Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. I thank Senator Durbin very much. This article is a few years old, but it underscores his point. Here is the opening line of an article from CNBC on this question of salaries for the CEOs of for-profit universities. The article opens by saying: ``Forget Wall Street and Silicon Valley. If you're looking to rake it in post-graduation, set your sights on the executive floor at one of the nation's for-profit colleges.'' That is an article from CNBC detailing the fact that in their article--again this is a few years old--the salary of the head of Phoenix University was $11 million, and the CEO of Bridgepoint, another national for-profit university, was making over $20 million a year. You can say to yourself: These are private, for-profit companies. Why should Congress be in the business of caring what the CEO of Phoenix University makes or what the CEO of Bridgepoint or ITT or DeVry makes? Harry Truman made his name as a critic of wartime profiteering. LBJ made his name as a young Member of Congress doing the same. Their idea was that it is all well and good to make yourself rich in the most dynamic capitalist economy in the world, but it is another thing to be getting rich off the taxpayers. It is another thing to be making your fortune almost exclusively coming from sources of money that really is all of our constituents' money in the form of the taxes they pay. That is what we are talking about today. What we are talking about are executives who are getting rich off of companies that are 90 percent funded by the U.S. taxpayer because this 90-10 rule we talked about is an important rule for these companies. They run their revenue right up to the limit. So for many of these for-profit universities, their revenue is 70, 80, 90 percent from the taxpayers of the United States, and their CEOs are making $11 million, $12 million, sometimes $20 million a year. Listen, I am all for people making a million dollars. I have a lot of people in Connecticut who are making $20 million, but if we are being good stewards of the taxpayers' dollars, we should be wary of those who are making their fortune off of the Federal dole. That is what is happening today. Senator Durbin, I just wanted to add in this conversation a note of accountability. That is one of the things that used to unite Republicans and Democrats. Frankly, the Republicans, I admit, cared more about accountability in Federal dollars than sometimes the Democrats did. It was the Republicans in the second Bush administration who started attaching strings to education dollars that were flowing out of Washington to make sure there was actually quality attached to the money that was coming from U.S. Federal taxpayers, but that era seems to be over. Unfortunately, we don't have a bipartisan consensus on accountability. We are about to approve a budget that a lot of Republicans and a lot of Democrats will vote for that will send $140 billion in higher education aid to universities all across this country. It will come with almost no strings attached. It will come with almost no expectations that schools give a degree to kids that will actually get them a job or attempt to keep them in school so they can get some return on investment for the money we are all paying to them. Senator, you might have talked about it already today, but the numbers of for-profit colleges that just came out today are absolutely stunning. I don't know if you talked about the ``Trends in Student Aid'' report that just came out today from the College Board. Here is an amazing statistic. What this survey says is that borrowers who don't graduate from public and private nonprofit 4-year schools default at about the same rate as borrowers who do graduate from for- profit schools. Think about that. You are just as likely to not be able to pay back your student loan if you get a degree from a for-profit school as if you had dropped out of a not-for-profit school. Here are the numbers: 14 percent of for-profit graduates default; 15 percent of not-for-profit 4-year college nongraduates default. That is a really stunning number. Yet we are just sending money willy-nilly out to these schools that are not putting students in degrees. Why are they not putting students in degrees? Because they are marketing themselves in a way that just does not square with the job market today. As part of one of these attorney general lawsuits--there is a litany of stories about the abusive marketing techniques of these for-profit universities. One of them said: I told the enrollment representative that I did not want to sign the loan unless I was guaranteed a job because I knew that I would not be able to pay it back. She told me that the school placed 99 percent of the students and they could guarantee a job after I finished my externship. She told me that I would be making between $18 and $20 an hour after completing the program. No worries about the loan. She told me career services could place me in a job and that she makes sure everybody who enrolls gets placed. These are the claims that are being made. So it is frankly not surprising, when you have these for-profit universities enrolling thousands of kids in video game design degrees, that you are just as likely to default on a loan if you graduate from some of those worthless programs as if you don't graduate from a not-for-profit university. So last Congress, Senator Schatz and I, joined by Senator Murray and Senator Sanders, introduced a piece of legislation that would start to require some real outcomes from universities. We applied it to for- profit and not-for-profit universities. We said: You have to show that you are giving kids a chance to succeed and get a job, that you are keeping your tuition at reasonable levels. If you do that, then you can continue to get title IV dollars. But if they don't, we are not going to continue to send money to these schools that simply are not producing graduates who are ready to compete or that are deceptively drawing students in based on claims that just do not wash out in the end. So, yes, we have to shut down these fraudulent institutions like Corinthian. But we could just make a decision, Republicans and Democrats, to put some additional accountability standards on title IV dollars, apply it to for-profit and not-for-profit schools, and say: If you have a certain number of students who are defaulting, you are not going to continue to get title IV dollars. If you have a rate of tuition increase that is way above that of the national average, you are not going to continue to get title IV dollars. We know by statistics that this would put a good number of for- profits out of business. It might even touch a handful of the lower performing not-for-profits. But it should be something on which both sides can come together, just some basic accountability for higher education, a basic accountability for the $140 billion we send, because this does not make sense. It does not make sense to pad the pockets of these CEOs who are making $20 million a year off of our taxpayers when they are not delivering results that are actually making our economy better. Thank you, Senator Durbin, for bringing us together here. I hope that as we debate the Higher Education Reauthorization Act in front of the HELP Committee--I think Senator Alexander is very interested in some of these debates. So we are going to add some accountability standards. We are talking about these for-profits, but if we really are being good stewards of the taxpayer dollars, we should expect some results.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I wish to congratulate March Farm, a fourth generation family farm from Connecticut, on its 100-year anniversary. Since 1915, when Thomas and Rose Marchukaitis put down $2,500 to buy 114 acres of land, the March family has worked hard to produce delicious and healthy fruits and vegetables for the people of Connecticut. March Farm, like many of Connecticut's nearly 6,000 farms, is small and family owned. Situated in beautiful Bethlehem, CT, they have a growing community supported agriculture business that now has about 90 members receiving regular crates of produce. They have worked hard to implement efficient, modern farming practices, even as they eschew chemical pesticides and use environmentally sensitive pest mangagement practices. These practices and the bucolic setting they are located in are part of the reason they were recently named Connecticut's ``best farm/orchard experience'' by Connecticut Magazine. Many of my colleagues may be surprised to think of Connecticut as a farming state, but I am glad to report that farming is alive, well, and growing at home. The movement towards locally produced fruits and vegetables and a growing awareness among consumers about healthy, sustainable food choices has supported a nearly 60 percent increase in the number of farms in Connecticut since the 1980s. And many young people, like Ben March, are leaving desk jobs to rediscover the fulfilment of farming, reinvigorating this vital sector. These farms are an integral part of the fabric of our communities, but they need our help to continue to thrive. Although small farms like March Farm make up fully 90 percent of all farms in the United States, large operations account for the vast bulk of production and sales of produce nationwide. Small family farms face a number of challenges, not least slimmer profit margins and higher risk. I will continue to fight for small, local farm supports such as beginning farmer and rancher grants and robust farm safety net programs. March Farm is an example of the best of Connecticut, and I wish them continued success over their next 100 years.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, let me associate myself with the remarks of Senator Baldwin and Senator Portman. I thank them for making this bipartisan clarion call to bring this body together on behalf of students. There are over 6,000 students in my State of Connecticut. I believe Senator Blumenthal is going to give some remarks as well to add Connecticut's list of schools and to debate this issue on the floor. We have over 1,000 students at the University of Connecticut, over 700 at Yale University, 600 at the University of Bridgeport, 500 at Central Connecticut, and 400 in Eastern Connecticut. All across Connecticut, students are able to attend college because of the Perkins Loan Program. As one of the few Members of the Senate who is still paying back my student loans, who is also saving as fast as I can for my two boys who will hopefully go to college, this debate we are having today strikes me as crazy. We should be having a debate about how we expand access to college. Instead, we are simply trying to protect the existing access we have. In 10 years the United States has gone from the No. 1 country in the world with respect to the number of 25- to 35-year-olds with college degrees to number 12 in the world. In 10 years we have gone from first to twelfth. The answer for that is the cost of college. The cost of college is making it unaffordable for people to start and unaffordable for many others to complete it. The Perkins Loan Program is one that doesn't require any additional expenditure of taxpayer dollars. Those 6,000 kids in Connecticut will get to continue to attend college with Perkins loans, with no additional obligation on behalf of taxpayers. That is as good a deal as we can get--no additional expenditure from the Federal Government and hundreds of thousands of kids all across the country--6,000 of them in Connecticut--get to continue in college. I simply wanted to come to the floor to express my bewilderment that the Republican leadership is standing in the way of simply preserving the student loan programs that are on the books today. If we go back home to our districts, we are not going to hear from a lot of people who are sympathetic to this argument. They want Congress to be talking about how to make college more affordable. They would be as bewildered as many of us are that Republicans in the Senate are trying to make college less affordable, when there is absolutely no additional expenditure required in order for us simply to preserve the Perkins Loan Program as it currently exists. Let me just add one story to the mix--the story of Amanda, who is a senior at the University of Hartford. Her family makes about $67,000 a year. People are going to be familiar with her story because that is just a little bit too much for her to be able to qualify for a Pell grant. So she has to work two different jobs to put money on top of her Stafford loans, to put money on top of the contribution her parents make, just to get into the neighborhood of being able to afford college, but what makes that final difference for Amanda is the Perkins loan. The only reason she is able to go to the University of Hartford is because of the Perkins loan. She is doing everything we ask. Her parents are putting in some money, she is taking out loans, and she is working two jobs. She says: I can't imagine how difficult it would have been if federal funding sources such as the Perkins loan had been eliminated as options for me. I've utilized the Perkins loan offered to me, in the full amount, every single year to resolve my account balance. Even now, in my senior year, I have no choice but to work two jobs and I'm barely getting by. Without the Perkins and other financial aid, I truly believe that I would have had to transfer to a community college where I would not have been able to accomplish nearly as much as I have here at the University of Hartford. On behalf of her and the six other students in Connecticut who will lose their Perkins loan eligibility as long as this Republican objection lasts, I hope it will come together. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am on the floor today to join my good friend from Louisiana, Senator Cassidy, as we formally introduce to the Chamber the Mental Health Reform Act of 2015. I thank him personally for all the time he has put into this not only as a Member of the Senate but previous to this as a Member of the House of Representatives. This effort is patterned after a bill Senator Cassidy and my namesake, Representative Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, worked on for years in the House of Representatives. I wish to begin by sharing a story with you--that is the way Senator Cassidy ended. I will talk about a woman from Bloomfield, CT, named Betsy. She has a 28-year-old son, John, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder. It is a serious mental illness whose signs began showing when John was 15 years old. He was hospitalized--think about this--15 different times between the ages of 15 years old and 18 years old, generally only for time-limited stays ranging from about 5 days to maybe 2 weeks. Despite the severity of the condition, he was told upon discharge there was really nowhere for him to go, no permanent solution for this young man. He was just an adolescent, but his parents were told there was no place for him to be treated. What resulted was not only John getting to a breaking point but his parents as well. As we know, serious mental illness doesn't affect just the individual person, it also affects family members who are trying to care for them. Without needed supports and services, John became increasingly remote and psychotic until he was hospitalized again. Upon discharge this time, John went to a shelter--the only place he could go. Since he couldn't follow the shelter's rules, John, whom his mother said was ``young, fragile, vulnerable and mentally unstable,'' was kicked out to survive homeless on the streets. John finally--finally--was able to get a bed at a place that was able to house him for longer than 2 weeks, Connecticut Valley Hospital. That ability to get John stabilized for a longer period of time, get him into a real treatment plan, allowed him to then transfer into a community bed in Middletown, CT. That is where John is today. John has been living successfully out in the community for 3 years. But we spent millions of dollars on John's care, which led to no better outcome for him. We wasted millions of dollars and potentially thousands of hours of time because he was shuttled in and out of hospitals without any long-term treatment and without any hope for him and his family. What Senator Cassidy and I are trying to say is that there is a better way. We are already spending billions of dollars on inadequate mental health care in this country. We need to do better, but a lot of this is just about spending money in a more effective way. One of the programs our bill helps fund is an early-intervention program for individuals who show their first episode of psychosis. The program the National Institutes of Mental Health just evaluated--with findings released yesterday--was the RAISE Program. And in Connecticut we run a similar program called the STEP Program. What this study showed yesterday is that if you provide wraparound services to an individual who shows a first episode of psychosis--comprehensive, immediate services--you can get a dramatic decrease in the number of episodes they show later in life. In Connecticut, we found that the STEP Program reduced hospitalizations by nearly 50 percent after individuals were given those wraparound services immediately. When they did need hospitalizations later on, they were on average 6 days less than when you didn't provide those wraparound services. These are the types of programs that could have helped Betsy's son John early so that he could have started his recovery as a teenager rather than in his twenties. They could have saved the U.S. Government and the State of Connecticut a lot of money as well. The trendlines beyond the anecdotes are very disturbing. Mental illness has been on the rise for the past few decades. One out of five adults today is coping with mental illness. If you look at the time period from 1987 to 2007, the number of people with mental disorders who qualify for SSI has risen by 2\1/2\ times. From 1980 to 2000, we put up to 72,000 people in our jails who prior to deinstitutionalization would have been in psychiatric hospitals--people who are in jail primarily or only because of their psychiatric disorder. Just in the last 2 years alone, the number of people that HRSA estimates to be living in a mental health shortage area has gone from 91 million--that is pretty bad to start with--up to 97 million. That is just 2 years of data. Since 2005, we have closed 14 percent of our inpatient beds in this country. So what is happening is a dramatic increase in the number of people who are suffering from mental illness and a rather dramatic decrease in both outpatient and inpatient capacity. We have to provide more resources to meet the demand, but we also have to spend money better. Senator Cassidy covered our piece of legislation accurately, so I won't go into detail, but I wish to talk about our process. What we decided to do at the beginning of this year was bring together all of the groups--the provider groups, the advocacy groups, the hospital groups--who have worked on this issue for years and then bring in those in the House of Representatives who have been working on this as well: Representative Tim Murphy and Eddie Bernice Johnson. They have a bipartisan reform bill in the House. We decided not to start from scratch but to take their piece of legislation, knowing that it has a good chance of passage in the House, and try to build on it and improve it. We spent 6 months meeting with all of these groups and coming up with our own consensus product that today has the support of a cross-section of behavioral advocacy groups all across the country, including the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the National Council for Behavioral Health, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, social workers, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the list goes on. We also went out to our colleagues as well, knowing that nothing in the Senate can pass without not just bipartisan support but bipartisan support that reflects the diversity of both of our caucuses. We think we were able to build a good foundation of cosponsors for this bill: Senators Franken, Stabenow, Blumenthal, and Schumer on the Democratic side, and Senators Murkowski, Collins, Vitter, and Capito on the Republican side. We hope that this coalition of groups on the outside, this alliance with a reform effort in the House that we believe has legislative legs, and a good one-for-one with some cosponsors in the Senate, will allow us to move this bill forward, and we have to. We have to. So I will end where Senator Cassidy began his remarks, which is why the Nation's attention has turned to this question of how we reform our mental health system. We lived through a tragic and gut-wrenching episode of mass destruction in Newtown, CT. Senator Cassidy has had his own experience with mass tragedy. The reality is that the reasons why we see these episodes of mass shootings are complicated, but if you read the report on Adam Lanza's intersection with Connecticut's mental health system, you will see that it failed him. It failed him and it failed his family. I don't know that correcting the mental health system alone would have changed what happened in Newtown, but I know that if we fix our mental health system, we will have a downward pressure on the episodes of mass violence that happen in this country. But, as Senator Cassidy said, we should fix our mental health system because it is broken for everyone, regardless of whether an individual has a predisposition towards violence, because, of course, the reality is that people with mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of violence than they are to be the perpetrators of violence. So there is no inherent connection between mental illness and violence. But these mass shootings have drawn the Nation's attention to what Congress can agree on right now that will try to improve public safety across this Nation. We are not going to get a background checks bill this year. I hoped we could, but we won't. What we can get is a mental health reform bill, and that will help everyone--the case in Maine, the individual in Bloomfield, and millions of others who have had a miserable experience with a mental health system that is broken today, in part because of lack of coordination and in part because of lack of funding. I am so thankful to Senator Cassidy for being with me on the floor today. I am grateful for his friendship and for his cooperation on bringing this truly bipartisan Mental Health Reform Act to the floor of the Senate. We recommend it to our colleagues. We look forward to the upcoming hearings in the HELP Committee that we both sit on, and we hope to be back on the floor of the Senate as soon as possible to move forward on its passage through this body. I say thank you to my colleague in the Senate, Senator Cassidy. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, democracy doesn't work like this. Democracy doesn't work such that 90 percent of the American public can support the pretty simple concept that you should not get a gun if you are a criminal and have Congress ignore its will. Democracy doesn't work like that. As Senator Schumer said, this is really about making sure the American public are engaged at the highest level and are making it absolutely clear that silence in the face of these mass murders, silence in the face of young men and women--predominantly young men getting gunned down in the streets of our cities every day--isn't acceptable. We are hopeful that over the course of the next several weeks and months Congress is going to hear loud and clear that our silence has effectively become an endorsement for these murders. I know that is hard to hear. But the reality is that when the Nation's most esteemed deliberative body does absolutely nothing in the face of this slaughter--we don't even hold one single public hearing--those whose minds are becoming unhinged start to think that those in charge have quietly endorsed it, because if they didn't, they would be doing something about it. The outline that we have laid before our colleagues today is reasonable, commonsense, and exists side by side along with the protection of the Second Amendment, and we should adopt it as quickly as possible. But at the very least, we should get started on a conversation about how we can end our silence on this issue. I live every day with the memory of standing before the parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School on that morning on which 20 first graders were gunned down. I live every day with the thought of a young man, disturbed in his mind, walking in with a military-style assault weapon, and in less than 5 minutes, killing every single little boy and girl that he shot. Twenty little boys and girls were shot in under 5 minutes. Every single one of them was dead because of the power of that gun, because it was being loaded by cartridges of 30 bullets at a time. It is something no hunter needs in order to enjoy his sport or his pastime. I talked to my first grader this morning as he was heading off to school. I told him that I was coming to talk about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. He looked at me with this vision of puzzlement.

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I ask for 1 additional minute.

Mr. MURPHY. He didn't understand why it was already the law of the land. A 7-year-old had enough common sense to know that criminals should not be able to own guns. As he went off to his first grade classroom--not unlike the first grade classroom that those little boys and girls walked into in December of 2012--I was reminded of the fact that if little boys and girls in a quiet town in Connecticut or young men and women in a quiet town in Oregon are not safe, then my son is not safe either. In the face of political opposition, which is real, that is why we are coming together to say: Enough is enough. It is time for us to understand that without a change in the law, the reality on the ground for those who are being affected by this plague, this epidemic of gun violence, will not end either. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, let me thank Senator Blumenthal for being such a great partner. He and I have traveled a very long journey together since September of 2012 when we both stood together at the firehouse in Sandy Hook, CT. We have become evangelical in our belief that this mass slaughter has to stop. On Friday we all stopped for a moment and we sent our sympathies to those who were killed in Portland: Lucero Alcaraz, Treven Taylor Anspach, Rebecka Ann Carnes, Quinn Glen Cooper, Kim Dietz, Lucas Eibel, Jason Dale Johnson, Lawrence Levine--he was the assistant professor there--and Sarena Dawn Moore. Mr. President, 274 days this year and 294 mass shootings. We are averaging one mass shooting--multiple people being shot at one particular moment--more mass shootings than we have days in the year. Of course, for us, this shooting and the information that came out in the aftermath of it was particularly chilling because we have seen this young man before. The young man, Christopher Harper-Mercer, was isolated, withdrawn, and obsessed with guns. His family had many of them. He had rebuffed attempts at socialization by his family. He had grievances that he mainly shared with himself. He eventually turned those grievances on nine people who died and about an equal number who were injured. We know that story because we saw it play out in Connecticut as well--a mentally ill individual, a young man who became isolated from his friends, his community, and his family, who had a rather large store of weapons, and who then took out his frustration and his outrage on 20 little kids at Sandy Hook Elementary. But I guess to me what is definitional about this scourge of mass violence is not necessarily what happened on Friday but what happened the day after, on Saturday. On Saturday there were likely another 80 people killed by guns all across the country. That is about the number we run every single day. Every day there are a handful of exceptional stories, stories that make your heart turn, that make your gut cringe. On Saturday there was an 11-year-old boy who confronted his 8-year- old neighbor in Tennessee over the fact that she would not let him play with her pet bunny. When she protested and said she did not want him to play with it, he marched back into his house, got a shotgun, walked back over to her, and shot her with a shotgun. How on Earth did an 11- year-old boy get that quick access to a shotgun? How on Earth have we gotten into a moment in which a dispute over whether you can hold a little pet bunny turns into a murder? What I can tell you is that I guarantee that scene does not play out in other countries in this world, that 11-year-old boys don't shoot 8- year-old girls with shotguns in Sweden or Japan or in Great Britain. We know that because what is happening here in the United States is exceptional. This rate of 80 people being lost to guns every day, this normalization of mass shootings, is exclusive to the United States. We have a gun homicide rate in the United States that is not twice the average of other OEDC countries, it is not 5 times, it is not 10 times, it is 20 times the average of our first-world competitor nations. We have to ask ourselves, what is different about the United States? What is different about life here, the way in which we resolve disputes, from all of these other nations that have gun violence, gun death rates that are 20 times lower than the United States? Let's be honest about one thing. It is not that the United States has higher rates of mental illness than other countries. It is not that our mental health delivery system spends less than other countries. There is no more mental illness in the United States than there is in any other industrialized country. Some studies will tell you that we spend more on mental illness treatment and behavioral health treatment than any other country. Yet gun deaths are 20 times what they are in other countries. It is not because we lack for protection. Our malls and our churches and our movie theatres are not any less protected or less secure than those in other countries. We invest in law enforcement at a same or greater rate than all of these other nations. What is different? What is different here in this country? What is different is that we are awash in guns. We are awash in illegal guns. We celebrate weapons that are designed exclusively to kill other people, and we collect them and show them off for sport, military-style assault weapons, cartridges, drums of ammunition that hold 100 rounds, whose utility is only associated with ending life. That is what is different. That is what is different about the United States. I will admit that the solution is comprehensive because I will be the last person to tell you that fixing our mental health system will not have a beneficial effect on the rates of gun violence. Adam Lanza and Christopher Harper-Mercer were deeply troubled individuals who were ill-served by a behavioral health system that was far too opaque and complex for them. Law enforcement needs more help on the streets of New Haven and New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. All those things will help. But what distinguishes America from the other parts of the world that have much lower rates on gun violence is not investment in law enforcement and is not our rate of mental illness. So we have to have this conversation about our laws that allow for this flow of high- powered guns and illegal guns onto the street. Senator Blumenthal and I are going to join together tomorrow to introduce what we think is a modest measure to ensure that no guns get sold to people who cannot pass a background check. Walmart does it today. They say: We won't sell you a gun unless you can pass a background check. But unfortunately many other retailers take advantage of a loophole that allows for 72 hours to pass without a background check, which then allows them to sell a gun. We just think there should be a simple premise. If you can't pass a background check, you shouldn't be able to get a gun--getting a green light to walk out of a store with a weapon that can kill people. But that is just one brick in the wall. There are a series of other measures that enjoy 90 percent support in this country, whether it be making sure people who are subject to spousal restraining orders cannot buy a gun during the period of time in which they are under a restraining order or just expanding background checks to gun shows and Internet sales or just giving more resources to the background check system so they can make sure they upload the proper records. Mental health is part of the solution. It is not a substitute for the reform of our gun laws, but it is part of a solution as well. I am proud to join with Senator Cassidy to introduce the primary comprehensive mental health reform legislation on the floor of the Senate. It has 10 cosponsors at this moment: five Republicans and five Democrats. We think you should fix the mental health system because it is broken, full stop, but we also understand it will have a downward effect on gun violence. I wish to close by echoing the sentiments of Senator Blumenthal. We are going to introduce our legislation tomorrow, and we are hopeful it will be taken up by this body. What we really worry about is that this silence from Congress has become complicit. I know that sounds like a very hard thing to say-- that sounds very hyperbolic--but let me walk you through why I have come to believe that the failure to act in the wake of these mass shootings has made us complicit in them. I think these young men--and it is not all young men, but it is mostly young men--these young men whose minds are becoming unhinged and are contemplating mass violence, they take cues from the total, complete, absolute silence from Congress in the face of mass shooting, after a mass shooting. If the Nation's top elected leaders, the people charged with deciding what matters in this Nation, don't even try to stop the mass carnage, then these would- be shooters reasonably conclude that we must be OK with it because if a society doesn't condone settling a grievance with a gun, wouldn't the people in charge of it at least try to stop it. But we don't try--and that is what is most offensive. That is what truly turns my stomach. We just lived through a summer in which 4,000 people died on the streets of this Nation, and this body is sending a loud, clear signal that we don't care--we don't care. Nine more people died on Friday--another mass slaughter--and we are back to normal this week. We are going to debate the Toxic Substances Control Act this week. I don't deny that is probably a very important piece of legislation, but we are acting as if there isn't an epidemic of preventable murder happening in this Nation and that it is getting worse. Somebody wrote last week that the gun control debate ended the day after Sandy Hook because that was the day America decided it was OK to murder 20 first graders. I know that is not the message my colleagues are intending to send, and we appreciate all of the sincere notes of sympathy that have been sent over the course of the last 2 years, 3 years, to Newtown and those that went out on Friday to Oregon, but words are beginning to become meaningless. The tweets aren't helping. I would argue they are becoming a cover for cowardice. It is not a coincidence that America has a gun violence rate that is 20 times that of any other competitor nation. We are doing something wrong here and the whole reason we draw our paychecks is to make wrong things right. If we cannot do something--a background check law, a mental health bill, more resources for law enforcement--if we cannot do anything to try to stop this soul-crushing, life-extinguishing violence, then we might as well go home. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I am here on the floor this afternoon to talk about a young man named Billy Smolinski and a law that Senator Hoeven and I are introducing on behalf of him, his family, and, quite literally, the millions of other families throughout the United States who have had to deal with the trauma, angst, and grief of a loved one gone missing. I will begin by telling everyone a little bit about Billy Smolinski. Billy's parents don't think that he is alive any longer, but they aren't sure because on August 24, 2004, at the age of 31 Billy went missing. Billy was a vibrant young man who lived in Waterbury, CT, along with his treasured dog. When he didn't respond to calls and communications from his family over the course of a number of days, his parents--and I will speak about his mother in particular, Jan Smolinski, who has been the driving force behind Billy's Law--contacted the Waterbury Police Department. The Waterbury Police Department is a great police department, and I have a lot of friends there, but even they will admit they really screwed up this case from the beginning. They told his parents that he probably didn't go missing, that he was just running away from his personal problems. One officer stated that Billy was probably ``drinking a beer somewhere in Europe.'' The Smolinskis pressed their case over and over, day after day, and after 2 weeks of asking for help from the police department, the Smolinskis were finally able get an investigation started, but it went slowly. DNA samples were submitted and lost. It took 4 years before the police department ever actually searched his car to see if there was any information about what happened to Billy. Billy's case made a lot of news in Connecticut and Waterbury, and over the course of the last few years, it has taken twists and turns, but he has never been found. His parents suspect he has been killed, but law enforcement hasn't made progress on that potential case either. Over the course of the last 11 years, Billy's parents encountered obstacle after obstacle when they tried to be helpful and participate in the investigation and search for Billy Smolinski. They came to me at that time, as their Member of Congress representing Waterbury, CT, to discuss ways in which we here in Washington could take down some of the barriers they faced. What they reluctantly found, as they became a part of this big national network of families who have had loved ones go missing, was that their story was not unique. Their story of finding obstacles at the local police department and nationally was not unique and unfortunately all too common, as they tried to figure out what happened to Billy. What they were connected into was a national network of tens of thousands of individuals who were searching for a missing loved one--a missing father, mother, brother or sister. Nationwide there are as many as 90,000 active missing persons cases at any given time, and there are some really simple things we can do to help families who are trying to find their missing loved one. Much of the attention, rightly, goes to missing children. Missing children have an entire set of laws built up around them, and for good reason, our priority lies in finding them. Law enforcement, within a matter of hours, has to post information about missing children onto national databases. There are specific campaigns waged on billboards and media outlets to immediately find missing children. But our focus on finding missing children shouldn't absolve us from the responsibility to help families such as the Smolinskis to find missing adults as well. Senator Hoeven and I have gotten together on a fairly simple piece of legislation, and I wish to talk about it today. A companion piece of legislation is being introduced in the House by my colleague in Connecticut, Representative Elizabeth Esty, and Congressman Ted Poe of Texas. I will explain what this piece of legislation does. At its foundation, it strengthens the database system that families access to try to find their missing loved one. Currently, there are two databases. One is a law enforcement database, which is called NCIC, and the other one is a public-facing database called NamUs. These two databases very often aren't talking to each other, and therein lies the primary problem this bill tries to solve. Law enforcement uploads all sorts of information onto NCIC, but the net data often doesn't get transferred over to the database that the families can access, which is called the NamUs database. Why is that important? It is important because families are the supersleuths in cases of missing persons. Families are the ones who know all of the detailed and intricate information about the circumstances of a disappearance and the identification of their loved one. I don't mean to get too gruesome, but think about this statistic. There are 40,000 sets of unidentified remains in the country today. Think about that. There are 40,000 sets of unidentified remains in the country, but because not all of that information--the detailed descriptions of those remains--is uploaded onto a database that the public can see, Billy's body may be out there somewhere, but his parents can't find him because they don't have access to the information. Unfortunately, that is the reality and the problem that we are trying to solve. If you get more information that law enforcement has onto a public database, the supersleuths--the parents, brothers, and sisters--will have more access to it. What about information that law enforcement has about an individual who has gone missing--a report of someone who has gone missing in California and whose information is not uploaded onto a database that a family who is looking for that information in New York may want? This legislation authorizes NamUs permanently in law and then requires that the two databases be connected. Law enforcement, rightly, has a concern that any information that is sensitive to an open case should remain private, and this legislation allows for the FBI to determine what information has to remain private as part of NCIC and what information goes onto the public database. But connecting those databases will give more information to families such as the Smolinskis to try and crack these 90,000 cases that are out there today. The legislation also opens up a relatively modest but important training program for police, coroners, and medical examiners to make sure they are using these databases and putting this information online. The databases don't work if the information is not getting uploaded. If the data from the coroner's office isn't up on the database, there is no way a family from across the country can access it to try to find the final resting place of their loved ones. So this legislation authorizes a small new program that would provide training to those medical examiners, coroners, and police departments to try to make sure that information is getting up on the law enforcement database, the NCIC. Remember, they put up all the information about missing kids right away, but as we heard in the case of Billy Smolinski, they often don't put that information up about missing adults. Some of these police departments are tiny. They don't have the resources to train their personnel on how to do that, and this program would allow them to get that. In the end, we can crack a lot of these cases--thousands of these cases--if we are able to simply give tools to these families so they could participate in the search and tools to law enforcement so they can talk with each other. The Smolinskis have not given up. Jan has come down to Congress to testify on behalf of Billy's Law. She has changed the practices of the Waterbury Police Department and has even gotten laws passed in Hartford to make sure that other police departments don't make the same mistakes. She wants to make sure those mistakes aren't repeated across the country. She thinks about what would have happened if that information about Billy had been uploaded onto NCIC immediately, the day she reported it. Maybe Billy was taken to some other State. Maybe the lack of that information being transmitted that day meant that a break in the case didn't happen in those early days. She always thinks about what would have happened if she had access to more information--if the database that she looks at virtually every day, the NamUs database, had more information about missing persons and unidentified remains. She thinks about her ability to solve this case and how it could have helped the police solve this case if those databases were better or more up to date. We hope we are eventually going to solve the case of Billy Smolinski's disappearance in Connecticut, but we also hope that we can pass legislation here in both Houses--bipartisan, noncontroversial, measured, commonsense--that will assure that there are less Jan Smolinskis in the world going forward. We passed this in the House, when I was there, with a broad, big bipartisan vote. This is the first time we introduced it on a bipartisan basis here in the Senate, and I am hopeful--speaking on behalf of not just the Smolinski family, but the 90,000 other families who are grieving for a missing person--we can get this done and get it done shortly so we can get families and law enforcement the tools they need to crack more of these cases. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, over the course of the summer we have watched with horror as thousands more have died in Syria and Iraq, and the debate over what we should do about it has been omnipresent here in the Senate and in the House. We have held hearings, appeared on television to tell our story of how we should respond, and talked about it on the floor of the Senate and the House. Similarly, we have watched the conflict continue to persist in eastern Ukraine. Although they have not had the same number of casualties as we have seen in Syria and Iraq, they have had similar death and destruction, and we have responded with a vigorous debate on the floor of the Senate--again, hearings in committees, letters to the President, bipartisan pieces of legislation that have been proposed--about how the United States should seek to reduce the amount of casualties in a place like eastern Ukraine, and we are also debating what our response should be in Syria and Iraq. What if I told you that this summer 4,000 people died in another conflict in which there was absolutely no debate here in the Congress? What if I told you there were 4,000 people who died this summer in a conflict and not a single committee in the Congress held a hearing on it? What if I told you there was a conflict this summer in which 4,000 people perished and not a single Member of the majority party in the House or the Senate has proposed any comprehensive way to deal with it? This chart shows the number of people on a daily, monthly, and annual basis who are killed by guns. On average, it is 86 a day, 26,000 a month, and 31,000 a year. This summer, while kids were out of school, over 4,000 people--just this summer--died across this country from gun violence. I come to the floor not as often as I would like but as often as I can to tell some of their stories because I kind of thought these numbers would be enough to persuade Members of this body to do something--anything--to try to stem the scourge of gun violence in this body, but it hasn't, and so my hope is maybe by telling the stories of some of these individuals, it will hopefully make a difference. Every day we add dozens of stories of young men and women--mostly young men and women--whose lives were cut short, whose greatness we were never able to see, whose potential was never realized because they were killed by a gun. This summer we have been gripped by mass shooting after mass shooting. Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Sharonda Singleton, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Daniel Simmons, and DePayne Doctor, and Clementa Pinckney--we don't know all of those names, but we know about many of them because they were killed at a mass shooting in a church in South Carolina. Sgt Carson Holmquist, PO2 Randall Smith, GySgt Thomas Sullivan, LCpl ``Skip'' Wells, and SSgt David Wyatt--maybe you have heard their names because they were all killed at a shooting in Tennessee at a Chattanooga Armed Forces recruiting center. Maybe you have heard of Jillian Johnson and Mayci Breaux, who were killed in a movie theater in Lafayette, LA, in July of this year. Most people have now heard of Allison Parker and Adam Ward, who were gunned down on live TV just a few weeks ago in Virginia. On each one of those days--June 17, a shooting in South Carolina; July 16, a shooting in Tennessee; July 24, a shooting in Louisiana; and August 26, a shooting in Virginia--there were dozens more people who died from gunshot wounds whom we never heard of, but they meant something to their families. To this day their loss is experienced deeply by those who knew them well. Some of them were people who were close to those of us who serve in public service. Matthew Shlonsky was killed this summer in Washington, DC. On August 15 he was heading to a going-away party, and he had just stepped out of a cab when he was shot outside of the Shaw-Howard Metro station. He was the sixth gunshot victim in the Shaw area in a little over a week. Think about what it is like to live in a neighborhood in which there have been six shootings over the course of a week. Think of the fear that breeds in those communities. We knew Matthew because he was an intern for one of our colleagues. He was working as a consultant at Deloitte, but he had served as a Senate intern. He was an amazing kid by all accounts. He traveled the world, spoke two languages, and was a star hockey player. His future was absolutely limitless. But because this city is awash in guns--many of them illegal, many of them in the hands of criminals who get them because of giant, gaping holes in our background check system--Matthew Shlonsky is no longer with us. He is dead at the age of 23. How about the heartbreaking story of Carey Gabay, who was 43 years old. He was serving as an assistant counsel to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and before that he had been counsel of the Empire State Development Corporation. He died on September 16--just on the back end of the summer--after he was caught in the crossfire of a shooting in New York City. He was an innocent bystander when he was shot in the head while attending the pre-West Indian American Day Parade festival with friends and family. He was the son of Jamaican immigrants and grew up in public housing in the Bronx. He had done amazingly well. He attended Harvard University and Harvard Law School. He was working for the Governor and trying to make a better life for others by trying to give opportunities to kids who grow up in the same circumstance as he did. A friend described him as ``an amazing human being who melded public service, professionalism, personal integrity with warmth and caring for everyone he knew.'' He was 43 years old when he was gunned down in broad daylight outside of a festival simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This summer 4,000 people were killed by guns, and not a single public hearing has occurred in the U.S. Senate to discuss a solution. There is not even mention of a debate happening anytime soon on the floor of the Senate as to how we stop these episodes of mass slaughter. We are averaging more than one mass shooting in this country every single day this year. That is astounding. That is shocking. Yet there is total, utter, absolute silence from the world's greatest deliberative body on what we should do about it. I am the last person to say there is any panacea coming from the Congress on how to stem gun violence. We are never going to be able to eliminate these epidemic rates of gun violence just by one law or set of laws that are passed. But what is an absolute indictment of this place is that we don't even try. I have made this contention on the floor before, and I will make it again. I truly believe our silence on this has become complicity. We have become accomplices to these murders because by saying and doing nothing, we offer up a kind of quiet endorsement to people who exist in the fringes of their minds and who are thinking about contemplating violence, and the leaders of this country are doing absolutely nothing to seriously condemn or stop their destructive, malevolent behavior. Our silence has become complicit. I hope that at some point over the course of the rest of this year, we can begin a conversation as to how we can turn these numbers back in the right direction. There is no other country in the industrialized world that even comes close to these numbers. I can offer a suggestion on where to start. If between now and December we can't come to a common understanding on our gun laws--I still don't understand why we can't just do that since 90 percent of Americans support expansive background checks--let's start by fixing the mental health care system. I think there are a lot of reasons why Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 kids over 2 years ago. The child advocate in Connecticut issued a damning report on his interactions with the mental health care system. His mother tried and tried and tried, but in the end she gave up and let him retreat into the isolation of his room, where he plotted these murders. That family and mother and young man ran into barrier after barrier and obstacle after obstacle trying to find a course of treatment for his very serious set of illnesses. What we know is that people with mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of gun violence than the perpetrators of it. There is no inherent connection between being mentally ill and being violent. There is no greater incidence of mental illness in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Yet we have epidemic rates of gun violence. But I will certainly be the first to admit that if we fix our mental health care system, it will help lots of people who have no intersections with gun violence, and it will push these numbers downward because some of these people are committing these murders because they are not getting treatment for serious illnesses. Senator Cassidy and I--frankly, we don't agree on a lot because he is a conservative Republican from the Deep South, and I am a progressive Democrat from the Northeast--introduced a mental health reform measure which has broad bipartisan support and which would seek to break down these barriers in order to get care for the seriously mentally ill and try to get the parents more involved in the care, especially of young adults. It would increase the capacity in our mental health treatment system for both outpatient and inpatient care. Maybe over the course of the rest of this year, at the very least we can make a dent in the massive shortfalls in our behavioral health care system. The families I have become so close with in Sandy Hook, CT, commanded me to come down to the floor every week or so and tell these stories, the voices of victims. They would like us to come together on a set of meaningful changes to our gun laws. They just don't understand why Adam Lanza was able to walk into the school with a gun that killed 20 little boys and girls in less than 5 minutes because of how powerful it was with the 30-round cartridges he was able to use. They don't want our inability to get action on gun laws to stop us from making other progress that would make the next Adam Lanza less likely. Maybe we can do that. But we should do something. Our silence is an embarrassment after this summer of mass shootings. These news reports should command us to action, but we, frankly, shouldn't have had to wait for the news reports of shootings in Virginia or Louisiana or South Carolina because these numbers were just as true last year as they are this year. Maybe there are more episodes of mass violence and mass shootings and headline-grabbing atrocities, but these numbers which reflect what is happening on the ground in New Haven, CT; Hartford, CT; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; and Los Angeles have been a reality for a long time, and we should have woken up long ago. But maybe over the course of this year we can make some progress so that moving forward there are a few less voices of victims to bring to the floor of the Senate. I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. I say to Senator Durbin, I come from Connecticut, one of the Thirteen Original Colonies. We are proud of our role as part of the foundation, the fabric of America, and our State's motto is ``He who transplants sustains.'' This Nation's existence is predicated on people coming here fleeing persecution, sometimes violence, and finding a home. It represents the best of America's traditions. Some 190,000 Vietnamese came here, and 180,000 from the Balkan countries came here just a decade ago. The Senator is right--this isn't easy because we have to go through a substantial vetting process to make sure we are not bringing anyone here who even sniffs of potential violence or connection to terrorist groups. I was sitting in those Syrian refugee camps 2 weeks ago, and I was looking at 8-year-old kids digging ditches through the sand so the feces running out of their house has a place to go. Those little kids aren't terrorists. We can figure this out. We are going to need some additional resources to do it. I thank the Senator for taking such a lead in the caucus, and I am hopeful we will be able to move on to that debate in the Foreign Relations Committee and in the Appropriations Committee after today. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am back to the floor a second time to speak very briefly in favor of the nuclear agreement with Iran. I don't clearly understand why we are here again. When I was sworn into the House, I remember that one of the things people told me was a phrase that said that politics stops at the water's edge. The idea was we reserve our deep political, partisan disagreements for domestic issues, and we don't hesitate to disagree-- often vociferously--with each other on issues of national security that regard our relations with other countries, but we do that based on policy grounds. We don't do that in order to try to score political advantage with one another, because when you are playing pure politics with international relations, you are really playing with the security of this country. There is absolutely no reason to have this vote today other than a desire on behalf of the majority party in the Senate to try to gain some perceived political advantage over the minority party or over the President. We know exactly what is going to happen. There aren't the votes for this resolution of disapproval to proceed past the Senate. There weren't the votes last week. There will not be the votes this week. We know this agreement is going to go into effect and we, frankly, have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do to keep the government open and operating. We have a lot of work to do to implement this agreement. I will mention in a few moments that we have a lot more work to do in the Middle East to try to secure those who are running from terror and violence. This is a waste of our time tonight. This is just about politics. This is just about trying to gain political advantage over an issue that is fundamental to the security of this country and to our allies. I continue to support this agreement for a very simple reason. I just think it is the best way, taking a look at the options in front of us, to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. I know there are others who are hopeful--by the moderates achieving a victory within Iran's political power structure--that there will be a willingness to try to come to the table and figure out some other very meddlesome issues in the region, but that is not why I support this. I support this because I believe we have negotiated an agreement that is going to make it much less likely for Iran to get a nuclear weapon than if we were to reject the agreement. We are dramatically reducing the number of centrifuges; the quality of the enriched material will be greatly reduced from 20 percent down to 3 percent; we essentially eliminate their stockpiles, reducing their stockpile materials by about 97 percent; we get intrusive, unprecedented inspections on the entirety of the supply chain, so if they try to cheat--and they may try to cheat--we will have a much better chance of catching it with inspectors on the ground than if we rejected this agreement and had no inspectors on the ground. Then, importantly--and I think especially for many of my more hawkish Republican friends--we preserve the military option and make it much more effective and credible under this agreement. It is much more effective because we are going to have eyes on the program and on the supply chain so that if we did catch Iran cheating with those inspections, we would have more information than we would if we didn't have any inspectors on the ground. It is more credible because we will do it in the context of an international agreement, meaning that if we do have to strike militarily, we will have our partners, our international partners, by our side--which we frankly would not have if they all asked us to sign this agreement to try to put us on a diplomatic path to divorce Iran from a nuclear weapon--we alone refused and then asked them for help in a military endeavor, they wouldn't go with us and, thus, we would be on our own. We have just the last 10 years to see what unilateral, U.S. military action in the Middle East looks like. We are better off when we have partners. But this has always been a choice between one set of consequences flowing from the adoption of the agreement versus a set of consequences flowing from the rejection of the agreement. I have heard very little realistic talk from the opponents of this deal about what their conception of a realistic alternative would be because most serious foreign policy thinkers are of one mind when it comes to what will happen if Congress were to reject this deal--and we are not going to. We knew that last week. But what we know is that Iran's nuclear program would start back up. I don't think they would rush to a bomb--very few people do--but they would start their nuclear program back up, have more centrifuges spinning, and more stockpiled material piling up. The inspectors would get kicked out. I don't think there is any way they would allow for inspectors to remain in the country if it wasn't in the context of a deal. The sanctions would probably fray at first because the Russians and Chinese would not walk away, but they would-- over time--fall apart. The military option, as I mentioned, would get harder because we wouldn't have as much knowledge of their program, and we would have to go it alone with Israel, potentially, but probably not with our international partners who would feel badly burned by this rejection. Finally, U.S. credibility as an honest, diplomatic, negotiating partner would be greatly damaged if--with the unanimous support of the Security Council, the unanimous support of the P5+1--the Senate and Congress decided to walk away from this deal. This idea that there is a magical, better deal on the table is just fiction, plain and simple. There is no way to go back to the negotiating table if Congress were to reject this deal. The Iranians will not come back to the negotiating table. Our P5+1 partners have told us to our face that they will not come back to the table. So you are left, at that point, with an isolated Iran with a nuclear program restarting, with sanctions fraying, and with U.S. credibility damaged. I have no idea how that makes this country or that makes our allies in the Middle East any safer. I have listened to all of the arguments against it, and I listened to Senator Risch--who is a good friend--just make his secret agreement argument again. But it is amazing to me, having had so much attention over this AP article a few weeks ago on this supposed secret agreement between the IAEA and Iran, that there has been not even a whisper from opponents about the article this week correcting the AP story talking about how, in fact, the IAEA--according to this report--is going to have direct access to Parchin and is going to be able to take samples under the agreement they have with Iran. There is a lot of talk about the first article, but the second article that corrects the record, nary a whisper from folks who oppose this deal. The reality is that this secret agreement you talk about, this agreement between the IAEA and Iran as to how they inspect Iran's nuclear program is nothing new because the IAEA has this with every single country they inspect. It is the foundation of the IAEA's inspection regime, the idea that they could only have credibility--they can only have credibility if they don't disclose the secrets of the countries that participate in the program. The IAEA could not function if it weren't for these agreements. Now, we all sat in a room and were briefed on this agreement, so there is not a single Senator who cannot say they don't know what is in this agreement. There is not a single Senator who could say the AP story was correct. There is not a single Senator, if they were sitting in those briefings, who can say they were surprised by what we heard this week. The argument, especially after reporting that we have seen this week, just doesn't wash any longer. But as I said at the outset, the imperative to move beyond this argument is not just because we shouldn't be playing politics with an issue of this import but also because we have to come together on other issues that are vital to the stability of the region. Syrian Refugee Crisis Mr. President, I just came back from a Syrian refugee camp with Senator Peters: 80,000 people living in this camp with 250 of them getting on a bus every day and going back to Syria. Why? Because they have been sitting in this camp in abysmal, unconscionable conditions, for 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, and they have no hope, no hope of ever getting out. So they are going back to Syria. They are taking their kids and almost accepting the potential for death because the conditions in these camps gets worse and worse and their hope just atrophies away. Those who aren't just going back to live in Syria, as we know, are pouring into Europe by the tens of thousands. When we were in the region, our partners in the Middle East told us two things. Our Arab partners in the Middle East said: Get this agreement done. It is vital to the security of the region. To a person, every single individual we met with in Qatar, in UAE, in Iraq, and Jordan said: Get this deal done. Second, they said: Step up to the plate and do more when it comes to solving this humanitarian disaster. Take refugees--like we are--in Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey. Make sure that the World Food Programme doesn't run out of money, as it is about to. Think about that, 1 million refugees in Jordan are about to lose their food benefits because the United States and some of our partners refuse to put up money to continue to operate the program. And guess what. When they do not get funding from the World Food Programme, they go to see who else is offering them sustenance, and often it is the extremist groups we are trying to fight. When you stop funding the World Food Programme, you push thousands of individuals into the very arms of the groups we are attempting to take out, degrade, and destroy in the region. It is unconscionable that we are not feeding people in the Middle East who have fled violence, but it is terrible national security strategy to push them into the arms of the extremists. What we should be debating today is an emergency appropriations bill to allow for refugees to come to this country, as has been in the best traditions of America, and to fund humanitarian assistance so that people don't starve and die or get pushed back into Syria to be killed by Assad and others. But instead we are having another vote--another vote--on the Iran nuclear agreement when we know the outcome is predestined. We have some really important stuff to talk about here, and we need to move on from this debate so we can start to build on the credibility we have already grown by virtue of negotiating this agreement in the region.

Mr. MURPHY. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak to the nuclear agreement with Iran. First, having just come back from the region after having spent Sunday morning in one of the biggest refugee camps inside Syria--where 80,000, more than half of them children under the age of 18, with more than 250 every day leaving the camp because they have lost hope and they are, frankly, more willing to live inside a dangerous Syria with their lives in danger than to continue to live inside of this camp--let me associate myself with the imperative that Senator McCain laid before us, that we can do more. I don't agree with his diagnosis of how we got here, nor will I likely agree with his solution in terms of prescriptions to solve the problem, but I certainly agree that this body and the administration should be standing up and bearing our share of the burden when it comes to this humanitarian crisis, having seen it now firsthand for myself. Peace is a messy business. As Yitzhak Rabin said upon the recognition of the PLO--a really hard thing for the Israelis to do--he said, ``You don't make peace with your friends, you make it with very unsavory enemies.'' It makes sense, right? The definition of peace is the settlement of old disputes or even just one big dispute with someone with whom one has a long history of disagreement or conflict. And unless peace comes from unconditional surrender--and that frankly doesn't happen very much in the postnuclear age--then peace by nature is going to be a compromise. It doesn't come from one side getting everything it wants. Thus, by definition, it is going to feel fairly unsatisfactory. I say this because viewing the Iran deal through that prism allows me to understand why so many people are voting no, and it allows me to understand why many of those who are voting yes took a long time to get there, but what I have trouble understanding is all of the revisionist history that is crowding this Chamber right now. I don't think there is a single Member of the Senate who didn't in principle support the idea of negotiating an end to Iran's nuclear weapons program. And I don't remember anyone who didn't understand that the sanctions we layered upon Iran were directed at their nuclear program, not their support for Hezbollah or their detainment of hostages or any other malevolent behavior in the region. Why? Because we had a whole different set of sanctions on that activity. But now there is all sorts of Sturm und Drang in Congress over the idea that this deal represents a give-and-take between the United States and Iran. Why didn't we get everything, a lot of people are asking; and the failure of this agreement to settle all our disputes with Iran at once--but they still do bad stuff, people say. I view these protests largely as cover for a ``no'' vote that is likely about something else because we always knew this was going to be a negotiation. We can complain about the end balance, but we can't engage in a straight-faced argument about the outrageousness of Iran getting to keep a few centrifuges. And we can all rage about Iran's support for terrorism or their dangerous talk about our sacred ally, Israel, but we all passed sanctions bills knowing they were about their nuclear program, not all of these other activities. Thus, it must stand to reason that these sanctions would be removed if Iran came to the table and satisfied our concerns about their nuclear program, not our concerns about everything else they do that is terrible. Peace is never perfect. Diplomacy is, frankly, mostly ugly, but it matters. Because why on Earth do we spend $500 billion every year on the world's biggest, baddest, most capable military force if we aren't willing to use it? I don't mean use it in the way that Senator Graham or Senator Cotton may mean ``use it,'' I mean use it by entering into peaceful agreements that are held in place by the threat of overwhelming U.S. military force. Our planes and our bombs and our brigades, these are the muscle that ensures that agreements are lived up to, not the muscle that substitutes for a diplomatic agreement. America, more than any other country in the world, can afford to take a diplomatic risk because we can clean it up fast if it goes wrong. Now, I don't think this agreement is going to go wrong, but I sure like knowing that a bunker-busting bomb is waiting in the wings if it does. And I will sleep better at night knowing that by agreeing to this deal, we are keeping together an unprecedented international coalition that will stand with us if we need to drop that bomb--something they would not do if we dropped it without this agreement. This body often seems to forget that American power is not simply exercised through the blunt force of military power. And President Obama, frankly, is not the first President to be pressed by hawks in Congress, and outside of Congress, to forsake diplomacy in favor of war. In the first meeting with legislative leaders after the announcement of Russian missiles inside Cuba, the bipartisan congressional leadership, meeting with President Kennedy, was unanimous in its support for an attack and ultimately the possible invasion of Cuba. All of them thought that talking to Russia about a negotiated solution equaled weakness. President Kennedy didn't listen, and over 13 days he worked out a peaceful solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis that history looks very kindly upon. President Reagan, upon signing the IMF treaty with Russia, leaned over to Gorbachev as they announced the deal and said: ``The hardliners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands today.'' Hawks in Congress didn't want an agreement with our sworn enemy, Russia. They didn't understand why we signed a nuclear agreement with a country that was still out for American blood on so many other fronts. But history tells us that the IMF treaty was an important piece of our strategy to weaken hardliners inside Russia and open that country to reform. I hear this analogy to 1938 and Munich almost every day, and it doesn't just come with respect to this agreement. Almost every time we sit across the table from someone we have a disagreement with, the claim is that it is Munich all over again, but Munich is the exception, not the rule. There are plenty more diplomatic agreements to avert war that went right rather than those that went wrong. It doesn't mean we don't use 1938 as a caution, but it doesn't mean it is an automatic parallel to every single time we are trying to settle our disputes with an adversary at the negotiating table rather than through the means of arms. Our partners in the Middle East largely get this. I just returned from this trip, as I mentioned, to the region--Qatar, UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan--with Senator Peters. In every country we visited, we heard about Iran's dangerous activity in the region, including support for the Houthis in Yemen, funding Shiite militias in Iraq, propping up the murderous Bashar al Assad in Syria, pumping money into Hezbollah and Hamas to threaten Israel, but despite these provocations, every Arab political leader whom we met with--every single one-- supports this agreement. They give two basic reasons, and I want to share them because they mirror the reasons for my support as well. First, they know that no matter how dangerous Iran is today, they shudder to think how much more dangerous Iran would be if they possessed a nuclear weapon. They believe, as I do, that this agreement is the best way to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and they support it, to a country, first and foremost for that reason. Before this deal, Iran had 19,000 centrifuges spinning. After it, they are going to have just a few thousand. Before this deal, Iran was enriching up to 20 percent and was only a few months from being able to enrich to a level in which they could get on a pathway to a bomb. After this deal, enrichment will be down to 3.7 percent. Before this deal, Iran had an enormous stockpile of enriched uranium, and after this deal that stockpile is, for all intents and purposes, eliminated--reduced by 97 percent. Before this deal, the only way we knew what was going on in the nuclear program was through covert surveillance. After the deal, we are going to have a network of inspectors crawling over every inch of their nuclear program to make sure they aren't cheating. Second, our Arab partners whom we visited within the region know that all of the problems in the region can't be solved without Iran at the table, and while they aren't sure this agreement by itself will draw Iran into peaceful negotiations over Syria or Yemen or Iraq--and I think none of us can be sure that is how this will play out--they are certain that a rejection of the agreement by the United States Congress will virtually guarantee that Iran will not come to the table. They talk openly about fearing a newly isolated Iran, the rejection of this agreement empowering the hardliners, punishing the moderates, and pushing Iran away from any constructive dialogue in the region. Our Arab partners don't love the terms of this agreement any more than the U.S. Senate does, but they know the alternative--a retrenched Iran with a green light to start back up their nuclear program--is the most dangerous outcome of all. Our partners understand what supporters of the deal understand; that this idea that if Congress were to reject the agreement, we could come back to the table and get a better one is pure fiction. It is pure political fiction made up by people who don't want to sound like they don't have an alternative plan, when they really don't. No one with any credible diplomatic experience in the Middle East believes that Iran will come back to the table if Congress rejects this deal, and our international partners have told us to our face that they will not come back to the table if we reject this deal. A better deal is fantasy, plain and simple. Here is what happens. Here is what really happens if Congress rejects this deal that is supported by all of our negotiating partners-- Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia--the entirety of the Security Council and all of our Arab partners in the region. What happens is that Iran starts back up their nuclear program, centrifuges climb to 25,000, 30,000, enrichment gets closer to the level necessary for a bomb, the inspectors get kicked out--our eyes on a nuclear program disappear--and sanctions fray at first and likely fall apart over time and Iran gets everything it wants. It gets its nuclear program and it gets sanctions relief. What a catastrophic outcome that would be. But as bad as that reality would be, it actually gets worse. We know the hardliners have been marginalized as a result of this deal, and the moderates, which I admit is, frankly, a relative term inside Iran, are gaining power. Rejection of this deal would just be a gift to hardliners and would likely lead to Ruhani being replaced by a Revolutionary Guard proxy who would lead Iran down a path that is even more dangerous--hard to believe--than the path they are on today. Lastly, the United States would just become an international pariah. With all of our partners at the negotiating table, almost every nation around the world supporting this agreement, what would it say if the U.S. Congress walked away? Our power as a nation would be irreparably damaged. Now, I heard Senator Cruz on the floor earlier today chastising Democrats, yelling at us, about how could we live with ourselves doing a deal with our mortal enemy Iran. So let me ask him and others who oppose this agreement, with the rhetoric that he uses, a question in return: How could opponents of this deal live with themselves if a rejection of this deal would result in, No. 1, Iran restarting its nuclear program; No. 2, sanctions dramatically weakening; No. 3, inspections ending; and, No. 4, hard-liners being in power inside Iran? The fact is that many Republicans opposed this agreement before they read it. Senator Cruz opposed it within an hour of its announcement. So I don't know how some opponents of this deal can live with themselves having made a political decision to oppose the most important diplomatic agreement that most of us will vote on during our time here. This is not a perfect deal, but no diplomatic agreement ever is. Peace, as the great Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin told us, is never easy. History almost always judges that it is worthwhile. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for my State Department fellow, Tovan McDaniel, to be granted floor privileges for the remainder of this work period.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, one thing we all agree on is that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon. That has been the foundation of American policy. For a long time, it has been at the root of these negotiations. That has been our guidepost as a body. It certainly has been my guiding principle as I review the course of these negotiations and the agreement that is now before us. That is because we know what a nuclear-armed Iran would mean for U.S. security, for Israeli security, and for regional security. Not only would it make their provocations in the region even more dangerous by giving them a nuclear cover of protection, but it would also lead to a nuclear arms race in the region. That doesn't mean Iran's unacceptable conduct begins and ends with its pursuit of a nuclear weapons program. This is one of the largest state sponsors of terrorism in the world. This is a country that has called for the obliteration of the Jewish State still to this day, chants for ``Death to America,'' a country that denies basic human rights and political liberties to its own citizens, and executes and imprisons thousands upon thousands of people who disagree with the regime. But this agreement and these negotiations from the beginning have been about the nuclear issue. It has not attempted to resolve all of these other very dangerous and malevolent behaviors that Iran engages in, in the region. We are focused on the nuclear issue because we frankly believe we are more likely to deal with this other activity if we remove the question of a potential nuclear weapons arsenal cover from the equation. So the test for this agreement is simple: Is Iran less likely to obtain a nuclear weapon with this deal than without it? Because I answer yes to this question--because I believe they are less likely to get a nuclear weapon with this agreement than without it--I am going to support the agreement when it comes before the Senate for a vote this September. That doesn't mean there aren't parts of this agreement that I find distasteful. I would have preferred for the duration of the agreement to be longer than the 10 to 15 years of many of its components. I would have preferred to see fewer conditions on the inspections and on our access to contested sites. I would like for Congress's ability to impose new sanctions on nonnuclear activity of Iran to be clearer and less clouded as part of this agreement. That being said, I think we achieved our objectives. Our negotiators achieved their objectives that they set out at the beginning. We have lengthened the breakout time from 2 to 3 months to now over a year. We have reduced by 95 percent the amount of stored nuclear material that is housed within Iran's borders. We get an inspection regime which is absolutely unprecedented. No other country has been subject to this kind of an inspection regime, not just as a declared site, not just the ability to get to undeclared sites but a view of the entire supply chain that backs up their nuclear program. There is an ability to snap back sanctions should they cheat, an ability that is not conditioned on the support of countries such as Russia and China, and then an international consensus that undergirds this entire agreement. To me, this isn't a referendum on the agreement, the decision we are going to make in the Senate; it is a choice. It is a choice between one set of consequences that flow from supporting the agreement and then another set of consequences that flow from a congressional rejection of the agreement. The set of consequences that occur if Congress rejects this agreement are pretty catastrophic. I would argue it would result in a big win for Iranians. What would happen? First, the sanctions would fray, at best; at worst, they would fall apart. Iran would resume their nuclear program. Maybe they wouldn't rush to a bomb, but they would get closer. Inspectors would be kicked out of the country so we lose eyes on what Iran is doing. For those who believe we should just come back to the table and get a better deal, you have a very high bar to argue. You have to make a case that there are going to be a set of conditions that will cause Iran to come back to the table and agree to something different, more strenuous, and more rigorous than they did today. How does that happen if the sanctions are weaker and their nuclear program is stronger? It doesn't. So this idea that you can get a better deal to me appears to be pure fantasy. Finally, I wish to spend a few minutes talking about this juxtaposition that the President has created that I know has caused some in this Chamber to blanch--the idea that this is a choice between this agreement or going to war. I understand that feels and sounds very unfair because no one who votes against this agreement believes they are voting to go to war. I want to make the case it is not as unfair as some may think it is because if there is no deal, if there is no ability to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon through a negotiation, and if we accept the premise that we are not going to stand still, do nothing, and take a wait-and-see approach if they were to move closer to a bomb, then the only option is the military option. And I frankly think it is time we start taking seriously the rhetoric we are hearing from some Members of this body. Senator Cotton said this week that we could bomb Iran back to day zero if we took a military route to divorcing Iran from a nuclear weapon. Let us get back to reality for a second about what a military strike would mean. You can set back Iran's nuclear program for a series of years, but you cannot bomb Iran back to day zero unless you are also prepared to assassinate everyone in Iran who has worked on the nuclear program. Why? Because you can't destruct knowledge. You can't remove entirely from that country the set of facts that got them within 2 to 3 months of a nuclear weapon. So I know Members bristle at this notion the President is suggesting that it is a choice between an agreement or war, but there are Members of this body who are openly cheerleading for military engagement with Iran, who are oversimplifying the effect of military action, who are blind to the reality of U.S. military activity in that region over the course of the last 10 to 15 years. This belief in the omnipotent unfailing power of the U.S. military is not based in reality. We could set back a nuclear program for a series of years, but the consequences to the region would be catastrophic. So I get that people don't like the choice the President presents, but at some point we have to take Senator Cotton and his allies seriously when they continue to make a case for war and oversimplify the effects of a military strike. But let us be honest. This is all just a political agreement we are talking about here today. So we do have to reserve the possibility that if all else fails and there is no other way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, we may have to take military action. None of us have taken that wholly off the table. But a military strike, if it is necessary, is made more effective if this deal is in place. We will have more international legitimacy if we try diplomacy first and Iran rushes to the bomb in the context of this deal. We would have more partners in this military action if we stuck together on this agreement. I won't say war isn't an option, but I know it is more likely to be successful and effective in the context of this agreement than without it. And I certainly would challenge anyone--Senator Cotton and others-- who try to simplify the effects of a military strike or suggest that it is the immediate alternative to this agreement. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin said, when talking about Israel's decision to recognize the PLO, that ``you don't make peace with your friends, you make it with very unsavory enemies.'' Diplomacy is never easy, and the results of diplomacy are never pretty. This isn't peace with Iran. We still reserve the right to fight them tooth and nail on their support for terrorism, on their denial of the right of Israel to exist, and their miserable human rights record. But the question still remains: Is the world better off with this agreement or is the world better off if this agreement falls apart at the hands of the Congress and we are right back to square one? I believe Iran is less likely to become a nuclear weapons state with this agreement than without it, and I am going to support it. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, later this week we are going to have our first Republican Presidential debate, the official one that is on TV, and a lot of people are going to be watching. There has been a lot of speculation as to who is going to be in the debate, who is not going to be in the debate, who will do well, who will not, who will rise in the polls, and who will fall in the polls. Frankly, we don't need to wait for that debate because the Republican Presidential primary campaign is playing out right now on the floor of the Senate, I think, to the detriment of the institution. How else would you explain a threat from Members of this body and frankly from Members of the House--many of whom are not running for President--to shut down the government over the issue of funding for Planned Parenthood. We have been through this before. We have been through government shutdowns prompted by ideological politics before, and a lot of people got hurt--a lot of people got hurt. The life of a woman in Bridgeport, CT, was torn apart because her Head Start Program was shut down because of the Federal Government shutdown. She was just beginning a new job, and she had to make a new choice between continuing in this new place of employment that was going to lift her out of poverty, essentially sending her kids out on the street while they didn't have care, or leaving the job and taking care of her kids while Head Start was shut down. Those are the consequences of a government shutdown. So if you are going to shut down the government, your reason for doing it better be pretty good. The reason a couple of years ago was a miserable one--taking health care away from millions of Americans who are getting it because of the Affordable Care Act. But this one is just as insidious. I don't know where women in my State would be without Planned Parenthood. My wife is one of tens of thousands--probably hundreds of thousands--of Connecticut women who got their preventative care from Planned Parenthood. She did that when she was young, didn't have a lot of income, and needed to find a primary care provider who could get her access to basic health care services. There are 2.7 million patients all across the country who receive their health care, their preventative health care, from Planned Parenthood. More than 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does all across the country is engage in preventive health care. In 2013, 400,000 Pap tests, 500,000 breast exams, 4.5 million STI tests and treatments, including HIV tests. In Connecticut, there are 17 Planned Parenthood centers and they serve--here is the number--64,000 patients in the State of Connecticut. So we are going to shut down the government in order to take health care away from 64,000 women in Connecticut, all in order for a handful of people to make an ideological point that may get some additional votes within a Republican Presidential primary, despite the fact that since the 1980s the law in this country has been clear: You can't use Federal dollars for abortions. I oppose that law because I believe abortions are part of a panoply of medical services that should be available to people in this country at their choice. Frankly, I think the government should stay out of the business of deciding what medically necessary health care choices women can make. I don't think we should be involved in that. So I don't actually support the underlying law that prevents those dollars from being used, but it is the law of the land, it has been the law of the land, and it will be the law of the land. We are saying we are going to shut down access to 64,000 women in Connecticut because the place they are getting health care also performs a health care service that is objectionable to people who are running for President, but let us take that logic to its natural extrapolation. Let's take it to its logical end point. If you believe no one should be eligible to get health care services from any institution that has anything to do with abortions or the full array of reproductive health care services, then you can't actually stop at Planned Parenthood. You have to stop funding any hospital that has anything to do with offering a full array of health care services. You have to stop funding for health care centers that do the same. Why wouldn't you stop sending Medicaid dollars to States such as Connecticut that have codified Roe v. Wade? What is the logical end to this policy if all of a sudden an organization that spends 90-plus percent of its resources simply engaging in the good stuff of preventive health care now all of a sudden can't serve anybody because they engage in a service that is a politically hot topic in Congress, despite the fact that there is a law on the books that says they can't use any of their Federal dollars for that particular service. Take this to its logical end, and we cut off Federal funding for not 64,000 patients in Connecticut but virtually every patient in Connecticut if any association with the provision of abortions all of a sudden denies you Federal funding. I don't concede the fact that the Hyde amendment is the law of the land, but I acknowledge that it is and it will be. This is just Presidential Republican primary politics finding its way onto the Senate floor. What this could lead to is not the defunding of Planned Parenthood, because they will not get the votes nor the Presidential signature to defund one of the most important primary and preventive health care providers in our States--I will not do that. I will not deny health care to 64,000 Connecticut women. So all they do by creating this line in the sand, once again, is shut down the Federal Government, sucking thousands of jobs out of our economy, leading to tens of thousands of stories of individual misery, such as the woman from Bridgeport who all of a sudden awoke to find her kid couldn't go to his Head Start Program and so she had to think about quitting her new job in order to take care of her child. I get it that threats about shutdowns make good headlines. They play to a slice of a Presidential primary electorate, but they are big headaches for real people. We are not playing with politics when we talk about shutting down the government over defunding Planned Parenthood or over repealing the Affordable Care Act. We are playing with people's lives. So I hope this is just the issue of the week in the Republican Presidential primary. I hope when we come back in September we are not seriously talking about another government shutdown. I hope we seriously are not talking about an attack on women's health care all across this country. I hope we are not entertaining the idea that tens of thousands of women in my State are all of a sudden going to lose access to services or tens of thousands of women and men are going to lose access to programs such as Head Start, job training, and all the other things that get affected when the government shuts down. I am sick of shutdowns. I have only been in the Congress for less than a decade, and I have been through more of them, real and threatened, than I care to remember. I am certainly not going to stand for a shutdown threatened on the basis of denying health care to women in the State of Connecticut or anywhere else across this country. I hope we can spend some time after this vote next week--that even my Republican friends in the Republican Presidential primary will admit is a showboat--and get down to the real business of passing a budget that respects the values and priorities of this country, that keeps our government operational, and separates, to the best we can, the business we do on the Senate floor from the business of sorting out who is going to be the next Republican nominee for President. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I would like to congratulate Pratt & Whitney for 90 years of success in the aviation industry. While there have been many important innovators in aviation over the past 90 years, Pratt & Whitney's work on the jet engine deserves special recognition. Pratt & Whitney began operations in Hartford, CT, in August 1925. With a staff of 24 men and 2 women, the company began work in the old Pope-Hartford auto plant. Under the direction of aviation engineer Fredrick Rentschler, this small team set out to build a new and improved aircraft engine. Despite limited funding and resources, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft succeeded in modernized the jet engine with revolutionary advancements like a powerful and dependable air-cooled radial engine. Through the many changes of the last 90 years, Pratt & Whitney's engines have consistently powered the most advanced modern aircraft. The F135 engine, for example, designed by Pratt & Whitney, meets the exacting requirements of the F-35 Lightning II, which is one of the most technologically advanced military jets ever made. The jobs that Pratt & Whitney has created over the years have enriched Connecticut communities, and I am proud to honor Pratt & Whitney's 90 years of incredible achievement. I wish them the best of luck in their next 90 years.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank my great friends Senator Booker and Senator Bennet for their passionate and moving remarks about the task ahead of us, to make sure that as we reauthorize No Child Left Behind, as we reorder our priorities, that we remember that this law is an education reform law, but it has to be a civil rights law as well. It has to make sure that in the best traditions of this country, we are requiring that every single child gets a quality education. I want to talk about my amendment that is cosponsored by Senators Booker and Warren, Coons, Durbin, Mikulski, and others. I want to start by telling a story that is, unfortunately, not unfamiliar in probably every corner of this country. I am going to talk about a 16-year-old African-American boy, an eighth grader in an urban middle school in Connecticut. I will call him James for today's purposes. James had a habit of walking out of class in the middle of instruction. He walked out of class and he would wander the hallways until he would eventually run into a teacher, an administrator, a school resource officer, who would haul him down to the principal's office. His grandmother, who was his primary care giver, would get a phone call. She would come pick him up and then the suspension proceedings would start. James would get suspended for a few days. He would come back, and the whole cycle would play out again, such that by the middle of his first semester of his eighth grade year, he had been out of school-- suspended--more days than he had been in school. One day he was so frustrated when an assistant principal stopped him, once again, as he was wandering the halls that he had an argument. He was a big kid for his age, but he was a total teddy bear. He never hurt anybody. But that day when he talked back to that assistant principal, they called the police and James got arrested. Now he has a criminal record. But the reason he was walking out of class day after day, week after week, was pretty simple: James was an eighth grader who could not read--he could not read. He could barely read. So he had this toxic mixture of frustration and embarrassment every day that he sat in class such that it had no relevance to him and he walked out. The worst of it is that the school knew he could not read because he had an identified learning disability. It was not a mystery. Yet James got promoted year after year because it was easier to pass him along, easier to push him out, as the suspensions and eventual arrest were on their way to doing, rather than actually give James an education. Now, I only know this story because my wife, who was then a legal aid lawyer in Connecticut, represented James. His grandmother, who just wanted James to get a decent education, would call my wife in tears every time James was found in the hallway and suspended again and again. My wife actually got the services James needed. But James' story is not unique. Most kids do not have legal aid lawyers fighting on their behalf. Most kids in James' situation have the deck stacked against them: disabled kids who are hard to teach, poor kids who are warehoused in failing schools, Black and Hispanic kids struggling to overcome generations of discrimination. They do not all have lawyers. They have us in the Congress. This place, Washington, DC, has had its finest moments when it stands up for educational civil rights: the idea that a child in this country should get a quality education no matter their race or their address or their disability. Whether we like it or not, there are these political pressures in America that cause minority kids and disabled kids and poor kids to get an education that is not equal to that of their White or nondisabled or more affluent peers. The facts are just very stubborn. I can't say them any better than Senator Bennet did earlier today. Today, half of African-American and Latino fourth grade students score below the basic level of reading that we expect of our students. Just one out of every seven African- American eighth grade students scores at a basic proficiency level in math. Nationally, 70 percent of students who attend high school with low graduation rates come from low-income families. These statistics, they represent a stain on the conscience of our Nation. If this body wants to stay true to its history of standing up for educational civil rights, then we have to make a stand this week to make sure this Every Child Achieves Act ensures that minority and poor and disabled kids get a fair shot at a good education. Now, right now this bill does not meet this test. That is why the Nation's leading civil rights organizations, from the NAACP to La Raza, to the Urban League oppose this bill in its current form. It is why they have joined together with business groups who want to make sure our educational system stays competitive for everyone, to propose a fairly simple solution to a problem that is also fairly simple. So this bill requires that schools continue to assess student performance while getting rid of those annual high-stakes tests that were unquestionably bad for schools and for students. No Child Left Behind was a bad bill for my State and for the Nation. So I am glad Senators Murray and Alexander have come together to create something better for our kids. The bill requires that States track results by what we call subgroups: minority students, disabled students, poor students, and non-English-speaking students. But the problem is that when the schools are failing or when minority or disabled students are falling way behind their peers, the bill doesn't require or even ask States or school districts to do anything to fix it--nothing. As a civil rights matter, that is unacceptable. No Child Left Behind said a lot on this issue, and most of it wasn't helpful or productive. NCLB made the measurement of schools and subgroups a test and only a test. NCLB prescribed in a detailed way what schools had to do to turn around student outcomes, and NCLB punished schools that didn't turn around those outcomes quickly enough. We have learned a lot from that backwards approach, from this ``Washington knows best'' attitude. That is why the amendment we are offering today takes a very different approach to accountability for vulnerable kids. Under our amendment, States are required to identify the bottom 5 percent of performing schools according to their measurement of performance; they have to identify the dropout factories--the high schools where fewer than two-thirds of the students are graduating; and then they have to identify, again according to their own measurement, schools where subgroups of students--low-income students, students of color, students with disabilities, English learners--aren't meeting their own set of criteria. This amendment ensures that schools are identified based on a measurement that is set by the State, not by Washington, and it has to include multiple measures, not just test scores alone. Let me say that again. The measurement is determined by the State, and it cannot be based on test scores alone. Then the amendment says that once you have identified those schools or those student groups who are in need of improvement according to your own measurements, then the State needs to come up with a plan to improve outcomes. Period. Stop. Identify your achievement gaps according to your own comprehensive measurements and come up with a plan to fix the gaps. There is no federally dictated measurement, no federally set intervention, no Federal penalty if you don't succeed. Just identify your problems and come up with a plan to make the problems better. The accountability will then happen naturally, as students and parents and community members have input into that plan and the ability to watch to see if it is working--local solutions, local oversight, local accountability. In 2006, as a candidate for Congress, I excoriated No Child Left Behind wherever I went. I come from a family of teachers, and I married a former teacher. Now I have two kids, one in the public school system and one on his way there. And I watched firsthand as NCLB failed teachers, parents, and students. But about a month or so after I was sworn in to the House of Representatives in 2007, I received a visit from the Children's Defense Fund. They had heard how vocal I was in my criticism of the law, and they just wanted me to know that not every State was like Connecticut. They told me stories of places where prior to NCLB kids with disabilities were sent for half a day of ``vocational training'' with the janitor. Nothing was expected of those kids, and more often than not those kids lived up to the low expectations that were set for them. So maybe the only redeeming quality of No Child Left Behind was that it did expose these inexcusable gaps in performance between disabled and non-disabled kids. It forced States to talk about why Black students year after year were 30 percent behind their White peer students in achievement tests. It caused embarrassment for school systems with schools where the majority of kids got so little out of school that they dropped out before graduation. And it put pressure on all of us to do better. This is an education bill, but it is not a worthwhile bill unless it is also a civil rights bill. Every single child, no matter their race or their geography, their income or their disability, deserves a first- rate education. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this vital amendment that continues our march away from the stringent, inflexible requirements of No Child Left Behind, while ensuring that all of our students receive the support they need to be successful. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, arguably the only good thing that the existing education law did was expose these unconscionable gaps in this country between the performance of minority kids and nonminority kids, between disabled kids and nondisabled kids. Frankly, this body is at its best when it says that, no matter your race, geography, disability or income, you deserve access to a quality education. If we can't guarantee that, then the question is this: What good is a Federal education law in the first place? So this amendment learns from the mistakes of No Child Left Behind, and it simply says two things. States have to identify when they have these unjustifiable yawning gaps between the performance of disabled kids or minority kids and the rest of the school, and then they have to come up with a plan through a community conversation as to how to fix that--period, stop. Identify your problem, your achievements.

Mr. MURPHY. All this amendment says is that just simply on a State by State basis, identify your achievement gap and then come up with a plan to fix it--no Federal intervention, no Federal prescription of how you fix the problem. It is a big, big problem in this country that has a very simple solution in this amendment, and it deserves our support. I yield back.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Russell Armstrong, a fellow in my office, be granted floor privileges for the rest of the month.

Mr. MURPHY

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