will have a drug that costs a small amount one month and come back a month later and find a dramatic increase for the exact same drug. They can go pharmacy to pharmacy and find a different price for the exact same drug or find that the pharmacy closest to them doesn't offer that drug, and a different pharmacy is the only one that is allowed to have that drug. The complexity is driving them crazy and rightfully so. As we peel back the layers on pharmacy issues, we are finding that the complexity is that cost overruns being built in are too high. For the past few months, we have looked at every step in the drug process, from the approval to research and development, to try to figure out how the cost is actually getting to the consumer. Along the way, several things have occurred. The administration has aggressively been approving generics. In fact, the administration has approved a record number of generics. Those generic pharmaceuticals are much less expensive than the branded pharmaceuticals. Many of those have been waiting a very long time at the Food and Drug Administration to actually be approved. The Food and Drug Administration is rapidly getting those out the door, and that helps consumers. Something else we have done in Congress is to try to address something called the gag clause. The gag clause is one of those things that was behind the scenes that no one knew about except for the pharmacists because, if you came in with your insurance card to pick up your prescription, the pharmacist knew the actual cost you would pay if you paid in cash. Often, you could get that same prescription for less by paying in cash than you could if you were to pay with your insurance card, but the pharmacist was prohibited from actually telling you that. We have addressed that in Congress, in a bipartisan way, to release that gag clause and allow pharmacists to actually tell people their options on pricing. You might say: That is an absolutely crazy thing. Who put that gag rule in? Well, the system, and the structure behind the scenes that negotiates all of it, said: If you want to be a pharmacy that sells these drugs, you have to submit to these rules. As we found, the culprit behind many of these issues is a group called pharmacy benefit managers. You will hear it referred to as just the PBMs. Those pharmacy benefit managers are supposed to negotiate between the manufacturers and the insurance plans to lower the prices. In many areas, they have lowered prices, but they have also given preferred formulary placement to some of their preferred pharmacies so some pharmacies get that drug and other pharmacies that are competing with them don't get access to that drug. Often, it is the drug that is the highest margin drug only their pharmacies will get and other pharmacies will not. It has become an anti-competitive piece in the background, when it was supposed to be something that was a highly competitive piece to actually help the consumer. Unfortunately, PBMs have created one of the most elaborate, complex, and opaque system of pricing, which has a tremendous amount of market distortion and at times has limited patients' access to those drugs. Oftentimes, it is a system they have been able to take advantage of and have created financial incentives to help their bottom line in the process rather than actually help the consumer. Many consumers have heard about rebates, but they wonder who is getting a rebate. They go to their pharmacy to pay for their drugs, and they are not getting the rebate. There is a rebate going somewhere, just not to them. Here is the challenge. We are trying to peel back with greater transparency what is happening in the pharmacy benefit manager world and figure out how a small group--it is actually three companies that have 90 percent of the market nationwide, how that middleman in the process actually handles pricing and negotiation. If you talk to any pharmacist anywhere in the country--and certainly across my great State--who is an independent pharmacist, they will all express their frustration with pharmacy benefit managers and their access to some drugs and not others and the stipulations they deliberately put there to hurt them and help others. I have joined my colleague Senator Cantwell in trying to shine some light on the operations of PBMs within the drug chains. Consumers deserve greater transparency. That will help us understand the actual cost of drugs and how those costs are actually getting to consumers or not to consumers in the process. The PBMs need greater examination, and we are finally taking that up to walk through the process. On the Finance Committee, we are dealing with several issues. Led by Senator Grassley, we are walking through Part B of Medicare, Part D of Medicare, and trying to examine what can be done to help the actual consumer. Our goals are how do we actually increase the options in drugs that are out there, how do we stop the cost increases, and how do we decrease out-of-pocket costs for pharmaceuticals. In Part B--these are drugs that are often intravenous, but they are done in a hospital setting or in an inpatient setting. As we are working through that process, we are trying to find the perverse incentives that are built in because, right now, physicians are actually paid a percentage of the medicine they prescribe in Part B. That means if there are three medications that are out there, if a doctor prescribes the highest cost medication, they get a much higher reimbursement. It is not a flat amount. Now, all three may be intravenous, but whichever is the most expensive actually helps the doctor the most. I am not challenging doctors and saying they are always prescribing the branded drugs and the most expensive in the process--that is between the doctor and the patient to determine--but there is no doubt a perverse incentive is built into this; that if they prescribe a more expensive drug, the doctor and his office actually benefit from it. We need to fix that. In Part D, there are reforms that can actually slow the growth in cost increases and allow people to have greater access to drugs. We are not interested in some kind of formula where we are actually going to decrease the patients' options of what drugs they can actually get in their formulary. That is a great thing about being an American; that we don't have limited formularies. It is very open in the process so Americans can try different pharmaceuticals to see which one works best for them. That is not chosen by government; it is chosen by them and their doctors. The Part D definitely needs a redesign of the benefit structure because right now things like the doughnut hole drive up costs for consumers. We are exploring a way to limit the out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries so there is a lifetime cap sitting out there. There is an opportunity to know that if I end up with cancer or some other rare disease, I am not going to have these out-of-control costs on the pharmaceutical side and know there is not a doughnut hole waiting for me, where when I get a couple thousand dollars in, I am suddenly going to have a very expensive time. So I can afford my insurance in January, February, and March, but from April to August, I can't afford prescriptions anymore. We can't have that. We have to address those issues because that dramatically affects the out-of- pocket costs. There are lots of other options we are looking at while working through this process, like the rebates, as I mentioned before, actually getting to the consumer, not to the companies behind the scenes, and dealing with how to take greater advantage of biosimilar drugs--very similar to the generic drugs but just in a different category and at a reduced cost--to allow them to have opportunities to get to those drugs faster. We have to deal with some of the patent issues to make sure drug manufacturers can't hold on to their patents abnormally long so the generics can't actually get out to people or bundle them together to restrict their patents. We have to end this practice of surprise medical bills. Some folks have no idea what that is, and other folks know all too well. They look at their insurance. They go to a hospital that is in network, and their doctor is in network. So they go to a hospital that is in network, and they go to a doctor who is in network, but they get a giant bill from an out-of-network anesthesiologist, or the lab is out of network and the hospital is in network, and they get a giant bill from the lab. We are working to end the practice of having labs that are out of network or certain specialists a doctor has sent them to--the patient assumes they are in network, but then they find out that certain individuals who have taken care of them are out of network. We are also dealing with the issue of air ambulance surprise bills, which has been a great challenge for those folks in rural America who are having to be transferred long distances to get to a hospital and then are getting an enormous bill for an out-of-network air ambulance as a surprise billing. There are ways we can address this to deal with the out-of-pocket costs. We are focused on areas where we can find agreement and things we can do to work through this process. There is much to be done in the area of prescription drugs and in the area of in network, out of network, and surprise medical bills. We should be able to find common ground, and I am grateful I am part of this dialogue to help try to find ways we can come together, get this resolved, and get a better situation for American consumers and patients in the days ahead. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I want to rise today to speak to the Senate and compliment two of my colleagues, Senator Jim Inhofe from my State of Oklahoma, my senior Senator, and Senator Jack Reed, for their leadership and bipartisan work on this year's National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2020. This is a complicated bill. It has had hundreds of amendments, both in committee and in the initial managers' package that came out of committee that has already been debated, and there are a lot more amendments that are still being debated in the process. It is an incredibly complicated issue to bring the authorization and information for all military for the next year. It is something that Congress has done for a long time. But for Jim Inhofe, this is his first year to chair this committee and to actually be the driver for this, and I think he has done an exceptional job of walking through this piece of legislation. It is a $750 billion authorization. There will be additional appropriations that have to be done to be able to designate that, but that is exactly what President Trump had asked for and said is what is needed, and it is what the Department of Defense has said that they would need to keep our country safe and to prepare for the future. There are a lot of elements in the bill. I want to identify a few of them, beginning with a 3.1-percent pay increase for our troops. That is something that is much needed. The pay for our troops has been very, very behind for a long time, and this starts an initial process of getting them a little bit above inflation to start trying to catch up. It also deals with an issue that is very important to our military families, and that is their housing. There are many areas and many bases and posts around the country and around the world where the housing has fallen behind: mold issues, plumbing issues, electrical issues, roofing issues, and flooring issues. It is important for the members of our military to have a safe place that they come home to that really feels like home. They are traveling around the world. They are in difficult places, and as much as their families can be kept safe and have a place that they can make home as a family--that is exceptionally important. For those single men and women, it is important that they have a place where they can actually get rest and have connection with each other. This bill deals with additional funding to deal with housing, which is much needed. This bill also deals with spouses, in their transition from facility to facility, being able to pick up an additional job. For many of the spouses who are traveling with our men and women in the military, when they move to a new base or post, they also want to pick up a new job in that place. It takes months to do that transition now. There is also an issue with licensing. If they have a professional skill in one State, when they move to another State, there are some additional hurdles for them just to move to that next State. This bill helps deal with that and, again, helps those families know that when they move, as we ask them to move to different locations, it is a little bit easier on their family to also pick up a second job if they choose to do that. Oklahoma is home to Altus Air Force Base, Tinker Air Force Base, Vance Air Force Base, Fort Sill Army Post, McAlester Army Ammunition Plant, and, of course, the amazing facilities for our Army and Air International Guard. We have a lot of folks in Oklahoma who are veterans who come back to Oklahoma to retire, and a lot of folks who are actively serving there. This bill deals with every one of those facilities in some way. Let me give a few examples. The KC-46 tanker--a brandnew tanker that will be the refueler for the next generation--has already begun its delivery. It is coming to Altus, and it is already there at Altus Air Force Base. In fact, I had the privilege, along with Senator Inhofe, to ride in from Seattle on the very first KC-46 tanker coming to Altus Air Force Base in the 97th Air Mobility Wing. That wing does all the training for every pilot who will fly the KC-46 for the decades ahead. Whether they are in the Reserve or in the Guard or Active Duty, they are going to be connected to Altus Air Force Base for the KC-46. It has long been awaited, and it is finally arriving. This bill does the authorization for an additional 15 tankers, as we are modernizing that force, and we will do a few every single year for quite a while. The bill includes funding for the procurement of critical Army weapons and combat vehicles, including the Paladin Integrated Management System upgrade, which is assembled in Elgin, OK, right next to Fort Sill. The Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill organizes, trains, and equips all the Paladin units in the Army Paladin Integration Management. In fact, the skills that are coming in at Fort Sill Fires Center of Excellence are asked for all over the world. Almost every one of our allies and every single foreign base is asking for the good folks from Fort Sill who are trained to help protect our men and women around the world. Additionally, Senator Inhofe and Senator Reed and all their staff have worked to get in some of the amendments that I brought in on the base text. Those amendments--they heard it out. We got a chance to have dialogue. They have now been included long term. One of those that I worked with one of my colleagues on--Senator Shaheen--we worked on a sense-of-the-Senate on dealing with Turkey. Turkey is a NATO ally. They worked very closely with us in the development of the F-35, but we have a problem. The leadership in Turkey is now reaching out to Russia to buy the S-400 air defense system. The F-35 is incompatible with the S-400 Russian system sitting right next to it. We will never ever allow the F-35 to sit next to the Russian S-400 system. We tried to make that clear in multiple conversations with Turkey and with Turkey's leaders. We tried to bring this up over and over again. I worked with Senator Inhofe, along with my colleagues, Senator Shaheen and Senator Jack Reed, to make it clear that we will not allow the F-35 to be sold to Turkey if they are also going to purchase the S-400 from Russia. I maintain my strong support for the F-35 program and applaud its advanced capability. The military actually will be shaped around the F- 35 in the days ahead, based on its capabilities. But we cannot allow Turkey to have the F-35 and also buy a Russian system at the same time. One of my other amendments that I dealt with when I was dealing with Turkey and the F-35 and the security of that advanced weapons system also dealt with something that some folks may not have noticed, but I did, and other folks have as well, and that is the retirement of chaplains. We lose track at times that when people enter into the military, these mandatory retirement ages will sneak up on folks. Well, it is especially so for chaplains because many chaplains actually enter into their service in the military after--as a second career. For many folks in the military, that is their first career, and then they have a second one, but not so for chaplains. Many of them are pastors or missionaries or counselors in hospitals and other locations. They get into their service and then time out. Chaplains need a little bit of extra time to serve so they can serve a full term with the U.S. military. One of our amendments in this bill allows those chaplains to be able to complete service and be a part of that. There are many other aspects of this bill that is literally hundreds of pages long that deal with military service. I want to bring up one additional element. It is an element that has been in great debate in conversation here in Congress, and it deals with the country of Iran. This bill deals with not the military policy specifically with Iran but deals with our defense and our preparation for any enemy, including Iran. There is an amendment coming up for debate and conversation that changes the rules of engagement with Iran, that literally says to this administration that they cannot engage in any hostilities with Iran. They can only defend themselves if attacked but cannot respond until they get a vote from Congress. I cannot imagine a worse set of rules of engagement for anyone in the U.S. military who is forward-deployed and facing risk from Iran than to say: You can respond when Congress votes for it. I will certainly vote against that amendment, as it comes up as one of the final amendments, to say to our military leadership: I will not handcuff you in the face of the threat that is Iran. I have heard folks on this floor and in the media want to lay the issues we have with Iran on President Trump. May I remind this body that we had 444 hostages taken in Iran in 1979. Iran was the mover that bombed Beirut and our Embassy there in the 1980s. Iran is the one that attacked the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and killed many of our folks in the 1990s. The reason Bashar Assad is still in power in Syria right now is because Iran and their forces have brought them up. The reason there is a civil war in Yemen right now is because Iran is providing the weapons there and the insight to be able to instigate that civil war that is happening in Yemen right now. The reason there is constant peril on Israel's borders all the way around is because Iran is funding Hezbollah and Iran is funding Hamas. Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and the instability in the region is not something new and is not President Trump's fault. It has been a long-term issue with not only the United States but all of the West and all of the region. Our issue is not with the Iranian people. They are smart. They are entrepreneurs. They are well educated. But they also live under the thumb of a ruthless regime led by the ayatollahs. That regime squashed the Green Movement several years ago in Iran--the people just wanting more freedom. The issues we are facing with Iran right now are not President Trump's fault, are not because he is being mean, just as Iran's attack on the Khobar Towers and the murder of many of our people was not because President Clinton had put sanctions on Iran the year before. It wasn't President Clinton's fault that the Khobar Towers were attacked; it is not President Trump's fault in this case. He has pushed back on a terrorist regime and is demanding that they change their ways not only in the nuclear setting but also in conventional terrorism around the region and, quite frankly, around the world. We cannot allow them to continue to terrorize their neighbors. No one wants a war with Iran. That is why we have used sanctions and diplomatic means to address this. All these accusations that the President is secretly going to try to take us to war with Iran I find absurd, especially for the man who is trying to get us out of a war in Afghanistan, out of a war in Syria, and out of a war in Iraq. Suddenly, secretly, he wants to get into a war with Iran? That is absurd. All of the region is looking to us to help push back on the biggest bully in the region for decades, and every President since Jimmy Carter has tried to isolate and push back on Iran. I do not want to suddenly limit President Trump from trying to isolate and push back on Iran because some folks don't trust him. In the days ahead, we as a nation will cautiously, diplomatically, economically isolate Iran to try to bring them into cooperation with the rest of the world, but in the meantime, let's not handcuff our folks who are in harm's way in that region and tell them: If you want to respond, come and get a vote from us first. In closing, I again thank Senator Inhofe, who has done tireless work on this NDAA, and Senator Jack Reed for their great bipartisan leadership on this. They have done yeomen's work on this. I hope that this bill will not only pass the Senate but that we will put it on the President's desk in the days ahead and give some stability to our military forces around the world and that they will know we understand that 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, and in every time zone in the world, they are standing watch for peace and freedom. They are not a threatening presence. They are a peaceful presence, and their strength has brought exceptional peace to the world. I am grateful for them and for their families and for the amazing sacrifice they make every day. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I started working on election security with Senator Klobuchar in 2017. At the time, I served on the Senate Intelligence Committee. We have worked together, from the beginning, to make this a bipartisan--in fact, nonpartisan--issue. Elections are an American event. They have partisan results, but the act of voting is an American event, not a partisan event. We had a hearing in the Rules Committee. We worked through the process. We continue to get feedback. In fact, she and I worked incredibly hard to be able to reach out to and have multiple meetings with secretaries of State from all over the country to be able to hear as much feedback as we could from the States, because elections are run by States. Elections are not run by the Federal Government. Each State runs their own election. Each county or precinct or parish has its own structure for doing elections. In fact, one of the strengths of our system is the diversity of how elections are actually done. So we had to do a lot of work behind the scenes with all of these different States, to meet with their leadership, to meet with Governors, and to meet with as many groups as we possibly could to get it. The basic goal from the beginning was to achieve a piece of legislation that had a couple of features in it. First, ensure timely information sharing between the Federal Government, State, and local officials because we learned in 2016 it was not timely information that was shared. The Federal Government had visibility on what Russia was doing; the States and the precincts did not. It took up to 14 months for the States to find out what the Russians were doing. That can never happen again. Second, we must expedite security clearances for the State and local election officials. Again, we had this issue in 2016 when Federal officials saw what was going on by the Russians but said that the State individuals didn't have enough security clearance. So, instead, they got a nebulous memo that said to watch out for these IP addresses, with no explanation as to why. That can never happen again. Third is a way to verify the results of our elections. That should be straightforward. Every State, every precinct should be able to verify that--to go back to the people in the area and say: This is how you voted, and this is how we verified that the number is accurate, that there aren't additional ballots showing up later that the machines didn't count, that suddenly pop up from nowhere. There are no hanging chads. There are no inconsistencies. So people can look and say: That was done efficiently and professionally. The administration is taking steps on the first two of these. In fact, we had multiple hearings with DHS to talk about what they are doing to get security clearances. Now every single State has individuals within their State who have security clearances. Every State has greater cooperation now with the Federal Government. Multiple layers of cyber security have been offered to every single State so that each State can use their own cyber protection or add an additional layer from the Federal Government. It is up to that State to choose. It is not a mandated piece that has come down on them. Almost every State has taken that, though, and has said that they want those additional layers of cyber protection because it is not just about the voting machine or the piece of paper; it is how it is counted, how it is presented, how the unofficial results go out in the States the night of the election. All of those things matter. DHS has leaned in, and they have done aggressive work on this in the last several years. That is why the 2018 election went so smoothly. DHS has done a tremendous amount of work already on this. I have been clear, though, through this process that this cannot be a way of federalizing elections and trying to run the elections or saying that every piece of election equipment has to be run through some bureaucracy here in DC, whatever it may be. This is a State responsibility that the State has to take on. Right now, there is not a way for the States that do not have an election system--pieces of hardware for their elections--to change that hardware before 2020. The first of our elections is not in November 2020; it is 8 months from now, when our primaries begin. States cannot purchase the equipment, put it into place, train the volunteers, and make that transition before the 2020 election. So the emphasis is, what can we do to assist States in cyber protection? What can we do to get information to them? How can we run this? In the days ahead, Senator Klobuchar and I completely agree that every State should have a system with backup paper ballots--every State and every precinct. Right now that is not so, but no matter how much money we throw at the States right now, they could not make it so by the 2020 Presidential election. It is not possible to get there. In the 2018 omnibus, we added $380 million to go to the States. Not all of that $380 million has even been spent yet. There is still quite a bit of it that is banked. But that has all been allocated to the States, and the States are deciding the best way to use that. In States like mine--Oklahoma--we use optical scanners and paper ballots. That money was used in my State to assist in cyber protection of the system, the transition of the information, and how the unofficial results get out to the public. It is a good way to use those funds to make sure any threats are being mitigated. My State, like 21 other States, was one of the States that the Russians tried to engage in our election systems. They came to the State election board in my State, tried to get into it, found out the door was locked, and moved on to another State. They did not get into our system. But there are other areas where we could protect it. Of the $380 million we allocated just last year, much of it has not even been spent. So I object to another $380 million on top of that when the first part of it hasn't been spent yet, and it will not make a difference in this year's election because the $380 million for last year was really preparing for the 2020 elections. Here is my concern long term. I don't want election security to become a partisan issue. It would be easy for it to become that. H.R. 1, when it came out of the House, was clearly a very partisan bill. I find myself at odds today with a partner in this, Senator Klobuchar. We have worked together in a very nonpartisan way to resolve this issue. I think we still can resolve this and we can actually get a result, but a partisan proposal will not get us an end result in which both parties come together and resolve this. I reiterate again that election security should never be a partisan issue. This is about the preservation of our democracy, and it is something that all parties--Independents, Republicans, Democrats, and all parties--agree should be a central issue. Having stated all of that, begrudgingly, in this proposal because it is not a bipartisan proposal--I look forward to working through it and getting a bipartisan proposal done in the days ahead--I must object.