Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about two topics that often make this body and sometimes my side of the aisle uncomfortable. I want to talk about the fight that is on across the world--or particularly in the Middle East for the soul of Islam and how it matters to the United States--and I want to talk about our relationship with Saudi Arabia and the connection to the former issue. We frequently hear this criticism of President Obama that he doesn't have a strategy to defeat ISIS. I fundamentally don't believe that is true. He does have a strategy, and it is largely working when you look at the metrics on the ground. You see that ISIS's territory in Iraq and Syria have been reduced by about 30 percent over the course of the last year. We have tightened our immigration policies here to make sure the bad guys don't get in. We have stood up a more capable fighting force inside Iraq. We have clamped down significantly on ISIS's sources of revenue and financing. Listen, it is hard to win when only one spectacular and deadly strike can erase all of your good work, but the President does have a strategy on the ground right now inside Iraq and inside Syria. The problem is that it is still a relatively short-term strategy. As we debate how to defeat ISIS or groups like it, our strategic prescriptions are all relatively short term. We use military force. We try to retake territory. We try to take out top terrorist leaders. We clamp down on sources of financing. These are necessary and important measures to combat a serious threat to the United States, but they don't address the underlying decisions that lead to radicalism. Addressing those issues is the only way to ensure that the next iteration of ISIS--whoever it is, whatever it is, wherever it is-- doesn't just simply emerge in its place. So my argument is that one of the reasons no one has a particularly credible long-term strategy is that it would involve engaging in some very uncomfortable truths about the nature of the fight ahead of us and about the imperfections of one of our most important allies in the Middle East. To make this case to you, I want to first bring you to northwest Pakistan and ask my colleagues to imagine that you are a parent of, let's say, a 10-year-old boy. You are illiterate, you are poor, and you are getting poorer by the day. Unemployment in your village is sky high. Inflation is robbing you of any wealth you may have. Your crop yields have been miserable, but one day you get a visit that changes your perspective. A cleric from a nearby conservative mosque offers you a different path. He tells you that your poverty is not your fault but simply a punishment handed down to you because of your unintentional deviation from the true path of Islam. Luckily, there is a way to get right to God, to submit your only son to Islam. It gets even better. This cleric is going to offer to educate your son at his school. We call them madrassas. Not only will you not have to pay for the education, this school is going to actually pay you maybe $6,000 just to send your son there. When your son finishes school, this individual promises you that he will find him employment in the service of Islam. Your 10-year-old, previously destined to lead a life that was perhaps more hopeless than your own, is now going to get free housing and meals, religious instruction, the promise of a job when he is older and you get money that you badly need and improved favor with God. For thousands of families in destitute places such as northwest Pakistan, we can see how it is often a pretty easy choice. But as the years go on, you lose touch with your son. The school cuts off your access to him. And when you do get to see him every now and again, you see him changing. Then one day it is over. He is not the little boy you once knew. He is a teenager. And he is announcing to you that the only way to show true faith with Islam is to fight for it against the infidels who are trying to pollute the Muslim faith or the Westerners who are trying to destroy it. He tells you that he is going off to Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq with some fellow students and that you shouldn't worry about him because God is on his side. You start asking questions to find out what happened in the school and you start to learn. You discover the textbooks he read that taught him a brand of Islam greatly influenced by something called Wahhabism, a strand of Islam based on the earliest form of religion practiced under the first four caliph. It holds that any deviation from Islamic originalism is heresy. In school, your son was therefore taught an ideology of hate toward the unbeliever--defined as Christians, Jews, and Hindus, but also Shiites, Sufis, and Sunni Muslims who don't follow the Wahhabi doctrine. He is told that the crusades never end; that aid organizations, schools, and government offices are just modern weapons of the West's continuing crusade against his faith; and that it is a religious obligation to do ``battle'' against the infidels. I tell my colleagues this story because some version of it plays out hundreds of times every day in far-flung places, from Pakistan to Kosovo, Nigeria to Indonesia, the teaching of an intolerant version of Islam to hundreds of millions of young people. Think about this: In 1956 there were 244 of these madrassas in Pakistan; today there are 24,000. These schools are multiplying all over the globe. Yet, don't get me wrong, these schools, by and large, aren't directly teaching violence. They aren't the minor leagues for Al Qaeda or ISIS. But they do teach a version of Islam that leads very nicely into an anti-Shia, anti-Western militancy. I don't mean to suggest that Wahhabism is the only sect of Islam that can be perverted into violence. Iran's Shia clerics are also using religion to export violence as well. But it is important to note that the vicious terrorist groups whom Americans know by name are Sunni in derivation and greatly influenced by Wahhabi Salafist teachings. Of course, the real rub is that we have known this for a very long time. Secretaries of State, ambassadors, diplomats, and four-star generals have all complained over and over again about it. Yet we do very little to stop this long, slow spread of intolerance. We don't address it because to do so would force us to confront two very difficult issues. The first is how we talk sensibly about Islam. Right now we are caught between two extremes. Leading Republicans want to begin and end this discussion with a debate over what we call terrorists. Of course, the leading candidate for President often equates the entire religion with violence. I think this debate over nomenclature is overwrought, but I certainly understand the problem of labeling something ``radical Islamic terrorism'' because it gives purchase to this unforgivable argument that all Muslims are radicals or terrorists. So many Republicans don't want to go any deeper into the conversation than just simply labeling the threat. But Democrats, frankly, aren't that much better. The leaders of my party often do back flips to avoid using these kinds of terms, but, of course, that forestalls any conversation about the fight within Islam for the soul of the religion. It is a disservice to this debate to simply brand every Muslim as a threat to the West, but it is also a disservice to refuse to acknowledge that although ISIS has perverted Islam to a degree to make it unrecognizable, the seeds of this perversion are rooted in a much more mainstream version of that faith that derives in substantial part from the teachings of Wahhabism. Leaders of both parties need to avoid the extremes of this debate and enter into a real conversation about how America can help the moderate voices within Islam win out over those who would sow the seeds of extremism. Let me give an example. Last fall, I visited the Hedayah Center in Abu Dhabi, a U.S.-supported, Arab-led initiative to counterprogram against extremist messaging. When I pressed the center's leadership on the need to confront Wahhabi teaching and the mainstream roots of extremism, they blanched. They said it was out of their lane. They were focused on the branches of extremism, not the trunk. But, of course, by then it is probably too late. America, frankly, doesn't have the moral authority or weight to tip the scales in this fight between moderate Islam and less tolerant Islam. Muslim communities and Muslim nations need to be leading this fight. But America--and most notably, sometimes the leaders of my party--also can't afford to shut its eyes to the struggle that is playing out in real time. Saudi Arabia That brings me to the second uncomfortable truth, and I present it to you in a quote from Farah Pandith, who was President Obama's Special Representative to Muslim Communities. In a moment of candor, she commented that in her travel to 80 different countries in her official position, she said, ``In each place I visited, the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence . . . funded by Saudi money.'' The second uncomfortable truth is that for all the positive aspects of our alliance with Saudi Arabia, there is another side to that country than the one that faces us in our bilateral relationship, and it is a side we can no longer afford to ignore as our fight against Islamic extremism becomes more focused and more complicated. First, let me acknowledge that there are a lot of good aspects in our relationship with Saudi Arabia. I don't agree with cynics who say our relationship is just an alliance to facilitate the exchange of oil for cash and cash for weapons. Our common bond was formed in the Cold War when American and Saudi leaders found common ground in the fight against communism. The unofficial detente today between Sunni nations and Israel is a product, in part, of the Saudi-led diplomacy. There have been many high-profile examples of deep U.S.-Saudi cooperation in the fight against Al Qaeda and ISIS. More generally, our partnership with Saudi Arabia--the most powerful and the richest country in the Arab world--serves as an important bridge to the Islamic community. It is a direct rebuttal of this terrorist idealogy that asserts that we seek a war with Islam. But increasingly, we just can't afford to ignore the more problematic aspects of Saudi policies. The political alliance between the House of Saud and the conservative Wahhabi clerics is as old as the nation, and this alliance has resulted in billions of dollars funneled to and through the Wahhabi movement. Those 24,000 religious schools in Pakistan--thousands of them are funded with money that originates in Saudi Arabia. So are mosques in Brussels, Jakarta, and Paris. According to some estimates, since the 1960s the Saudis have funneled over $100 billion into funding schools and mosques all over the world, with the mission of spreading puritanical Wahhabism. As a point of comparison, researchers suggest that the Soviet Union spent about $7 billion--a fraction of that--during the entire period of 1920 to 1991. Less well- funded governments and other strains of Islam just can't keep up with the tsunami of money behind this export of intolerance. Rightfully, we engage in daily castigations of Iran for sponsoring terrorism throughout the region. But why does Saudi Arabia largely get off the hook from direct public criticism from political leaders simply because they are a few degrees separated from the terrorists who are inspired by the ideology their money helps to spread? Why do we say virtually nothing about the human rights abuses inside Saudi Arabia, fueled by this conservative religious movement, when we so easily call out other countries for similar outrageous behavior? Second, we need to have a reckoning with the Saudis about the effect of their growing proxy war with Iran. There is more than enough blame to be spread around when it comes to this widening Saudi-Iranian fault line in the Middle East. I would argue that the lion's share of the responsibility lies with the Iranians, who have been a top exporter of terrorism and brutality for decades. It is primarily Iranian-backed groups who have destabilized places such as Lebanon and Iraq. It is the Iranians who are propping up a murderous regime in Damascus. But in the wake of the Iran nuclear agreement, there are many in Congress who would have the United States double down in our support for the Saudi side of this fight in places such as Yemen and Syria simply because Saudi Arabia is our named friend and Iran is our named enemy. But the Middle East doesn't work like that anymore, and there is growing evidence that our support for Saudi-led military campaigns in places such as Yemen are prolonging humanitarian misery and, frankly, aiding extremism. Ninety billion dollars in U.S. arms sales money has gone to Saudi Arabia during the Obama administration to help them carry out a campaign in Yemen against the Iranian-backed Houthis. Our government says its top priority in Yemen is defeating AQAP, which is arguably Al Qaeda's deadliest franchise, but this ongoing chaos has created a security vacuum in Yemen in which AQAP can thrive and even expand. No expert would dispute that since the Saudi campaign began, Al Qaeda has expanded in Yemen and ISIL has gained a new territorial and recruitment foothold. To make matters worse, Saudi Arabia and some of their GCC allies are so focused on this fight against Iran in Yemen that they have dramatically scaled back or in some cases totally ended their military efforts against ISIS. Under these circumstances, how does military support for Saudi Arabia help us in our fight against extremism if that is our No. 1 goal? Here are my recommendations. The United States should get serious about this. We should suspend supporting Saudi Arabia's military campaign in Yemen, at the very least until we get assurances that this campaign does not distract from the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda or until we make some progress on the Saudi export of Wahhabism throughout the region and throughout the world. And Congress shouldn't sign off on any more military sales to Saudi Arabia unless similar assurances are granted. If we are serious about constructing a winning, long-term strategy against ISIS and Al Qaeda, our horizons have to extend beyond the day to day, the here and now, the fight in just Syria and Iraq. We need to admit that there is a fight on for the future of Islam, and while we can't have a dispositive influence on that fight, we also can't just sit on the sidelines. Both parties here need to acknowledge this reality, and the United States needs to lead by example by ending our effective acquiescence to the Saudi export of intolerant Islam. We need to be careful about not blindly backing our friend's plays in conflicts that simply create more instability, more political insecurity vacuums which ISIS and other extremist groups can fill, such as what is going on in Yemen today. We need to work with the Saudis and other partners to defeat ISIS militarily, but at the same time, we need to work together to address the root causes of extremism. Saudi Arabia's counter-radicalization programs and new anti-terrorism initiative are good steps that show Saudi leaders recognize some of these problems, but they need to do more. Tackling intolerant ideologies, refusing to incentivize destabilizing proxy wars--these are the elements of a long-term anti- extremism strategy, and we should pursue this strategy even if it on occasion makes us uncomfortable. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Senator Coons, thank you for convening us. I think it is important to restate the progress we have made. I know it has been said before, but frankly not enough attention has been paid to the fact that since implementation day Iran has shipped 12 tons of enriched uranium out of Iran and kept enrichment at that 3.67 level, which is significantly below what is necessary to create a bomb. They filled the core of the Iraq plutonium reactor with concrete, preventing them from producing weapons-grade plutonium. They started to allow the IAEA access to the entire nuclear fuel cycle or uranium enrichment, including their centrifuge production shops and uranium mines and mills. Of course, as has been stated before, the IAEA has been given an unprecedented level of access to the entirety of the supply chain leading up to any future potential development of a nuclear weapon. That is an unprecedented level of access that will require an unprecedented level of support. We are talking about an additional $10.6 million per year that the IAEA is going to need to carry out these oversight responsibilities. The United States puts up a percentage of IAEA's funding, but it is still the minority of funding. One development that we need to guard against are attempts in Congress to undermine this agreement in very quiet, subtle ways. There is a bill that has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would disallow the United States from funding the IAEA unless it grants the United States access to the contents of proprietary bilateral arrangements. That would have the results of stripping the funding necessary to carry out this agreement. If the IAEA doesn't get U.S. funding, it simply can't have the purview it has been granted, by virtue of this agreement, of the entire field cycle throughout the country. As important as it is to get the personnel in place who can enforce this agreement, who can root out the ways in which Iran may take money they get by virtue of this deal and support terrorism in the region, it is also important to make sure the IAEA is properly funded as well. Senator Coons, the only comment I would add to this discussion is this. I think for those of us who supported this agreement--I will speak for myself. I supported it because this was the most effective way to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon--period, stop. With this agreement, we were much more likely to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon than we were without this agreement, but we certainly accepted the premise that it is in our long-term security and strategic interest as a country to facilitate the transition of power within Iran from the hardliners who have chosen a path of Iranian foreign policy to be simply a provocateur and an irritant in the region to the more moderate elements who would like to see Iran reengage on big questions of both regional and global security. I don't think you can count on that happening. I don't think anybody should have voted for this agreement or supported this agreement because they were counting on that being the end result, but you have started to see a different level of engagement, whether it is with the release of the prisoners as you spoke about, whether it was about the resolution of the detainment of U.S. personnel, and we will shortly see whether this battle that plays out almost every day inside Iran is ultimately accruing to the benefit of the moderates. We will have elections next month in Iran. I think we should support this agreement because it strips from Iran the ability to rush to a nuclear weapon, and you see the evidence already in the steps they have taken since the implementation agreement, but I think we should read with some level of positive interpretation some of the resolution of crises that we have seen just in the time passed over the course of 2016. That doesn't mean there aren't still enormous issues still at stake, but it is in our security interests, and it was part of the discussion of this agreement to ultimately bring Iran to a place in which the will of the vast majority of that country be expressed in the leaders who speak to the world community. I thank Senator Coons for continuing to bring us down to the floor. I think as important as it is to talk about the positive steps that have been taken since implementation day, it is also important to note that we have a lot of work undone--whether it be funding the IAEA, confirming these important positions--and we have a lot of work to do in terms of remaining vigilant about the quiet, subtle ways that may be undertaken in this body and across the hall in the House of Representatives to try to undermine this deal that is working. Thank you very much.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, let me thank my friend from Ohio for his very constructive remarks on the success of CO-OPs. We have a CO-OP in Connecticut that has been providing very good quality care at very reasonable rates. It is part of what helps make our marketplace function, and I will look forward to working with him as we try to sustain the success of CO-OPs across the country moving forward as an element of the Affordable Care Act which, as I have said many times on this floor, is working.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, today I have come to the floor to speak very briefly about a resolution that the majority leader introduced, I believe, yesterday. This is an authorization for military force that apparently purports to give the President legal authority to conduct military operations against ISIS. Before we break for the weekend, I thought it was important to come to the floor to explain very briefly to my colleagues what this resolution really is. This resolution is a total rewrite of the war powers clause of the U.S. Constitution. Let's be clear about that. It is essentially a declaration of international martial law, a sweeping transfer of military power to the President that will allow him or her to send U.S. troops almost anywhere in the world for almost any reason with absolutely no limitations. Article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution vests in Congress the responsibility to declare war. Many of us on both sides of the aisle have been arguing for over a year that the President--right now-- has exceeded his constitutional authority in continuing military operations against ISIS without specific authorization from Congress. I have been amongst those who have been calling on this body to debate authorization of military force. So in that sense I am pleased the introduction of this resolution may allow us to have a debate on the Senate floor about the right way to authorize war against our sworn enemy, ISIS, a terrorist organization that deserves to be degraded, defeated, and wiped off the map of this Earth. While the ink is still wet on this resolution--so I will not endeavor to go into any detailed analysis of it--it is safe to say that this resolution is the wrong way to authorize war against ISIS. The language of this resolution is dangerous and it is unprecedented. The American people want Congress to authorize war against ISIS, but they also want us to make sure we don't send hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers back into the Middle East to fight a war that has to be won first and foremost with regional partners, and they certainly don't want Congress to hand over the power to the President to send our troops into any country, anywhere in the world, for almost any reason. That is what this resolution would do. It doesn't give the power to the President to deploy U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. It gives the power to the President--without consulting Congress--to deploy U.S. forces in any one of the 60-plus countries where ISIS has a single sympathizer. Even worse, the language doesn't even require ISIS to be present in a country for the President to invade. All that is necessary for the President to be able to argue--with a straight face--is that the threat of ISIS was present. As we have seen in the United States, the threat of ISIS is present in virtually every corner in the world. Thus, this resolution would give the President total absolute carte blanche to send our young soldiers to any corner of the world without consulting Congress. Now, we wouldn't have to worry about a President abusing this authority granted to him if an example of this abuse wasn't in our immediate rearview mirror. This Congress gave President Bush sweeping authority in two resolutions to fight terrorism in the wake of September 11, and he manipulated and abused that authority to send millions of American troops into Iraq to fight a war under concocted, false pretenses. He got an open-ended authorization from Congress, and he ran with it. Now, what did we get for this colossal misrepresentation? Over 4,000 Americans dead, scores more than that crippled, and a region in chaos, in large part because of our disastrous invasion and occupation. On the campaign trail today, several of the candidates for President talked with such irresponsible bravado about throwing around America's military might. The likely Republican nominee, as we sit here today, shows a blissful ignorance about U.S. military law and basic foreign policy that is truly frightening. So given recent history and given the current rhetoric on the Presidential campaign trail today, why would we give the President such open-ended, sweeping authority ever again? And why would we even contemplate a resolution like this one that makes the 9/11 and Iraq war resolutions seem like exercises in thoughtful restraint? Why would we make the mistake of the Iraq war resolution again, especially when there is an alternative? I know that we will likely have time to debate the question of how to properly authorize war against ISIS later. But in December of 2014, the Foreign Relations Committee did vote out an AUMF that gave the President all the power he needed to fight ISIS, while making sure that he had to come back to Congress if he wanted to dramatically expand the current conflict to other countries or to put hundreds of thousands of American troops into a new war in the Middle East. It is the only AUMF that has received a favorable vote by the Senate, and it is a template for how we can authorize a war that isn't totally and completely open- ended. Several have argued for us to take up a debate on the AUMF because we believe that over the last 15 years, over the course of the War on Terror, Congress has basically abdicated its responsibility to be the voice of the people on the conduct of foreign policy. Many of us think that a smart AUMF would get Congress back in the game when it comes to our constitutional responsibility to decide when and where our brave troops are sent into battle. But this resolution, as currently written, would do exactly the opposite. It would permanently hand over war- making power to the President, and Congress would never get it back. It would allow this President and the next President to send our troops almost anywhere in the world for virtually any justifiable reason, with no ability for the people's branch of the Federal Government--this Congress--to step in and to have our say. I do look forward to this debate if it does come to the floor. I think it is an immensely important debate. Frankly, I will be glad to have it. The American public wants us to declare war on ISIS, but they want us to do it in a way that doesn't repeat the deadly, costly mistakes of the past. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. I thank Senator Shaheen for the question. I would hope that regardless of how any individual Senator voted on this deal, we would all be rooting for its success because success in the end is an assurance that Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon. But the results of this Senate failing to confirm Adam Szubin as the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Crimes undermine the implementation of not only this important achievement but also of all our efforts to try to root out the financial sources of terrorism all around the world. The fact is that this gentleman, Adam Szubin, is particularly qualified for the job. There is no one on the Republican side who has raised any individual objection to him. He has been doing the job very well for the United States under President Obama. He was the senior advisor to this appointee under President Bush's administration. He has done and worked in this field under both Republican and Democratic Presidents. It seems as if it is just politics that are holding this up. He is not the only one who is on that list. Laura Holgate has been appointed to be our U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. offices in Vienna, which includes the IAEA. She was nominated on August 5. Her nomination hasn't even gotten out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Wendy Sherman's replacement, Tom Shannon, was nominated on September 18. His nomination is on the floor today. We could vote on that this week if it was our pleasure. If we want this agreement to succeed, if we want to make sure Iran does not get a nuclear weapon, if we want to cut off the flow of funds from Iran to groups like Hezbollah, then we actually have to have people in place to do those jobs. I wanted to quickly come to the floor to make the point that in addition to the important points that are being made by my colleagues about the success so far of the agreement with respect to implementation, if we all are hoping that the end result of this is despite the predictions of many Republicans that Iran doesn't obtain a nuclear weapon, then we have to have these people in these important roles.

Mr. MURPHY. I said that Holgate was August 5, and Shannon was September 18. Adam Szubin has been before the banking committee since April 16. He is a few months away from being before the Senate for almost a full year in a job that we can all agree is one of the most important when it comes to protecting the national security of this country. That is pretty astounding.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, next week we will mark the 3-year anniversary, for lack of a better word, of the massacre at Sandy Hook, CT. Senator Blumenthal will be joining me on the floor momentarily. I wanted to come to the floor to speak to our colleagues for a few moments about what this week will mean to us in Connecticut and the challenge it presents to all of us. I want to open by speaking about one of the young men who perished that day--a little first grader by the name of Daniel Barden. Daniel was a really, really special kid. I talk about him a lot when I am speaking on Sandy Hook because I have gotten to know his parents pretty well over the years, so I feel like I know Daniel pretty well. Now that I have a little 7-year-old first grader at home, too, I, frankly, feel closer than ever before to the families such as the Bardens who are still grieving. Daniel had this sense of uncanny empathy that, now as a father of a 7-year-old, I know is, frankly, not normally visited upon children that age. Daniel just loved helping people in big and small ways; he was so preternaturally outward in his sympathy for others. There is a story his dad likes to tell about the challenge of going to the supermarket with Daniel because when they would leave, Daniel always liked to hold the door open for his family. But then he wouldn't stop holding the door open because he wanted to hold it open for all of the rest of the people who were leaving the grocery store. So the family would get all the way to the car, and they would look back and they wouldn't have Daniel because he was still holding the door open. It was small things like that that made him such a special kid. His father, Mark, wrote one day: ``I'm always one minute farther away from my life with Daniel, and that gulf keeps getting bigger.'' His mother, Jackie, in the months and years following Daniel's death, developed a habit of what grief counselors call defensive mechanisms. She would sometimes pretend that Daniel was at a friend's house for a couple hours, simply in order to give herself the strength to do simple household chores like cooking dinner or returning emails. The only way she could do it is if she pretended for a small slice of time that Daniel was actually still alive. It is hard to describe for my colleagues here today the grief that still, frankly, drowns Sandy Hook parents and the community at large. It is total, it is permanent, and it is all-consuming. But for many of those parents and many of those community members, the grief now is mixed with a combination of anger and utter bewilderment, all of it directed at us, in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. On December 14, Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School armed with a weapon that was designed for the military--designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible. He had 30-round magazines, not designed for hunting or for sport shooting but to destroy as much life as quickly as possible. Importantly, he left at home his lower round magazines. And the design of his weapons worked--to a tee. In approximately 4 minutes, he discharged 154 rounds, and he killed with ruthless efficiency: 27 people shot, 26 dead, including 20 first graders. Here are their names: Rachel D'Avino, 29; Dawn Hochsprung, 47; Anne Marie Murphy, 52; Lauren Rousseau, 30; Mary Sherlach, 56; Victoria Leigh Soto, 27. And the students: Charlotte Bacon, Daniel Barden, Olivia Engel, Josephine Gay, Dylan Hockley, Madeleine Hsu, Catherine Hubbard, Chase Kowalski, Jesse Lewis, Ana Marquez-Greene, James Mattioli, Grace McDonnell, Emilie Parker, Jack Pinto. It keeps going: Noah Pozner, Caroline Previdi, Jessica Rekos, Avielle Richman, Benjamin Wheeler, and Allison Wyatt. There are a handful of kids who aren't on that list, because there were children in Victoria Soto's classroom who were able to escape, likely--as investigators believe--when Adam Lanza had to reload his weapon to put another 30 bullets in it. So 3 years later, as we grieve those 26, we are still having these awful, searing questions to ponder: What would have happened if Lanza didn't have an assault rifle? Would he even have had the perverse courage to walk into that school if not aided by the security of having a high powered killing machine? Would less kids have died? What if his cartridges had six or 10 bullets instead of 30? Would more kids be alive if someone had been able to stop him while he fumbled with another reload? The facts of Sandy Hook are hard to hear over and over, but they are important because they should have educated us on ways that we could come together to make another mass shooting less likely. But we ignored Sandy Hook, and it happened again and again. This year, there have been more mass shootings than there have been days in the year: 9 in Charleston, 5 in Chattanooga, 9 again in Roseburg, 14 in San Bernardino. As I sat at that firehouse with Senator Blumenthal that afternoon in Sandy Hook, as the news rolled into those parents that the children they loved wouldn't be coming home, if someone had told me that day that we would do nothing--that our response as a Congress and as a country would be utter silence--I wouldn't have believed it--no way. But if somebody then told me that it would happen again and again and again and we still wouldn't do anything, I would have collapsed in disbelief. I am going to tell my colleagues, that is how the families feel. Whatever we think is the best way to stop this carnage--changing our gun laws, giving more resources to law enforcement, changing our mental health system to get more help to those who are becoming unhinged and thinking about settling their real or imagined grievances with violence--do something to honor those children and adults. Do something to show there is an ounce of compassion as we sit here 3 years after the bloody massacre at Sandy Hook. Our mental health system is broken. We have closed down 4,000 inpatient beds since the recession began. It is harder than ever for families to get the help they need. If you read the report on Adam Lanza, you will see a very troubled young man who was utterly failed by the behavioral health system that stood around him. Stronger gun laws do work. They absolutely would have prevented some of those kids from dying. And the data is irrefutable. This mythology that you are safer with more guns has zero basis in fact. The data tells us that in States that have tougher gun laws, they have less gun deaths. In States that have higher rates of gun ownership, they have more gun deaths. Stronger gun laws work. To be honest, the burden is not just on us; it is also on the administration. I have called, along with many of my colleagues, on the administration to take some steps, if Congress won't, to make sure that those who are truly gun dealers, though they might not have a brick- and-mortar store--those who are selling guns with frequency at places such as gun shows or on the Internet--have to do background checks, a recognition that they are dealers just like people who have stores in your downtown. So my plea, 3 years after this tragedy that utterly transformed that community, is for us to recognize that there is no other country in the world that would live with this level of slaughter. There is no other nation in the world that would accept 80 people dying every day from preventible gun violence and mass shooting after mass shooting and not even try to fix it. That is what is so offensive to me, and 3 years later that is what is so hard to understand for the families whom we represent in Sandy Hook, CT. If you don't want to believe me, I am going to close the exact same way I closed 2 years ago on the 1-year anniversary. I am kind of ashamed that I have to read this letter again because every single word of it still applies 2 years later, when the epidemic of mass shootings in this country hasn't abated but simply grown. It is from a mom whose child survived, and I will close with it. In addition to the tragic loss of her playmates, friends, and teachers, my first grader suffers from PTSD. She was in the first room by the entrance to the school. Her teacher was able to gather the children into a tiny bathroom inside the classroom. There she stood, with 14 of her classmates and her teacher, all of them crying. You see, she heard what was happening on the other side of the wall. She heard everything. She was sure she was going to die that day and did not want to die for Christmas. Imagine what this must have been like. She struggles nightly with nightmares, difficulty falling asleep, and being afraid to go anywhere in her own home. At school she becomes withdrawn, crying daily, covering her ears when it gets too loud and waiting for this to happen again. She is 6. And we are furious. Furious that 26 families must suffer with grief so deep and so wide that it is unimaginable. Furious that the innocence and safety of my children's lives has been taken. Furious that someone had access to the type of weapon used in this massacre. Furious that gun makers make ammunition with such high rounds and our government does nothing to stop them. Furious that the ban on assault weapons was carelessly left to expire. Furious that lawmakers let the gun lobbyists have so much control. Furious that somehow, someone's right to own a gun is more important than my children's rights to life. Furious that lawmakers are too scared to take a stand. She writes: I ask you to think about your choices. Look at the pictures of the 26 innocent lives taken so needlessly and wastefully, using a weapon that never should have been in the hands of civilians. Really think. Changing the laws may ``inconvenience'' some gun owners, but it may also save a life, perhaps a life that is dear to me or you. Are you really willing to risk it? You-- Speaking to us-- have a responsibility and obligation to act now and change the laws. I hope and I pray that you do not fail. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to congratulate my colleagues on passage of the repeal and replacement of No Child Left Behind, the Every Child Succeeds Act. In particular, I want to thank Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray. It is really an example of how things can work in the Senate when we put our minds to trying to get to good policy instead of simply trying to get to good politics. There is a lot of politics surrounding early childhood education and elementary education. There is a lot of hyperbole out there about the role the Federal Government should play in local education--issues such as the common core. Yet we were able to set aside all of those potentially inflammatory and toxic politics and get to a bill that despite those challenges has broad consensus from Republicans and Democrats. It ends up in a place that is really going to support a lot of teachers, students, parents and administrators out there. When you look at that vote tally, it is impressive. It is a piece of legislation that has been able to unite progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans. In many ways it is a credit in this Chamber to debate that Senator Alexander and Senator Murray set us upon. They were determined to get to a product that both parties could support. When you start with the idea that we can achieve a bipartisan solution, rather than your starting point being having a debate in order to maximize political impact and political division, it is miraculous what we get. We can all be blamed for falling into that trap far too often. Mr. President, like you, my entire life has been spent in and around public education. I went to Connecticut's public schools. My mother was a public school teacher. My wife is a former public school teacher. I have two beautiful boys--one of whom is in the public school system as well. As it is for many of us, this conversation is deeply personal. It is also deeply personal for me as someone who is going to raise two boys in a country whose greatness depends more than ever on the quality of our public schools. The reality is that when my great-grandfather got off of a boat and showed up in New Britain, CT, he was guaranteed to get a good job in one of the ball bearing factories there, regardless of his education. He could get a good wage, a pension, and a decent health care benefit without a lot of skills that he couldn't learn on the job inside that factory. Of course, our economy has radically changed since those days. We are lucky that we have declining unemployment. We are lucky we continue to grow jobs, as we have over the course of the last several years. They are totally different kinds of jobs than were available to my forefathers, immigrants who came to this country from places such as Ireland and Poland and worked in those factories. We now have jobs that require highly skilled professionals. We are competitive globally, not because of the price of our workforce but because of the productivity, competence, and educational level of our workforce. We are more dependent now than ever on the quality and capacity of our workforce, which is, of course, dictated by the quality and capacity of our educational system. So getting an education policy right is not just about serving kids; it is about serving our economy. The fact is, we have been doing a disservice to students and teachers all across America since the passage of No Child Left Behind. This is a law that by and large was a disaster for us in Connecticut. I am somebody who believes that a strong Federal Government can play a beneficial role in people's lives, whether it is smoothing out the rough edges of the financial system, building roads and bridges, or protecting America from attacks, but the Federal Government has not done a good job in guaranteeing universal, quality education. Why? Because bureaucrats in Washington ultimately have a hard time intersecting with the provision of a service which has largely been administered at a local level. The prescriptive rules that were inherent in No Child Left Behind haven't matched the realities of how Connecticut assesses schools and student performance or how we think it is best to turn schools around. No Child Left Behind did at least have one redeeming quality. The legislation required an assessment of every single student no matter where they lived, what their background was, or what their learning ability was. The law did shed light on some unjustifiable, unconscionable disparities that existed in this country, and it put pressure on school districts and States to address those disparities. The law brought attention to the fact that there were disparities, such as the fact that the graduation rate for African Americans in this country is 16 points lower than that of their white peers. The results showed disparities with Latino fourth graders. Only 25 percent of them are meeting expectations for their grade level in math, which is half the rate of their white peers. The law also shed light on the practices within school districts, such as school discipline. If you are an African American and commit the exact same offense in this country inside of a school, you are twice as likely to get suspended or expelled as your white peer. No Child Left Behind forced us to understand, recognize, and address those disparities. The challenge with this repeal and rewrite was to hand control back to States and local districts without removing the imperative to identify those disparities and cure them. I voted against the version of this bill that was originally passed by the U.S. Senate, and I did so because I labored under the belief, as a member of the HELP Committee, that it is not worth passing a national education law if it isn't also a civil rights law. I wasn't convinced that we had that balance in the bill that initially came before the Senate. I am grateful to Chairman Alexander, Ranking Member Murray, Representatives Kline, Scott, and others who managed to get that balance right in the conference committee. Today we were able to pass a bill that is both a proper return of authority to the States and a preservation of civil rights protections that are going to guarantee the perpetuity of the small, positive legacies of No Child Left Behind. What we have in the bill is a recognition that school systems should identify the 5 percent of schools that are the lowest performing schools and have specific plans to attack those schools and turn them around. Those interventions will be decided at the local and State level rather than at the Federal level. There is a requirement in this bill to identify what we call dropout factories--schools in which a disproportionate number of students show up freshman year but don't graduate. Similarly, States have to have a plan to turn those schools around, dictated by decisions that are made at the local level. Lastly, this bill contains a provision that requires us to continue to track the performance of certain subsets of students, whether they are minority students, disabled students, poor students, or non-English speaking students. Again, it requires those vulnerable populations that may not be hitting the goals that are set by the State or school district to have interventions to try to do better. All of the accountability will occur locally, but the mandate is to pay attention to those lower performing schools or those populations that sometimes get the short end of the stick within a school system or State educational system and ensure that they get special attention. I think this is the right balance. This is a bill that rightfully returns power to States and school districts but retains civil rights protections that have been the foundation of our Federal education policy since the 1950s and 1960s. I am also happy that there were a number of other civil rights wins in this bill. States have to note on their report cards indicators of school climate and safety. They have to disclose rates of suspension and expulsion, school-based arrests, and referrals to law enforcement so we can get a better handle on whether minority students are being treated fairly when it comes school discipline policies. States have to submit plans on how they will reduce the use of discipline practices that threaten student safety, including seclusion and restraint. Increasingly, school districts are relying on the restraint of kids by binding their hands and feet or the seclusion of children by locking them in padded rooms as a means of discipline. In almost all cases, those means of discipline make the underlying behavior worse, not better. They disproportionately affect disabled kids and children with autism whose school districts unfortunately don't understand their students' issues as well as they should. This legislation will require States to submit plans as to how they will reduce the use of seclusion and restraint. Finally, this bill retains the requirement that every kid, regardless of learning ability, should be expected to meet the same standard. This bill still allows for 1 percent of students to take an alternate assessment, but it requires the majority of special education students, or students with learning disabilities, to be tested against their nondisabled peers. They will have to compete against their nondisabled peers in the workforce, so they should be measured against their nondisabled peers while they are in the school system. Those are all important wins as well. In the end, as someone who was educated in the public school system and spent his lifetime around teachers, I know that No Child Left Behind not only sucked the effectiveness out of schools, but it also sucked the joy out of learning and teaching because so much of it was driven toward that test which became the only measurement of what a good school is. I am a parent who is deeply involved in looking at schools and deciding which one is right for my kid. While I pay attention to the test scores that come out of that school, that is not the beginning and end of my analysis. I take careful pains to meet with the administrators, talk to other parents, look at their curriculum, and look at other measurements, such as attendance and graduation rates, in order to build a full picture of what a good school is. Now States will be able to devise systems of measuring schools that mirror the way almost every responsible parent measures schools--in a comprehensive, robust way that doesn't just look at that test. Perhaps more importantly, as we try to grow a healthy economy that recognizes the strengths we have and the quality of our workforce under this new law, the Every Child Succeeds Act, we will be able to create a new generation that will have great innovators, great leaders, great mold breakers, and not just great test takers. Congratulations to Senator Alexander and Senator Murray, and many others, like Senator Booker and Senator Warren, who worked closely with me on the accountability provisions. This is a really important day for teachers, students, and parents all across the country. It is also a pretty good day for us when we get to come together and do something very important in a bipartisan pay way. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 5 minutes.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am here to join my colleagues in our call to bring for debate and vote on the Senate floor a measure that is supported, I would argue, by probably 95 to 99 percent of my constituents, and that is the simple idea that if you are on a terrorist watch list, if you are suspected of being involved in terrorist activities, you shouldn't be able to purchase a gun. I will be asking for a unanimous consent agreement in order to move this debate to the floor. Here is why it matters. What we know right now is that over the last 12 months ISIS has lost about 25 percent of their territory in Iraq and Syria. That is not good enough, and hopefully we will be able to join together to put even more pressure on the so-called caliphate, to shrink it down eventually to elimination. But the growth of ISIS is dependent on two narratives. One is a narrative that the so-called caliphate is growing, and second, the narrative that the East is at war with the West, that the Muslim world is at war with the Christian world. As the first narrative becomes less powerful, the second one becomes even more important. So, as shocking as Paris was, as shocking as San Bernardino was, it is not surprising in the respect that these attacks outside of Syria and Iraq are now becoming more important, more necessary to this terror organization in order to perpetuate this second set of mythology around the Islamic world being at war with the Christian world. Now is the moment that Republicans and Democrats have to come together around hardening our country from potential attackers and potential attacks and recognize that because these attacks may be more important than ever before to the future expansion of ISIS, we have to take steps to make sure they don't occur. One of the simplest ways we can do that is embodied in Senator Feinstein's piece of legislation. Let's just say together that those who are on the terrorist watch list--and this is a list you get on if you have reason for the FBI or other law enforcement to believe you are affiliated in some way, shape, or form with a terrorist organization. You may not have committed a crime yet, but you have had communications or affiliations with terrorist organizations. Let's just agree that people on that list should by default be prohibited from buying guns. Importantly, the bill has in it provisions that would allow for those individuals to get off that list, to be able to say that they were put on it mistakenly. But let's say as a default premise that if you are on a terrorist watch list, you shouldn't be able to purchase a gun. Recent polling tells us that the vast overwhelming majority of Americans support this law. In addition, the vast overwhelming majority of American gun owners support this law, in part because they have seen statistics. It bears repeating. My colleagues have talked about these numbers, but they really are stunning. Over the last 10 years, someone on the terrorist watch list has attempted to purchase a weapon 2,223 times. In 2,043 of those instances, they were successful in purchasing the weapon, taking it home. That is a 91-percent success rate. It may be that 1 or 2 of those 2,000 shouldn't have been on that list, but this legislation gives them the power to contest that and to get off that list eventually, as it should. But let's not live in a fantasy world in which the majority of people on that list shouldn't be there. The list isn't foolproof, but the vast majority--95 percent, 99 percent--of those on the terrorist watch list are there with reason, and they shouldn't be able to walk out of a store with a weapon. That is why three-quarters of gun owners and 90 percent of Americans support this legislation. While today it has become partisan--Republicans are standing almost in lockstep against a bill that stops terrorists from getting guns-- historically this has been bipartisan. This was initially proposed by President Bush and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Let's make it bipartisan again. Today on the floor of the Senate, let's decide that we are going to have a debate on this and that we are going to bring it for a vote because that is where the majority of our constituents are. They want us to take steps together to stop terrorists from getting guns.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 551 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; I further ask that the bill be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, it is my understanding that this substitute would require the Federal Government to go to court in order to stop someone on the terrorist watch list from purchasing a weapon. As a default, we should all agree that if you are on the terrorist watch list, you can't walk out of a gun store with a gun and that it simply shouldn't be incumbent on the Federal Government to go through a court process in order to stop you from doing that. If you shouldn't be on the list, there are ways you can get off the list. But there is absolutely no reason to delay the process of stopping one of these would-be terrorists from getting a gun by requiring a complicated court process every time someone on the terrorist watch list walks into a gun store. For that reason, Mr. President, I object to the motion to modify.

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, Mr. President. The Senator is correct that last week Senate Democrats thought that it was more important to talk about terrorism than it was to talk about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act for the 16th time in the U.S. Senate, 55, 60 times in the House of Representatives. We did think it was more important last week to talk about stopping terrorists from getting weapons. I am sorry we didn't find that bipartisan consensus last week. What we are talking about here today is a different threat than we have ever seen before, and what we want to do is to stop terrorism before it happens. The Senator from Texas is right that many of the individuals on the terrorist watch list have not committed a crime, but in order to get on the terrorist watch list, you have to have been in communication with those who are trying to create radical jihad here in the United States. By denying those individuals from getting a weapon, you are serving to prevent a terrorist attack from happening. Why would we wait until after the terrorist attack has occurred in order to stop that individual from buying a gun? It is too late at that point. This bill includes provisions to get off that list if you are not on it, so it is perfectly observant of our tradition of supporting the rights of law-abiding citizens to buy and purchase a weapon. But to suggest that the only pathway to stopping an individual from buying a weapon is a criminal prosecution when we know there are people right now in the United States who are in contact with radical ideologies and may be contemplating attacks against the United States misunderstands the way in which we are going to prevent future terrorist attacks from happening in this country. This notion that those of us who want to change the law in order to better protect Americans are capitalizing on a tragedy is ridiculous and it is insulting, frankly. There are a lot of people who say: Well, when it comes to guns, you can't talk about policy changes right after a mass shooting. On average, there has been a mass shooting every single day in this country. If you had to wait 24 hours or 48 hours to talk about strategies--such as preventing terrorists from buying guns--that would keep this country safe after a mass shooting, then you would never talk about ways to keep this country safe because every day there are mass shootings separate and aside from the 80 people who die each day from the drip, drip, drip of gun violence all across this country. I don't think any of us mean to suggest, as the Senator from Texas said, that those who oppose this bill, which is supported by three- quarters of American gun owners and 90 percent of Americans, are rooting for terrorists to get guns. That is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that those who oppose this are more concerned with protecting the rights of potential terrorists than they are with protecting this country. That is what we are talking about. We are worried about the rights of people on the terrorist watch list more than we are about taking steps to protect this country. What we are talking about is a temporary inconvenience. If somebody is on this watch list who shouldn't be--and it is a very small number--then through this legislation they have a means to get off that list. They have to wait a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks, in order to buy a weapon. A tiny number of people who are inconvenienced is the cost; protecting the country from a potential terrorist attack is the benefit. That is a trade that my constituents would take in a heartbeat. I am sorry that we aren't able to proceed with debate on this bill, but I think I can speak for my colleagues that we will be back on the floor in the days, the weeks, and the months to come to continue to ask for a vote on simple legislation to make sure that potential terrorists cannot get their hands on dangerous life-ending weapons. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, when President Clinton proposed his health care bill in 1993, Republicans were so upset that they came up with a radical idea. This radical idea was to give tax credits to poor people to buy private insurance, to set up an insurance exchange where they could do that, to ban preexisting conditions, and to include an individual mandate--in short, the Affordable Care Act, built by Republicans, many of them still in this Chamber today. At the heart of that proposal was the idea that people should get a tax cut in order to be able to buy private insurance. At the heart of the underlying Republican amendment is a gutting of that ability of individuals to go out and buy private insurance for themselves. This amendment is pretty simple. It says that at the very least we can come together on the idea that we should preserve those tax credits for the most vulnerable--for pregnant women, for victims of domestic violence, for people suffering from heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's. At the very least, we can come together and decide to protect those tax credits--a Republican idea at the genesis for those vulnerable individuals. I urge adoption of the amendment.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act for purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 2918.

Mr. MURPHY. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor to speak to the debate that is happening now on reconciliation, specifically, the fact that we are here for the 16th time in the Senate debating the repeal of all or significant parts of the Affordable Care Act, and stack that on top of the 50 to 60 times this has been debated--the repeal of all or major parts of the Affordable Care Act--in the House of Representatives. As many of us have said over and over, we think the debate over repeal is over and that we should, A, accept the success of the Affordable Care Act and, B, to the extent that there need to be changes made, do it on a bipartisan basis--find the ways we can work together to try to perfect a law that is by and large working. The data only tells one story. I want to review it for a moment because if you hear many of my Republican colleagues talk, they act in the absence and in the denial of the overwhelming evidence that tells you the Affordable Care Act is working. There are 17 million Americans who have insurance today who didn't have it before the Affordable Care Act. They have gotten it either through these exchanges, these private health care exchanges with a tax credit from the Federal Government or they have gotten it through Medicaid expansion. We have reduced the number of people without health care insurance in this country by 30 percent in the few first few years of implementation. That is with many States doing everything they can to undermine the act. That is with many States refusing to accept the expansion of Medicaid coverage that could make that number even greater than 17 million or 30 percent. In my State of Connecticut, where we have been aggressively trying to implement the Affordable Care Act, we have actually reduced the number of people without insurance by 50 percent. The total numbers in Connecticut are pretty extraordinary, given the short amount of time we have had and given the fact that in Connecticut we had a pretty robust Medicaid Program to begin with. Overall costs to the Federal Government are under control for the first time in many of our lifetimes. The average medical rate of inflation to the Federal Government is about 2 or 3 percent. The overall rate of medical inflation is the lowest since 1960. That is because the Affordable Care Act is transitioning payments away from volume-based payments, rewarding you for the more medicine you practice, to outcomes-based payments, rewarding you for keeping your patients healthy. Quality is getting better. You look at a broad array of metrics. Things such as hospital readmission rates or hospital acquired infections are all going down. Let's be clear, the Affordable Care Act was not designed to fix every single problem in the health care system. There are still going to be problems, there are still going to be anecdotal failures, but if you are working to undermine the act in your State, you are going to have more problems with your health care system. When I hear my colleagues come down to the floor of the Senate and complain about hospitals closing in their State, when their State is actively rejecting Federal money that would help expand Medicaid and provide more people walking into hospitals with reimbursement attached to them, there is more than a hint of irony to that complaint. If you want your health care system to work, then implement the Affordable Care Act. Amendment No. 2875 Senator Johnson is offering an amendment which could be of particular harm to the people in my State and in neighboring States. His amendment would allow for plans that don't comport with minimum coverage requirements of the Affordable Care Act to continue to be offered. Before I relinquish the floor, I wish to speak for a moment about this particular amendment. There is a little boy named Kyle from Simsbury, CT, whom I have talked about before on the floor. Kyle requires injections that cost about $3,000 per dose, and he has to take them three to four times a week for the treatment of a blood disorder. Because his previous insurance plan had an annual lifetime limit, his treatment threatened to bankrupt his family. That fear is no longer a reality for his family because the Affordable Care Act says if you want to offer an insurance plan in this country, it has to be a fair plan. It can't have annual or lifetime limits, and it can't charge you more because you are a woman. It has to cover basic medical necessities, such as maternity coverage. The requirement of having insurance plans provide actual insurance that doesn't discriminate against a person based on their medical history or gender not only allows people to have access to health care they didn't have before, but it has given millions of families like Kyle's family peace of mind. The Johnson amendment would take that peace of mind away from millions of families by allowing for plans to go back on the market throughout the country--plans that would cap coverage on an annual or lifetime basis and that could once again discriminate against you based on your gender or medical history. There may be a lot of parts of the Affordable Care Act that people support or don't support. But the one thing that the people of all parties have generally supported is the idea that we should put patients and consumers back in charge of their health care, instead of the old days when the insurance companies were in charge and would tell you that you have insurance, but then halfway through the year, just because you used a lot of it, yank it away from you. There are a number of reasons why we should reject this specific amendment, but on behalf of the millions of families like Kyle's out there that don't want to go back to a world in which their insurance companies could take away their coverage just because they needed it more than other families, their stories alone are example enough to reject this amendment. I hope that we can move on from this debate and try to work together--Republicans and Democrats--to perfect the Affordable Care Act and that we can get beyond this perpetual, ongoing, never-ending debate about repeal. Specifically, with respect to the Johnson amendment, let's think about all of those families that have been jerked around by insurance companies for far too long and need relief that the Affordable Care Act has given them. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I wish to speak about Friday night for a few moments. In Connecticut, on Friday night the world really did stop. Thousands of people in my State watched their television set or their smartphone as images like this one poured in from the blood-soaked streets of Paris: horrific reports, scores dead, more badly wounded. Deep down, in Connecticut, we ached deeply for Paris's loss. Maybe it is because for those of us who hail from the former colonies, we feel a special sense of brotherhood with the French. In my boyhood town of Wethersfield, CT, I grew up a stone's throw from the tavern where Washington and Rochambeau met to plan their campaign against the British. We pain for France because of 250 years of friendship and also because we know, unfortunately, exactly what they are going through. That ominous sense of familiarity and that perverse bond among nations that have been visited by mass terrorist attack are part of the reason why we ached so acutely on Friday night, over the weekend, and into this week. But also, these pictures cause us pain because we fear this isn't the end of the mass slaughter. We grieve because the massive scale of this particular attack, on a nation that already had its antenna tuned for a potential attack, made us realize how vulnerable we still are today to a similar assault. The threat of another large-scale extremist attack just became so much more real for millions of Americans who had, frankly, begun to settle into an understandable comfortable complacency, a decade and a half since that last major terrorist attack just miles from Connecticut's border. In Connecticut, to be honest, people are mad and they are scared. Having watched all of this coverage, I understand why. But images such as this also move the people of my State. These are two little kids, Ralia and Rahaf, 7 and 13 years old. This is where they sleep at night, on the streets of Beirut. They went there from Damascus after their mother and their brother were killed by a grenade. Along with their dad, they have been sleeping on the streets for over a year. Rahaf, who is 13, says she is scared of the ``bad boys'' in Beirut on those streets at night. When she talks about that, Ralia starts crying. I don't want to cast with a broad brush all of the people of my State, but I think I can safely say that their hearts ache for pictures like this, for images such as the one of the 3-year-old boy--just about the same age as my youngest son--who washed up limp and dead on the beach in Turkey. My neighbors are not comfortable living in a country that simply turns its back on little kids who have been ravaged by torture and rape, dying from barrel bombs and executions and slipshod escape vessels. There has been a lot that has disturbed me about the debate here in Washington, across the country, and on the cable news channels since Friday's massacre: the hyperpartisanship, the concern for one religion over another, the refusal to wait for facts before jumping to policy conclusions. Maybe what has disappointed me the most is the suggestion that the people in my State or the people of this country or this Congress need to make a choice between acting on concern for this image or acting out of concern for this image. The suggestion is that if your priority is protecting us from a Paris-style attack, you can't show compassion for those two little kids. If you want to show compassion for these innocents, then you compromise national security. Here is the truth: Not only are these two priorities not mutually exclusive, they are actually interdependent. There is simply no choice to be made between protecting this country and helping the victims of terror. We can take steps together--Republicans and Democrats--to make sure terrorists do not get into this country, and we can continue in the best traditions of America to be, as our Statue of Liberty says, a home for ``your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.'' How do I arrive at this conclusion that we can do both, that we can protect our country and respond to the victims of terror in Syria? First, I asked the questions my constituents are asking: How can we be sure refugees fleeing Syria aren't going to pose a risk to the security of the people who live in my State in Connecticut? Yesterday I sat through two exhaustive briefings to seek the answer to this question, and here is what I learned. There is no one who comes to the United States, in any immigration category, that receives a more comprehensive and exhaustive background check than refugees: biometrics, international background checks, interviews, fingerprints-- a process that takes anywhere from 18 months to 2 years to make sure we get it right. It is exhaustive, and it is probably why of the nearly 2,000 Syrian refugees who are resettled in the United States this year, not a single one has been connected to terrorist activity. The other reason for this, as I learned yesterday, is because the profile of the refugees we are prioritizing for entry into the United States tells the story as well. We largely bring women and children, the frail and the sick, those who have been beaten, raped or tortured by terrorists--the ones who simply cannot survive in the refugee camps. It means that of all the Syrians who are already here, only 2 percent of them are young, single males. We aren't bringing into the United States the type of people who fit the profile of those who could pose a danger to us. The second reason I have concluded that ending the refugee program really will not make us safer is because of conversations I have had with experts about the nature of ISIS itself. I don't think you can argue that ISIS has been contained. Paris showed us ISIS can be lethal anywhere, anytime. Over the past year, ISIS has proffered two narratives to its recruits. The first is that this so-called caliphate is expanding. It is an unstoppable, inexorable force that challenges young Muslims to get on board now before it overtakes them by force. The second is this narrative that there is a war between the West that is left over from Iraq, left over from Afghanistan, left over from the aftermath of Sykes-Picot, left over from the Crusades. It is this idea that the Western World is out to destroy the East, they argue, and we have to fight for our survival. The first narrative is still strong, but it is not strong as it used to be. ISIS isn't expanding its territory in the Middle East anymore. They have 25 percent less territory than they did last year at this time. The second initiative now actually becomes more important, and the Paris attacks are evidence of this. Indiscriminate attacks on civilians in a place like Paris are designed, in part, to provoke a response from the West to feed this argument over a clash of civilizations. That doesn't mean we shouldn't respond, it doesn't mean we shouldn't respond forcefully, but it should wake us up to the reality of the necessity of this us-versus-them narrative that is essential to the growth of ISIS. The story of the Christian world's marginalization of the Muslim world is the nourishment that feeds the growth of ISIS. That is what makes our response to the Syrian humanitarian disaster interwoven into our strategy to defeat ISIS. Turning our back on those who have been tortured and raped and battered and beaten by Bashar al- Assad, after having welcomed massive refugee flows from Cuba and Vietnam and Bosnia, feeds straight into this radical Sunni argument that we are at war with Islam. Imagine the glee in Raqqa when they see postings of American politicians arguing we should take Syrian refugees but only the Christian ones and not the Muslim ones. That is a story line that is an ISIS recruiter's dream. None of this is to suggest we shouldn't be taking the fight to ISIS in Syria and Iraq. I have been a vocal supporter of the thousands of bombing runs by American planes, of our efforts to support the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga as they seek to kill as many ISIS fighters as possible. Fighting ISIS inside Syria and Iraq is absolutely necessary in order to defeat them. So we engage in that fight with the knowledge that our involvement may also help with recruitment. We weigh the benefit against the cost and we fight. When it comes to turning away the victims of terror inside Syria, if we are able to build a system that screens out any Syrians who pose a threat to the United States, then the meager benefit can never outweigh the costs of feeding this anti-Muslim narrative. Now that narrative is more important than ever to sustain ISIS. Here is the most important point to make. The people I represent don't believe we can just stand still in the wake of Paris, even if they believe the screening program is robust enough. They may be convinced of this, but they are certainly right that we can't accept the status quo. My worry over the past week is that this hyperfocus on the refugee program that has only brought in 2,000 immigrants last year--mostly women and children--misses the forest for the trees. The Visa Waiver Program brings in 20 million people a year--not 2,000--20 million people. It has background checks, too, but nothing like what is applied to refugees. There is a good reason for this difference, because the countries that are part of the Visa Waiver Program are our allies--countries we can generally rely on--but with several of the Paris attackers bearing EU passports, making them eligible for the Visa Waiver Program, this sense of security we have had with these countries has been shattered. If we want to have a real conversation about changing our immigration laws to better protect this country, then focusing on 20 million lightly vetted visitors rather than 2,000 highly vetted visitors sounds like the better approach. There is absolutely room to make the Visa Waiver Program stronger. There are a myriad of security information sharing agreements between the United States and Europe and among countries within Europe that have not been executed. Now is the time to demand that these agreements, like the umbrella law enforcement agreement between the EU and the United States, be executed, be signed. Now is the time for both the United States and Europe to require that every EU nation modernize their protocols for uploading law enforcement and anti-terrorism information onto the databases that we use to compile our no-fly list. If these agreements aren't signed or these protocols aren't updated, then we need to consider whether an unreformed Visa Waiver Program is still in our national interests. If our goal is really to keep America safe from infiltration of terrorist groups, this reform is the most important one we can make to our immigration system, and it should bring together Republicans and Democrats. Every day that I go home to my 7-year-old and my 4-year-old, I am reminded that my most sacred duty here is to enact policy that keeps them safe and keeps my constituents safe. The hundreds of calls and emails that my office has received since Friday reinforces for me this commitment, but I live in a nation like no other. I live in the United States of America, a nation that in the late 1800s had emerged from Civil War to become a beacon for the oppressed and the repressed all over the world and millions showed up on our shores--people like my Irish and Polish ancestors--and a nation that was spreading its wings over the world, beginning to understand the impact for good that we could have. It was during that time that the poet Emma Lazarus called America ``The New Colossus.'' The feeling was that we were capable of a greatness, a bigness of both achievement and heart that the world had never witnessed and exceptionalism, one that still burns bright today. The argument that America cannot both protect itself and protect those who are fleeing terrorism feels so small. It feels so contrary to this idea of exceptionalism that has been at the foundation, at the root of the American story. It feels very weak. In fact, the moments where we have made choices solely out of fear to marginalize others are moments we now regret. We interred Japanese Americans in camps because we were at war with Japan or hesitated to take Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis out of fear that some might be spies. In hindsight those measures did not reflect on who we really are as a nation. The America I live in does not settle for false choices that make America look and feel small or powerless. We can save the terrorized and protect ourselves from being terrorized at the same time. In fact, we have to do the former to accomplish the latter. In doing so we can come together as a Congress and as a country to make good policy and to recall that sense of American exceptionalism that caused Emma Lazarus's poem to end up on a statue that was sent as a present to the United States from France as a reminder of our unbreakable bond with them. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, we are in the beginning stages of open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act, which extends through January 31, 2016. I wanted to briefly come to the floor today to make sure the body knows that over the course of the next 2\1/2\ months their constituents will have an opportunity to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars by shopping around and finding the most affordable plan available to them but to also make everyone aware that despite the overwhelming success of the Affordable Care Act--the uninsured rate in this country has dropped by 30 percent since its inception only a few years ago--there are still some who have not gone onto the exchanges and found a plan that can bring them into the ranks of those who now have affordable insurance for the first time. This is an important period for people across this country, but it is also a moment for us to reflect on what has happened over the course of the last 2 years, especially given all of those who were naysayers, all those who predicted the country would fall apart or at the very least the health care economy would fall apart after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Of course, the exact opposite has happened. We have seen a dramatic reduction in the number of people who don't have insurance. We have seen people be able to gain enormous savings on the amount of money they spend on health care. We have seen the amount of money the Federal Government spends on health care dramatically reduced--a $1.2 trillion savings over the baseline when the ACA was passed, the amount of money the Federal Government is projecting to save over a 10-year period of time. We have seen quality get better. Indicators--from hospital readmissions to infection rates--are all going in positive trendlines because, of course, the Affordable Care Act isn't just about getting people access to affordable care, it is also about transforming our payment system away from one that just bases our reimbursement system on the amount of medicine practiced to one that is actually rewarding the quality and outcomes that are gleaned as a part of our health care system. It is a triple whammy. More people have access to affordable care; we are spending less money than we had planned to spend, by dramatic numbers, from the Federal perspective; and we are getting better quality outcomes. Lots of us have ideas about how we can improve the Affordable Care Act, and we hope that with the legislative fights behind us and with the judicial fights largely behind us, we can now focus on ways to perfect this law. But there is no question that it is returning enormous benefits to people across this country. Here is just another quick way to look at it. As shown here, this is the percentage of uninsured by county across the country. Here is 2013. You can see that in almost every county, we have north of 16 percent uninsured. But look how quickly these numbers change. Look how quickly almost every county, at least in the sort of vast swath of territory from the Northwest across to the Northeast, moves down to 2015, where we have majority sections of the country with close to 10 percent uninsured--a 30-percent national reduction in the number of people without insurance. We still have these big gaps where people are in the coverage gap, people who are making so little money that they don't qualify for Medicaid but also can't get into the subsidies, but this is enormous progress all across the country. We can make more progress, and a lot of that comes through consumers being educated during this open enrollment period as to the choices in front of them. Here are some stunning numbers. Eighty-six percent of current enrollees--people who are on Affordable Care Act plans today--can find a lower premium plan at the same level before tax credits by returning to the marketplace to shop for coverage. If every consumer in the country went back and shopped for the lowest cost premium plan at the same level, the total savings across the country would be $4.5 billion. The average consumer--let's say you bought a silver plan last year and you decided to shop for a better deal this year--can save about $52 a month. That results in a savings of about $625 a year. So shopping can save you money. You might be satisfied with your plan--and the satisfaction numbers are pretty remarkable. Seventy-five percent of people who are on the exchange today report being wholly satisfied with their plan, which is, frankly, a higher satisfaction level than for those who are on private insurance outside of the exchanges. But even if you are satisfied, go back and look at the plans that are available to you. You can find a plan that will get you the same coverage for lower costs. Let's make sure people are getting that return on their investment. The good news is that there is more choice out there than ever before. Every year since the inception of the Affordable Care Act, plans have been added to these State-based and Federal exchanges. The average number of issuers on an exchange was 8 in 2013 and then 9 in 2014 and then 10 in 2015. So choice for the average consumer is increasing. Now, there are certain areas in which choices maybe stayed the same or maybe in some areas choices have been reduced, but on average across the country, you have more choices today than you did before, so there is no excuse not to go back out and try to find a plan that saves you some money. In Connecticut, we are probably the poster child for effective implementation of the Affordable Care Act. We are a small State. We have a congressional delegation of only five in the House of Representatives. Yet we have had 700,000 Connecticut residents who have obtained health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, either on the exchange or on Medicaid. We have gone from an 8-percent uninsured rate--so we were already on the low end--down to a 3.8-percent uninsured rate. That is a remarkable number over the course of just a few years. We only have so much progress we can make when we have under 4 percent uninsured, but we have a goal of putting 10 to 20,000 people on the Affordable Care Act over the course of this open enrollment period. Nationally, because we have made so much progress, the goals are going to be modest compared to years past as well, but the point of coming down to the floor today is to say that at this point in the implementation, when we have made such great progress, we want to continue to try to kick down the uninsured rate. But the real benefit in open enrollment is going to come not simply by reducing the number of people without insurance but by making sure that everybody is on the plan that best represents their financial and medical needs. Again, that number--across the country, $4.5 billion could be saved between now and the end of January--is pretty remarkable. This Senator has been on the floor a number of times, along with my colleagues, to talk about the simple premise that despite all of those who have been rooting for the Affordable Care Act to fail, it has worked. It has worked from an empirical basis and an anecdotal basis. The statistics don't lie. There are dramatic reductions in the number of people without insurance, dramatic reductions in the pace of health care inflation, and dramatic improvement in the quality of medicine being practiced across the country. We all have stories of individuals from our State whose lives have been transformed by this act. There are parents who no longer have to worry about their children being locked into a future dictated by their illness, cancer patients who now know they are going to be able to have access to an affordable product and will never be denied access to health care just because of their illness, and taxpayers who see a trajectory of health care spending that is not going to bankrupt this country as fast as it would have had we not put changes inside this act. So open enrollment is open until January 31, 2016. I encourage all my Republican and Democratic colleagues to get the word out about this. Everyone has constituents who can benefit. Whether or not you support the Affordable Care Act, it is the law of the land and your constituents can benefit from it. We should all be out there talking about the potential for our constituents collectively to save almost $5 billion if they shop on Affordable Care Act exchanges between now and the end of January. Thank you. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Massachusetts. We spend a lot of time here on the floor of the Senate talking about how our States are different. That happens in the House of Representatives where I served as well. But there is one thing that certainly unites all of our States and, frankly, one thing that unites all of the front desks of our Senate offices, and that is this: We have all been flooded with phone calls from the thousands upon thousands of constituents in each one of our districts who are furious that they are going to get no increase in Social Security at the beginning of next year. Despite the fact that prices for virtually everything that fixed income seniors are paying for are going up, they are getting absolutely nothing to try to compensate them for those cost of living increases. We are hearing from people like Kevin in Bridgeport, who said: Dear Senator Murphy, I am a lifelong resident of Bridgeport. . . . I am 63 years old . . . living on SSDI due to a rare disease of the spinal cord. . . . Since my only source of income is SSDI, I am concerned about the recent announcement that there is going to be no COLA increase for 2016. If there is anything you can do to reverse this decision, millions of Americans like myself would be greatly helped and greatly appreciative. Or there is Fred from Wolcott, who said: I understand the lower gas prices have kept the CPI lower with the result [being] no [Social Security] increase in 2016. Many of us do not drive or drive a limited amount and the lower gas prices do not place additional funds in our pocket. Meanwhile, the cost of beef, chicken, eggs and milk etc., the things we live on have risen, and have reduced our purchasing power. Many on Social Security have no other form of income. Adeline of New Fairfield, CT, says: My husband and I were very disappointed that we did not receive our cost of living raise in our check. . . . Please let that be the last time. With all the medical deductibles and food and clothes and taxes going up, it gets discouraging. . . . We are up in age and not in the best of health and because of that we are unable to get a job. [Social Security is what we depend on.] These stories can be multiplied millions of times over, and all over our districts. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to sit here, as we do with issue after issue, and offer no response to the millions of our constituents who are telling us that they are going to have trouble making ends meet? Or are we going to make a choice? Are we going to make a choice to end an unjustifiable loophole that allows corporations to hand over millions of dollars to their CEOs virtually tax-free or are we going to invest in the millions of seniors and disabled across this country who are going to have a hard time living and making ends meet if we don't make the change involved in the piece of legislation that we are announcing today? The SAVE Benefits Act is going to save the lives of seniors who without a cost of living increase are going to have trouble affording medication and food. It really comes at no cost to the corporations that are right now receiving an unjustifiable tax benefit--one that Congress really never intended. Congress passed and has accepted as part of our tax law for 20 years this provision that doesn't allow companies to take a tax benefit for salaries over $1 million. It is not surprising that companies found a way around that provision because it exempted performance-based pay. So bonuses and stock options could be handed over with full tax benefit, and that became the standard for compensation packages. All of a sudden it wasn't about salary any longer, and it became about this performance-based pay. You live in a world today in which there is this perverse system--the more corporations pay their CEOs, the lower their tax bill is. It is not going to hurt corporations to simply have to pay taxes on the bonuses above $1 million that they send to their CEOs and big executives. They are going to continue paying their CEOs a lot of money. A lot of them live in Connecticut. I don't have any fear that there is going to be a rapid diminution in the amount of money that CEOs are making, but at least those companies will pay taxes on those exorbitant salaries. We will be able to use that money to make sure that their customers--the people who are buying the goods that these big companies make--actually have the purchasing power with which to enter and be active in the economy. I guess that is the piece of economics that I will end on here. By putting $50 more a month into the hands of frail, poor seniors and disabled, you are providing an enormous economic benefit to the economy, because all of that money is going to go into the economy. Let me tell you what a senior living at or below the poverty line is going to do with $50 a month. They are going to put it into food. They are going to put it into medicine. They are going to put it into Main Street businesses. The fact is that when you decide instead to subsidize salaries of above $1 million, that money isn't going back into the Main Street economy. Maybe a portion of it is, but a lot of it is ending up in giant accrued pensions and savings accounts or in offshore investments--not in the Main Street economy. This is not just the right thing to do for these seniors who are crying out to every single one of our offices to do something about this unjustifiable lack of a COLA, but it is the right thing to do for the economy at large because the money is going to find its way into all sorts of crevices and corners of this economy that badly need that kind of infusion. I wish to thank Senator Warren for introducing this legislation. I wanted to come down to the floor to lend my voice to it and for it on behalf of the hundreds and hundreds of seniors in Connecticut who are contacting and calling our office asking for the Senate to do something. With that, let me yield to my colleague and friend from Connecticut, Senator Blumenthal.