Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Minnesota for laying out the case so clearly on the challenge, as I like to call it, of taking on climate chaos. My wife Mary comes from Minnesota. I know they value the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Every time I have said that before, I always say the ``Land of a Thousand Lakes,'' and Senator Klobuchar corrects me. I just can't quite envision 10,000 lakes. Minnesota is a land with incredible wildlife, a land that certainly has seen the impacts of climate chaos, as has my home State. So thank you so much for your remarks and for being here to help celebrate our colleague and our friend, the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse, who spoke tonight just a few minutes ago for his 200th time, to say: Wake up. Wake up, America. We have a significant challenge, the sort of challenge that you may not notice from one day to the next. We may wake up tomorrow and not realize that the damage being done to our planet is greater than the day before or we may not be able to wake up a week from now and realize that the damage is more. Nonetheless, it is, if looked at over any significant span of time, a huge, huge force wreaking havoc on our planet, and it will just get worse with time if we do not take on this pollution of the atmosphere by carbon dioxide. Back in 1959, an eminent scientist was asked to speak at the 100th anniversary of the petroleum industry. That scientist was Edward Teller. Edward Teller gave his speech at this 100th anniversary in 1959, but he said to the gathering of the fossil fuel industry: You do realize that you will eventually have to look for a different form of energy to invest in, first, because the amount of fossil fuels in the Earth's crust is limited and it will run out. He said: Second of all, there are some interesting facts that many of you might not be aware of--that when you burn fossil fuels, it creates carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide might not at first seem like a pollutant because it is invisible and it is odorless, but it has this quality where visible light passes through it, but heat energy is trapped. As a result of trapping heat energy and changing the makeup of our atmosphere, we will start to do major damage to the planet. He talked about how it would affect the melting of ice on the poles, the rising of sea levels, and that humankind lived by the oceans and, therefore, this carbon dioxide would do enormous damage and it would be important to transition off of burning carbon fuels, off of burning fossil fuels. That was in 1959, which is a long time ago that we have had the information about the damage wreaking havoc by this pollutant, carbon dioxide. Henry David Thoreau, the philosopher, challenged us and said: What is the use of a house if you don't have a tolerable planet to put it on? Yet everywhere we see our planet crying out for us to pay attention-- never as much, however, as in this last year. Here in America, there were fierce forest fires from Montana, across Idaho, into Washington, down to Oregon, and into California clear into December. Smoke covered much of my State for month after month this last summer, having an impact on people's health and certainly having an impact on our economy. We could look at the storms of last year--the hurricanes of Harvey, Irma, and Maria assaulting Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Those storms were unusually damaging, and part of the reason for that is because the energy of those storms is taken from the temperature of the ocean, and the ocean has been collecting 90 percent of the increased heat on the planet from carbon dioxide pollution and, therefore, producing more powerful hurricanes. So we saw it in the fires, and we saw it in the hurricanes, but you really can start to see it almost everywhere. You can see that the pine beetles are doing much better because the winters aren't cold enough to kill them, and the trees are doing much worse. You can see that the ticks in New England and Maine and on through Minnesota are doing much better because the winters are not cold enough to kill them. Therefore, they are killing the moose. You can see the impact of the rising ocean temperature on coral reefs around the world, which are a small part of the ocean but have a significant role in the fisheries on our planet. In my home State in Oregon, the warmer temperatures and the acidity in the ocean caused a billion baby oysters to die in 2008. Well, that is quite an impact on our seafood industry. I can tell you that scientists were mystified because they couldn't imagine, at first, that it had to do with the water quality. They thought it must be a virus or it must be some form of bacteria, but it just turned out that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere not only results in the warming of the ocean, but it is absorbed in the ocean and becomes carbonic acid. That greater acidity of the ocean damages the ability of baby oysters to form shells. So now we have to artificially buffer the ocean water. We see it in spreading diseases, like malaria, as they follow the mosquitoes, and Zika, as it follows the mosquitoes into greater territory, or leishmaniasis, which is a real diabolical disease that now has come to the United States with sand flies. My point is that everywhere you look, if you open your eyes, climate chaos is having a big impact and hurting us. The answer is simple. We have to stop burning fossil fuels. This is where the 100-percent notion comes from, from my bill of last year--100 percent by 50, 100 by 50, or, if you prefer, mission 100. It just means we have to transition from the energy that we gain from fossil fuels to substituting energy from clean and renewable sources--100 percent. Stop burning fossil fuels. A few years ago, folks said: Well, that will cause great damage to our economy because renewable energy is so much more expensive than cheap fossil fuels. But we have been blessed. We have been blessed in taking on this challenge because it is no longer true that renewable energy is more expensive than fossil fuel energy. We have had an incredible drop in the price of solar energy over a short period--from 35 cents per kilowatt hour down to 5 cents per kilowatt hour. Then Xcel Energy in Colorado put out a proposal this year. The proposal came back at 2 cents per kilowatt hour. In other words, it is cheaper to have new and clean renewable energy than to burn coal in an already depreciated fossil fuel coal electric plant. Wind has gone from 13 cents or so per kilowatt hour to 5 cents per kilowatt hour. Xcel Energy in Colorado brought in a bid at 3 cents per kilowatt hour. As we have seen these prices drop dramatically on solar and wind, we have seen the installations of solar and wind surge. On the solar side, in 2017 we installed about 12 gigawatts of capacity--12 gigawatts, or 12,000 megawatts. That is a lot of energy. To put it differently, one- fourth of the total installed capacity of the United States of America went in just in 2017. That is a dramatic upsurge in installation. Think of a world where we can have every flat business roof and every manufacturing plant with solar rays on its surface or canopies over its parking lot because this energy is so cheap to collect, and we can collect it in places where the grid already exists. For wind, in 2016, 8 gigawatts of new capacity went in. Again, there is a tremendous upsurge in the amount of wind installed. Now we are seeing roughly half of our utilities scale new capacity with renewable energy rather than with fossil fuel energy. The transition is underway, but we need to accelerate it. We need to move it much more quickly, and then we need to move our consumption of energy over to the electric grid. What does that mean? For example, it means heating your house with a heat pump, which uses electricity, rather than a gas furnace. It means changing the way you heat water from a gas hot water heater to an electric hot water heater. It means getting a plug-in vehicle, an electric vehicle. Let's stop and talk a little bit about electric vehicles. While we have been seeing the production of carbon dioxide from making electricity come down in America, we are seeing the carbon dioxide from driving vehicles go up, so it is a major area we have to take on. Five years ago, I bought a Volt, which is a plug-in hybrid. It has a range of about 35 miles of electricity, and it also has a gas backup. That car really worked exceedingly well. We drove 3 out of 4 miles on electricity, even though we used gasoline to drive all the way to South Dakota and back. What we found was that the cost per mile on electricity was only about 3 cents a mile, and the cost of running it on gasoline--with oil, maintenance, and so forth--was closer to 10 cents a mile. So it is three times cheaper to drive it on electricity. So there is a big incentive. Unfortunately, my son had an auto accident, and we had to replace that car. Because the range has increased over 5 years, we were able to get a fully electric car, a Nissan LEAF. The range had gone up in 2016 from roughly 80 miles to about 107. That extra 27 miles is enough that my wife could do her work in home hospice, potentially being assigned to a house way on the west side of the Monona County area and then way on the east side and back and forth several times a day and still make it completely on a single-charged battery. With the proliferation of driving stations, now we are starting to see the ability to operate much more closely to the way we behaved, if you will, previously with gasoline vehicles--being able to drive hundreds of miles and then recharge. We have seen that with the Volt that just came out to replace the Bolt, which now goes over 200 miles on just its battery alone and more if you drive cautiously. Buses are another big piece of this. I went down to Eugene, OR, a couple of weekends ago and rode on their first electric bus, the first one in the State of Oregon. That bus looked just like the old diesel buses that we have had serving our metro systems across America, but it cost a lot more. It cost $200,000 more than a diesel bus. You might say ``Well, that is way too much,'' but here is the interesting thing: It saves about $40,000 to $45,000 a year on fuel. It doesn't take a math genius to then realize that after 5 years of service, you have paid off that cost, and after that, you are saving money. We are going to see a huge transition simply on the economics. This is the challenge before us, that we have been given the gift of affordable solar that is cheaper than fossil fuel energy, affordable wind that is cheaper than fossil fuel energy, a greatly declining cost of battery power to help supply meet demand, but at the Federal level, we are paralyzed. Unfortunately, the Koch brothers are really the puppet masters of this body, this Chamber I am in. This wonderful Senate is supposed to be the place where we deliberate to have government of, by, and for the people, but right now we have deliberations here that are of, by, and for the Koch brothers; of, by, and for the wealthy and the well- connected. That is not the vision of America. We have to reclaim the vision of America. The people of America understand that we have this enormous challenge that we must undertake to save our beautiful, blue and green planet. Since the Federal Government isn't operating, we see companies and cities and places of worship jumping in to fill the gap, adopting 100 percent resolutions--resolutions to transition to 100 percent cleaner renewable energy, to stop burning the fossil fuels that are damaging our planet. Burlington, VT, is now using a mixture of biomass and hydro wind and solar so that 100 percent of electricity comes from renewable generation. Fifty-eight other cities across America have committed to making that 100 percent transition, and they are handing out an action plan--this year we can do this, and this year we can do that. Families can do the same, places of worship can do the same, and companies are doing the same all across our Nation. We see many of our Fortune 500 companies stepping forward to be real leaders in this. They want to attract employees who know that they care about our planet. They care about stopping this pollution that Edward Teller, an eminent scientist, pointed out in 1959. When Henry David Thoreau said ``What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?'' he asked a question we should always ask ourselves in terms of the different threats to this beautiful orb that we call home. So let's fight to save this beautiful planet. It is the only one we have. We have no other. It is under serious threat, and we in this Chamber need to tell the Koch brothers to go and sit on their fossil fuel fortune, invest it as they want somewhere else, but to join us in the most important work they could possibly be part of in the years that they have remaining to live here in America, and that is this fight to take on climate chaos and win. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the first three words of our Constitution are, ``We the People.'' This is the mission statement of the United States of America. Our government was set up not to create a government by and for the powerful and the privileged but by and for the people of the United States and, as Jefferson put it, the government would reflect the will of the people. It is quite a different concept from many of the European governments that operated directly for the benefit of the best-off or the wealthy and well connected. We have seen a corruption of the American Constitution. We have seen it turned on its head, with government implemented by and for the rich and powerful, time after time over this last year. What did we see in 2017? We saw much of the year spent destroying healthcare for 22 million to 30 million Americans and increasing the cost of healthcare for everyone else--certainly not reflecting the will of the people--and then we saw a tax bill taking $1.5 trillion from our children and our grandchildren and giving it to the richest of Americans, the largest bank heist in world history. Well, now we have another assault on ``we the people'' government. S. 2155 undoes a lot of the work to create a financial system for America to thrive, for families to thrive, and restores the lack of regulation and high-leveraged bets that brought the economy down in 2007 and 2008. When the economy came down, the wealthy and well-off did quite well. They picked up properties at pennies on the dollar, but who was hurt? The American people were hurt. The American workers were hurt. They lost their jobs. They lost their retirements. Certainly, they lost so much in terms of the financial foundation for their families. Yet here we are again. We seem to have forgotten that when you let the big banks rampage through our economy, you are setting the stage for another big mess--high-risk gambling on Wall Street, destroying Americans' financial lives, lost homes, lost jobs, and lost retirement savings. When we passed Dodd-Frank, the principle was, never again will we let the Wall Street casino crash our economy. Well, ``never'' hasn't lasted very long. In the bill before us, section 203 exempts financial institutions-- smaller banks with assets under $10 billion--from the Volcker rule. What was the Volcker rule? The Volcker rule was a firewall that said: Take deposits to make loans but don't engage in high-risk, high- leverage bets on the future price of stocks or the future price of currencies. Those are called derivatives, those bets on those future prices. Those are appropriate in a hedge fund. If somebody wants to compile money for millionaires and billionaires and make bets on the future prices, then go ahead and gamble in your hedge fund, but don't do it in our banks. So now we have this bill that says: Well, let's open the door to reestablishing the Wall Street casino but just not on Wall Street; let's do it on our small banks. Well, what was bad and risky for big banks is bad for small banks. Should they put their money into loans to help the rural economy thrive or should they make big bets on future prices casino-style? This bill opens up small banks to being casinos. It is the wrong way to go. Then there is section 401 on capital requirements. It takes enormously large banks up to $250 billion in size and repeals the requirement for living wills. It repeals the requirement for annual stress tests to make sure the capital is truly being set aside and the bank is being operated in an appropriate fashion for a depository institution. Former Deputy Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin said granting the Fed control for the stress test, rather than having them annually, is ``legislative fool's gold.'' That is the expert talking about the foolishness of eliminating stress tests. In addition, it lowers capital standards. So often I have heard folks come to this floor saying, ``We don't need so much regulation. Let's just increase the capital standards,'' but this bill does the opposite. It impacts 25 of the 38 largest U.S. banks, which together hold $3.5 trillion in assets. This is clearly a situation that creates enormous risks for our economy. Who will pay the price? Working America will pay the price. Build the bubble, burst the bubble, and the boom goes down on middle-class America. Then there is section 402. Section 402 is related to globally systemically important banks. They are referred to by the initials GSIBs--globally systemically important banks. Then there are custodial banks. Those banks received $5 billion in Federal bailout money during the financial crisis. They want to escape the supplemental leverage ratio that was designed to decrease the risk. Each megabank has to have enough tier 1 capital to satisfy an SLR--a supplemental leverage ratio--but custody banks want relief so they don't have to hold as much common stock--common stock, which is tier 1 capital, but shoehorned into this are Citi and JPMorgan. CBO says the following: ``There is a 50% chance that regulators would allow two other financial institutions--JPMorgan and Citibank, with combined assets of $4.4 trillion--to adjust their SLRs under the terms in this bill.'' In other words, higher leverage ratios, lower capital, exactly the kinds of things that imperiled our economy previously, and yet that is right in the heart of this bill. What about consumer protection? Let's turn to section 107, which grants exemption from key mortgage lending protections for the buyers of manufactured homes. Manufactured homes are put on a foundation and sold as regular homes. Then you have modular homes. This provision expands it to modular homes. It would reduce consumer protections of the part of the market that disproportionately serves low- and very low-income Americans and rural America. Do we really want to strip the consumer protections for lower income Americans and rural Americans when buying a home? No, we don't, which is why this provision should not be in this bill. It is why this provision is a bad idea. One more section of the bill; that is, HMDA reporting--Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reporting. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau required expanded data reporting because it allows you to see where the rules might be being broken on predatory lending. It allows you to see where there might be an engagement in discriminatory lending. But this bill says that we are not going to get that data anymore. We are not going to get the data that would help us identify illegal redlining, for example, and that this exemption would apply to 85 percent of the reporting institutions that are covered by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Most of this information is data that is already collected. Reporting it provides an understanding about redlining, about discrimination, about discriminatory practices. If you don't have the information, those things get hidden. That is damaging to America's families. That is quite a list of things that are wrong with this bill. This bill has been presented as remedies for small banks, but, as my colleagues just noticed from these items, what we see are the ripping aside of consumer protections and a whole lot that is being demanded by the big banks that want less capital and higher leverage. Let's do a bill for smaller banks. Let's understand that more flexibility is appropriate in rural areas. Let's observe that more flexibility in the types of mortgages might be appropriate in small banks in small communities where those loans are portfolioed. Democrats came forward with a whole list of these things to help small banks, but what do we have from our Republican leadership? A bill designed for Wall Street. A bill designed for Wall Street, for the wealthy and the well-connected. It is not designed to help ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans are plagued by the challenges of discrimination, and this makes it worse; or redlining, and this makes it worse; or predatory practices, and this makes it worse. They are also plagued by high-interest payday loans. What does this bill do to take on the 500- percent interest rates that every society across the globe has recognized are incredibly destructive, sucking people into a vortex of debt and destroying families? This body right here said that they are so destructive, we cannot allow these high-interest loans to be given to our servicemembers because they destroy our service families. Shouldn't we stand up for all of our families in America? If something is so predatory and so destructive to our service families that we say it is illegal, shouldn't we make those same loans illegal for everybody? Do you see anything in this bill related to ``we the people''? Very little. The ``we the people'' bill the Democrats put forward was rejected, and what we have is this Wall Street bill for lower capital, more leverage, more predatory practices. That is just not right. I hold a lot of townhalls. I hold 36 townhalls a year, 32 of them in very red counties. Not one person in over 300 townhalls has come up to me and said: Get rid of the regulations on Wall Street because we want them to be able to do more low-capital, high-leverage bets and put our economy at risk. Nobody in America advocates building another bubble on high-risk leverage. So what are we doing with this bill? What we are doing is making a mistake. We should defeat this assault on the effort to have a financial system in America that is designed to serve the mission of the United States, the ``we the people'' mission of the United States of America. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Arif Hasan, be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern Jonah Harris be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, we heard a whole lot about the tax bill the Republicans passed, and it basically works like this: We borrow $1.5 trillion from our children and we give that money to the richest Americans. And then when there is a little bit of help for middle-class workers--and I mean a little--we say: Well, that is really cool. I like that we are doing a little for the middle class, but I don't like the fact that for every dime to help a middle-class worker, we gave away a dollar to the richest Americans. In other words, America has been robbed in the biggest bank heist ever, and then it was justified by distributing a modest amount to our workers. Even then, they included a provision that will drive up the premiums for healthcare by more than 10 percent next year, on top of whatever rises are driven by the drug companies. So whatever modest gain there is for the middle class is wiped out by more expensive healthcare in America. So we hear these big, sophisticated arguments: Oh, well, a worker here or there got a bonus. A worker here or there got their wages increased. But they don't tell you that they gave $1 trillion to the richest Americans. Why not? Why not be honest about the whole entire scope of this tax rip-off, borrowing from our children to enrich the richest Americans? As one House Member said, here is what this is all about: This is about the fact that my rich donors won't vote for me and won't support me in the next election unless I vote to give them all this money. That is what happened here, and it is not OK because we see the consequences. We have a budget that attacks the foundations for families to thrive. It takes a trillion dollars out of healthcare. Well, that trillion dollars went to the richest Americans. Then the President gets to the budget and takes a trillion dollars out of healthcare, takes money out of affordable housing. Housing is a very important foundation for families to thrive. So it attacks healthcare and housing, and then it attacks public education. Quite frankly, because all those resources were taken off the table that could have been invested in infrastructure and jobs in America, it also undermines the concept of a living-wage job, which is the principle that nobody who works full time in America should live in poverty in America. The majority has conducted the biggest bank heist in history, and they come to the floor and defend this time and time again without sharing the honest facts with the American people, as I have just shared them with you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, let's turn to another attack on workers. Our entire Constitution had a theme, had a mission statement, and that mission statement was ``we the people,'' government of, by, and for the people. My colleagues might be surprised to discover that the Constitution didn't say ``we the privileged; we the wealthy; we the well-connected; we the powerful'' because they bring bill after bill to the floor of the Senate that is exactly government of, by, and for the wealthy and the well-connected. Now we see that the Supreme Court is getting in on the act in this effort to undermine the ability of workers to organize, to get a fair share of the wealth that they create. Former President Jimmy Carter once said: Every advance in this half-century--Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another--came with the support and leadership of American labor. Well, he was absolutely right. I would also add a few more things to the list, such as 8-hour workdays, the 40-hour workweek, overtime pay, the minimum wage, family and sick leave, health and safety working standards. When workers have organized, they have fought for better conditions for every American--better pay, better safety, better and fair working conditions--and America is a better nation because of it. It is a much better nation because of the men and women of the labor movement who have fought tirelessly to ensure that our country lives up to that ``we the people'' vision statement. Thanks to their work, an honest day's work means an honest day's pay for millions of Americans. But that is exactly what the Supreme Court is poised to undo. All the powerful and the privileged--they want even more squeezed out of the workers, so they have spent decades really demonizing and attacking the ability of workers to organize. During the three decades after World War II, workers got a fair share of the wealth they were creating. Their wages went up as productivity went up, and it turned out that this is good for business as well because workers who have paychecks are able to buy products, and then the companies can sell more. The companies do well when people get paid fairly, but that concept is about to be undermined in a massive way with an attack on what are called fair share fees. When workers organize and bargain for better benefits, there is a cost of developing that organization and conducting those negotiations, and every worker who benefits chips in a share under fair share fees. Everyone wins, so everyone contributes. This is not about contributing to political activity. It is not about contributing funds that are distributed to causes. This is simply the cost of the negotiating process. For this foundation to be able to negotiate successfully, people have to share in that effort. The heart of the right to organize has been absolutely embodied in law for well over half a century in a case called Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. Collective bargaining among workers doesn't work if you create a strategy for workers to freeload; that is, to get all the benefits without putting in any of the effort. I am reminded of a story that I read as a very young child just learning to read. It was about the barnyard. It was about some member of the community baking bread and asking for help from all the other animals--would they help with this aspect or that aspect of making the bread. They all said: No, we are not interested in helping. At the end, when the bread was baked, all the animals in the barnyard wanted their share. They wanted a share of it without having contributed a thing. That system is what the Supreme Court is trying to foist on America, undermining the fundamental right to organize and allowing freeloaders to essentially create a situation where you can't afford to represent the group. Well, that undermines the success of our workers to get a fair share of the wealth they create. It undermines their ability to negotiate for a safer workplace. Again, this is not about political activity; this is simply about the function of representing a group in negotiations with the owner. That is the case in Illinois, where Mark Janus works as a specialist for the Department of Healthcare and Family Services. He works under a contract negotiated between the State of Illinois and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME. He is not a member of the union. He is not required to be a member of the union. But Mark Janus says: I want all the benefits that are produced by the union organizing and negotiating on my behalf, but I don't want to have to share any of the costs. Everyone knows that if people are given a permission slip to not share in the cost of organizing, the ability to organize is undermined. It is a fundamental part of it: You negotiate together; you benefit together. He is challenging that portion of the contract. The powerful and privileged titans of industry have been waging a decades-long campaign against the workers of America. They are excited about this. Don't worry, the Koch brothers are in control. Well, we have certainly seen their control here in the Senate. This certainly bears on the case right before us. They invested vast sums in 2014, and they supported and pushed campaigns in Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Iowa, Colorado, and Alaska, and they turned those seats in favor of folks who supported the Koch brothers. They took a majority of this body. What happened in 2016? Well, there was a vacant Supreme Court seat. We have all taken a pledge to support the Constitution. We have an advice and consent responsibility. But the majority leader came down here and said: We are not going to do our responsibility of advice and consent on any nominee from President Obama--none. It doesn't matter who the nominee is; we are not going to do this. Why? Because the Koch brothers said: Don't allow a debate or a vote on a nominee from President Obama. The majority leader said that this was justified because it was an election year. Let's look at American history. Fifteen times in an election year, there has been a vacancy on the Supreme Court. All 15 times previous to 2016, the Senate debated and the Senate voted. There were Members of my colleague's team across the aisle who thought we should honor that responsibility of advice and consent. You can vote somebody down or you can vote somebody up, but we should have the debate and we should have the vote. As soon as they said one word about how there should be a debate or there should be a vote, they got their chain yanked. In one case, the Koch brothers said they would immediately put in millions of dollars against their primary opponent. That is why the Koch brothers are known as the puppet masters of this body right here in which I stand right now. When they say ``jump,'' the majority says ``how high?'' That certainly came to fruition in 2016 when they refused to exercise their constitutional responsibility to debate and vote on a nominee for the Supreme Court. That was done so that the empty seat would be passed on to the next President. That is the first time in U.S. history a Supreme Court seat has been stolen and passed on to the next President--the only time. Well, what does that result in? That results in a Supreme Court that now has been selected where we know four people stand on one side of the issue and four stand on the other side. Then you have, essentially, an illegitimate process for the ninth Justice--a Justice who by every indication is willing to join the other four in attacking the foundation of the right to organize in our Nation. That right to organize was envisioned in the Constitution, in the ``we the people'' Constitution, not ``we the powerful,'' not ``we the privileged,'' not ``we the wealthy,'' and not ``we the well-connected.'' Mr. Janus is being represented and funded by the National Right to Work Foundation. Let's call it the right to freeload because that is what it is. You don't contribute your share, but you get all the benefits. It reminds me a little bit of the conversation about citizenship in America. People talk about the rights of citizenship and their responsibilities of citizenship too. There are responsibilities of being part of a group when you bargain for wages. That means paying your fair share. So it is their share. It is the heart of the ability to organize versus the position orchestrated by the Koch brothers to assault the ability to organize in this country so that workers can get a fair share of the wealth they work to create. We have seen these right-to-freeload bills pass with the influence of the titans across this country in State after State. Here is what we know. In those States that protect the constitutional vision of the right to organize, workers earn over $5,000 a year more than in other States. In the right-to-freeload States, workers earn a lot less. And that is apparently why the owners of the companies love that action so much--because they can squeeze more out of the workers. The right-to- freeload States have higher poverty. They have higher infant mortality. They have higher workplace deaths than other States. They support public schools less than other States. It is a mistake to have a Court assembled through an illegitimate process of stealing a Supreme Court seat proceed to gut the constitutional right to organize and assault the workers of this Nation just to put more zeros on the bank account statements of the millionaires and billionaires and titans and wealthy and powerful Americans. Let's have a remedial course in this Chamber about what our Nation and our Constitution are all about. It is not about coming here and getting elected by the wealthiest Americans to serve the wealthiest Americans; it is about coming here to form laws that serve ``we the people.'' Thomas Jefferson made this point again and again. He said that if you concentrate power in the few, you will get power from the powerful--you will get decisions from the powerful. You will never get the will of the people if you concentrate power. He called on every voter to have an equal voice--not just a vote but an equal voice. So let's remember Jefferson. Let's remember that our Forefathers put together this document so that we wouldn't have government by the few and the powerful, such as they have in Europe, but this would be different here in the United States of America, where we would try to forge laws that gave all families the opportunity to thrive. We can see the impact that the reversal of this principle has had. We spent half of last year on a healthcare bill or versions of a healthcare bill designed to rip healthcare from 22 to 30 million Americans, depending on the version. Then we spent the other part of the year on a tax bill designed to borrow $1.5 trillion from our children and deliver the vast amount of the benefits to the wealthiest of Americans. That is government for and by the powerful. Let's return to government for and by the people. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Amanda Power, be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, our Constitution begins with three very simple and very powerful words: ``We the People.'' It is the mission statement for our Nation, for our Constitution. It is a vision in which decisions are made of, by, and for the people, not for the privileged and not for the powerful. Who wrote those words? Well, it happened to be a group of White, wealthy landowners--the powerful and the privileged. They didn't choose to build a nation that would make laws for their benefit but laws that would be designed for the entire populous to thrive. They were descended from immigrants. In our country, unless you are 100 percent Native American, unless you have just arrived as a new immigrant, you are descended from immigrants yourself. It is part of the fabric of our Nation. It is what makes us a combination of powerful talents and abilities from around the world. George Washington himself once said: ``America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respected Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions.'' On another occasion, he wrote to a friend: ``I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.'' True to Washington's wishes and to his vision, that is the land we have been. It has been that land of opportunity, that land that welcomes others to our shores and gives them the chance to pursue the vision of opportunity, to help participate in the making of our great Nation, and to do so, each generation brings together a variety of languages and cultures and backgrounds. That is America. That is why, a century after our Nation's founding, the French gave to the United States the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty has stood as a beacon of hope, welcoming those from other lands. Inscribed in the pedestal of that statue are these words: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Those are the welcoming words for hundreds of thousands arriving here in the United States. As I speak at this moment, 800,000 young men and women right here in America are yearning to breathe free as full participants in the Nation that they have grown up in. These are our Dreamers--Dreamers like this group of Oregonians who visited my office in December, who came to this country as very young children, who went to elementary school here, who went to high school here, who are our neighbors, our community members, who have gone on to college, who have taken jobs, and who are contributing in every possible way to our community, studying in their schools, practicing and working in our industry. They are now young adults who are striving to support their families, building to strengthen this economy, and building a future for themselves. They are paramedics saving lives. If you stand on a street corner in Oregon and look around, there is a pretty good chance you will see a Dreamer. You may not know it because they are full members of our community, and you will see them contributing. But they have overcome a lot of obstacles, which creates a grit of character. It also helps to build the future of our Nation, just as it did for those of our forefathers and foremothers who arrived 1 or 2 or 3 or 10 generations ago. We provided a program, the DACA Program, which struck a deal that said: If you give us all of your information, we will make sure that you are legally protected. President Trump has broken that promise. He has broken that deal, that commitment made by our executive branch to these Dreamers. So it puts them in a terrible spot of uncertainty and stress and limbo. Now it is time to set that right. It could be set right by the President in a moment. Several of the courts have weighed in and said that the President has acted unconstitutionally in attacking our young immigrants, our Dreamers. But let's not wait for the courts to remedy this. Let's take care of it ourselves in this Chamber, the Senate Chamber. After months and months of inaction, after broken promises by President Trump, let's finally protect these men and women who do so much to embody the American spirit. As we move forward in this debate, we must look again to what our Founding Fathers intended for the Nation they created and ensure that the ``golden door'' that the poet Emma Lazarus wrote about in her poem remains an open door, open to all those who dream to become an American and to contribute to this Nation. We must remain, in President Washington's words, ``open to receive not only the Opulent and Respected, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations.'' Yet, looking at the plan that President Trump has put forward and similar plans offered in this Chamber, there is a real interest in slamming the door shut by those who have already arrived as immigrants, who have fled persecution, who have pursued freedom, who have pursued opportunity, and who have escaped from famine to come in and slam the door on everyone else. It is not very American to do that, and it is not a strength to undermine the future success of our economy by draining away the extraordinary talents of our Dreamer community. President Johnson made the point. He said: ``The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.'' President Ronald Reagan made the point. He said: ``More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.'' The founding President of our country, a respected Democratic President of our country, and a respected Republican President of our country have said the same thing: The strength of our country is in the contributions that have been made by our immigrants. The Founding Fathers wrote those words, that mission statement, that this would be a nation of, by, and for the people, not one to make laws by and for the powerful and the privileged. That is the vision we need to continue to hold on to--to understand that the strength of this Nation comes from weaving together the many cultural threads of the people of the United States of America. Let's get this Dream Act to this floor. There is a bipartisan understanding around restoring legal status. There is a bipartisan foundation for border security. Let's not give in to those far-right Breitbart voices that are so out of sync with the traditions, the strength, the culture, and the vision of our Nation. Let's restore the legal status for our Dreamers, enhance our border security, and do the work that this Chamber should have done long ago. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, we hear a lot in this Chamber about family values. We hear from Democrats and we hear from Republicans about the need to support and improve the strength of families across our Nation. What are the things that really do provide the foundation for a family to thrive? Jobs, education, and healthcare. Good-paying jobs and jobs with good working conditions, certainly, are extremely valuable, but the issue of good-paying jobs and good working conditions has been caught in a struggle between ``we the people'' and the powerful and privileged of this Nation. Our Constitution starts out with these three beautiful words: ``We the People.'' The whole entire setup was to avoid the type of situation that was in so many places in Europe, where the privileged and powerful families ran everything for their own benefit and not for the benefit of the people of the United States of America--in that case, the people of Europe. Our vision is different. Yet, time and again, we see this struggle played out, where the powerful and privileged are trying to ride right over the top of ordinary people--ordinary working Americans, ordinary middle-class Americans. That certainly is the case when we take a look at the issue of the Family and Medical Leave Act, FMLA. This is an act passed 25 years ago. It was a major step forward in striking a better balance for good working conditions. Let's revisit a little bit of the debate that occurred 25 years ago in preparation for the consideration of that act. Many folks today don't realize that the opportunity to take unpaid time off to be with a child or be with a loved one who is very sick or a family member who is dying is something that came out of the FMLA 25 years ago. They assumed this is just a fair, decent, and right way to treat your employees; that it produces more productive, more loyal team members, and it is just part of an appropriate consideration of the human condition. Before we had the FMLA 25 years ago, oftentimes people couldn't take time off to have an operation for a medical condition. Being sick a day might mean you are fired. Tending to a newborn child might mean you lose your job. Decent, ordinary interaction with family was something that was not prioritized by the companies around this country. It is a system that big, powerful, and privileged individuals and organizations fought to preserve. It took 7 years of congressional debates. It took overcoming two Presidential vetoes. It took overcoming entrenched opposition from special interests that said it would be a disaster for workers to be able to address their medical conditions or their family medical conditions. They predicted all types of catastrophes. The chamber of commerce back then called FMLA--that is simply family and medical leave--a dangerous precedent. The National Federation of Independent Business said it was the greatest threat to small business in America. One Member of Congress, Representative Cass Ballenger of North Carolina, described FMLA as essentially ``nothing short of Europeanization,'' and he didn't mean that in a complimentary fashion. We know better today. There is no partisan debate over the FMLA today. There is no organized corporate opposition to the Family and Medical Leave Act. Companies have found, treating their employees with the opportunity to address medical conditions of their own or their family members or to be with a new baby is simply a win-win for the company and for the employer. More than 200 million working Americans have taken leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act to care for a newborn child, to sit at the bedside of a sick loved one, or to recuperate after a major surgery. What has been the result? According to a Labor Department survey released 5 years ago on the 20th anniversary, 91 percent of employers said the law had either a positive impact or at least no negative impact on the business. Whenever you get 9 out of 10 on anything in America, we should pay a lot of attention to that. The FMLA has been so successful and so popular, it has been expanded twice. In 2008, we expanded it to allow military families to take up to 26 weeks of leave to care for injured servicemembers. Then again, in 2009, we expanded it to cover flight attendants and airline flight crews. It is time we consider, on the 25th anniversary, that we need to go from a system of simply unpaid leave to a system of paid leave. We need to join the rest of the developed world and say: It makes so much sense for family members to have this flexibility. It makes so much of an improved worker and an improved family that it is a win-win for America. It is time to recognize that while the FMLA--Family and Medical Leave Act--was powerful, it is only powerful for those who could afford to go without income. That leaves out a great, vast swath of America. President Trump said he wants to fight for working families, so I would expect him to be down here lobbying for the improvement of this act. We haven't heard from him yet, and I am not really expecting we will because what we have seen in the course of the past year is, while talking about strengthening families, time and again, the President is simply about diminishing the support for working families and undermining them. We saw that most recently with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, by assigning someone to go over there and head it up and then proceed to undo the protections for fair financial deals that are the foundation for the financial success of our families. Really? Turn the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into a bureau to support financial predators? No, that does not help our families. In fact, it will help our families to advance Senator Gillibrand's FAMILY Act because the time has come for national paid family and medical leave insurance in the United States. We know this because a number of States have already enacted their own paid leave law. This isn't some big experiment that we have no foundation for understanding the pros and cons because States have already acted. We can evaluate how that has gone. When California was debating paid leave before its passage in 2002-- yes, 16 years ago--the chamber of commerce described it as a coming disaster, and the National Federation of Independent Business predicted it would be the biggest financial burden for business in decades, but a study looking back on California's paid leave found that after 1.4 million leave claims were paid--that is 1.4 million times that a worker was able to take care of a medical condition, was able to care for a newborn, was able to sit by the bed of a dying family member--the law has helped reduce turnover. That is good for business. It has increased employee loyalty, which is also good for business. New Jersey passed paid family leave in 2008. They offered workers 6 weeks, at two-thirds their salary, funded through a payroll tax. At the time, the mayor of Bogata, NJ, railed against it saying, ``The basic argument for this . . . is to subsidize an army of breastfeeding single mothers.'' Well, I must say what a misunderstanding that is of the importance of a mother to be with a newborn or a father to be with a newborn. That bonding, that support--those are family values. Don't talk about family values to me and then talk about a mother having zero days to be with a newborn or a father zero days to be with a newborn. After 2 years, New Jersey has a leave fund that has a surplus, and they did a reduction in the payroll tax that pays for it. Between 2009 and 2015, 200,000 paid leave claims were approved, paying out $507 million in benefits, resulting in employee retention of over 90 percent. Business is humming in New Jersey and in California. In fact, businesses are doing well in each of the States and the District of Columbia where paid leave has already been established by law. I celebrate what we accomplished 25 years ago with the Family and Medical Leave Act, but I am saddened we restricted it to only those who could afford to take time off with no pay. Strengthening families is something we should want to happen with families who are doing well enough to go without pay, but we should also assist families who are struggling and living paycheck-to-paycheck. I want those moms and dads who are living paycheck to paycheck to be able to spend a moment with their newborn. I want them to get the operation they need, which causes them to miss time from their job. I want them to be able to sit by the bed of a loved wife or a husband or child as they are dying. That is strengthening the families in America. That is putting people ahead of the powerful and the privileged. And putting people ahead of the powerful and privileged is what our Nation is all about. So let's get it done and pass this bill. Thank you, Mr. President. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I appreciate that Senator Cantwell organized this time for a group of us to come to the floor to speak about this disastrous, insane plan to drill throughout 90 percent of our coastal shelf. This, the Interior Secretary tells us, is part of President Trump's directive to rebuild the offshore oil and gas program, but he also conveyed it was the President's directive to ``take into consideration the local and State voices.'' Well, certainly the draft plan--if you can call it a draft--didn't take into account local or State voices. Had the Interior Secretary bothered to actually consult, this is what he would have heard from people in Oregon. Our Governor, Kate Brown, denounced the plan, saying: ``In what universe would this be okay?'' Noah Oppenheim, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, stated: The Trump administration wants to put fish and fisheries at significant risk while lining the pockets of their oil industry co-conspirators. Meanwhile, more frequent oil spills and more intense ocean acidification and ocean warming are guaranteed to ensue. Charlie Plybon, the Oregon policy manager at Surfrider Foundation, an organization made up of everyday people passionate about protecting our oceans and our beaches, shared this opinion: We are united in an understanding of the threats which offshore oil drilling poses to our coastal economy, jobs and culture we have today. We will not gamble our ocean resources with dangerous oil exploration and polluting drilling activities that put our future and that of generations to come at risk. Charlie went on to convey the enormous disparity between the economy that is driven by fishing and ocean recreation and by tourism as compared to the economy driven by oil drilling and how the former completely outweighs the latter. The Association of Northwest Steelheaders is one of the oldest and most cherished conservation and sport fishing advocacy organizations in the Pacific Northwest. Their statement is the following: This proposal stands to go against everything we believe in. Drilling for oil and gas off the coast of Oregon compromises our fisheries, our coastal economies, and our values. These folks know what they are talking about. The Tribes weighed in through the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. Their resolution conveys opposition to ``any proposal to open Pacific offshore waters from California to and including Alaska to offshore drilling.'' Scott McMullen, the chairman of the Oregon Fishermen's Cable Committee--a group of troll fishermen who have been very involved in negotiations involving the fiber optic cable lines that are laid in the ocean--said: The Oregon fishing industry has had a long history of good stewardship of the fishing grounds which are open for multiple uses. Oil platforms in our fishing grounds would deny access to the resources that fishermen, fish processors and thriving coastal communities depend on. To take away the right to use our historical shared fishing grounds by awarding drilling rights for this single industrial use would be wrong. Dale Beasley had this opinion: As president of the Columbia River Crab Fisherman's Association and Coalition of Coastal Fisheries, our position on any fixed structures in the ocean and particularly oil platforms is simple--NO NO AND NO again. Our members rely 100% on clean sustainable marine waters for 100% of our families income. Terry Thompson, Lincoln County commissioner, stated: The state of Oregon has been a leader in the nation in terms of protecting our environment while responsibly utilizing our natural resources. We banned oil and gas development years ago because of the potential risk to our ocean, which is one of the most productive places in the world. The President's proposal to allow oil and gas development is an attempt to override the will of the people and shows a complete disconnect between the Administration and the people of the West. I think these voices--the voices of the crabbing industry and the salmon industry, the fishing industry and the tourism industry--these voices of the coastal economy, reverberate in absolute parallel and passionate opposition to drilling off our coast for oil. Before the drilling takes place, there are massive amounts of explosions that are conducted in order to create the maps of what is under the surface for potential drilling. That alone--just the preparation for drilling--is deeply disturbing, but imagine what an oilspill looks like. This is a map of the Washington and Oregon coast, with the outline overlaid with the gulf oilspill. It covers a section that is the entire length of the State of Oregon and the State of Washington. Imagine those hundreds of miles of soiled beaches, the oil's impact on the ecosystem of the fisheries. There is no way this risk is justified for pumping a few more barrels of oil--which, I might point out, should be left in the ground anyway because burning oil that we are extracting from the ground is steadily raising the temperature of the planet and the temperature of our oceans, which absorb the vast majority of the heat from burning fossil fuels, and that is creating changes, from ocean acidification to the bleaching of the coral reefs, and all kinds of impacts on the surface of the continents. So I say to the Interior Secretary, you have been given a mission by the President of the United States, which, as you have stated, is to take into consideration local and State voices, so simply hear those voices, and then take Oregon out of the equation, take Washington out of the equation, take California out of the equation, take every State that objects out of this equation, and, by the way, it would be wise to take the rest out as well. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, on August 25, a minority group of Rohingya militants proceeded to attack a number of Burmese police outposts in northern Rakhine State, and they inflicted injuries and killed about 12 members of the country's security forces in the process. These attacks certainly must be condemned, but they have triggered a response by the Burmese Government and military that is beyond horrific--attacks by the Burmese Government and military that have inflicted a massive humanitarian crisis in that nation. The Burmese military, aided by mobs of local vigilantes, carried out the violence against the Rohingya people in a systematic way. These are people who have been in Burma for generations, but they have been stripped of their citizenship under Burmese law. In the attacks that followed, Doctors Without Borders estimates that well over 6,000 men, women, and children were murdered in just the first month of this ongoing assault, and that included hundreds of children--an estimated 700 children ages 5 and under. The survivors have shared countless stories of women being raped, men murdered, children murdered in the most inhumane ways imaginable. Human Rights Watch has reported that the Burmese military and the associated vigilantes have burned 354 villages to the ground. The response of the Rohingya has been to flee the country, desperately fleeing as fast as they could the systematic violence inflicted upon them--systematic rape, systematic shooting, the murder of children. The result is that 650,000 people have fled to the adjoining country of Bangladesh, where they are now establishing refugee camps. These camps are a big improvement from being attacked, shot, murdered, and raped inside Burma, but the camps themselves are just a jumble of split bamboo frames with plastic draped over the tops of them. You can see here in this photo that the ground has been cleared away and people have shoveled out relatively flat sections of the hillside, split bamboo into little pieces, tied them together with threads, and draped plastic over the top of them. I wonder what will happen when the monsoons come or a severe windstorm comes. I don't think these shelters are going to hold up. The overcrowded conditions and poor sanitation in these camps put them directly at risk for diseases like diphtheria and cholera, and these camps--full of displaced, disenfranchised, angry young men--are also recruiting grounds for violent extremist groups like ISIS. This is, in the words of the United Nations, the fastest growing refugee emergency in the world. It is unacceptable, and America needs to pay attention and respond. The flow of refugees has continued, even until now. The numbers have dropped. There aren't that many Rohingya left inside of Burma. The Governments of Burma and Bangladesh are discussing a repatriation strategy on how these individuals may be able to return to Burma, and they have a framework for a plan. Burma says that they will welcome them and let them go home. They have even said that they can return to where their villages were burned and have assistance in rebuilding their homes and community structures. In the first step, they say that they will house them in reception camps, and they also say that they may put them into model villages. These words ``reception camps'' and ``model villages'' are words for encampments that are based on what is already in much of Rakhine, central Rakhine State, which are long-term camps that are essentially prison camps--prison camps for the Rohingya. If this is not going to unfold in this manner, the world has to be engaged. Right now, of course, the Rohingya who have fled this horrific violence are not anxious to return immediately because they don't believe the government will protect them. If you had been subjected to a horrific rampage of slaughter and violence, why would you immediately go back to that unless the circumstances were dramatically modified? Can they depend upon the Burmese Government to protect them when they haven't protected them since August? Can they depend upon the Burmese military to protect them when the Burmese military perpetrated these crimes? Repatriation is important. The ability to go back to the villages and rebuild them is important, and time is of the essence for it to happen in a way that is really going to work. The international community is going to have to be involved. Let's understand that this assault, which went from August even until now, is not a one-time occurrence. It is the latest in a long line of atrocious assaults on the Rohingya people. In 1978, Burma's military launched Operation King Dragon, causing more than 200,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. There were similar campaigns of assault in 1992 and in 2012 and in 2015 and in 2016, none as horrific as what was witnessed just a few months ago, in August of 2017, but terrible assaults nonetheless. Time and again, the Rohingya people have been subjected to abuse, persecution, and violence, and recognize this isn't just a tactic that the Burmese Government and Burmese military have used against the Rohingya. They have used it against other minorities--this systematic strategy of burning the village, shooting people as they flee, and raping the mothers and daughters. We have seen this with assaults on ethnic minorities in the Shan and Kachin States, where people have faced very similar persecution. In fact, in those States, over 100,000 people have been displaced by the military since 2011. So the United States and the world must not only stand up and say that this ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya is wrong, but also say that this strategy being used by the Burmese military against minorities is absolutely unacceptable under any code of moral conduct, under any religious vision, under any civilized understanding of the treatment of citizens. Much of what took place over the last few decades was out of sight of the world because Burma was closed off to the world. But then Burma went through a diplomatic awakening, the budding of democratic institutions, and they have been more open to the world, so now we can see very vividly what is going on. They are not hidden, and there is no excuse for the world to turn away and not engage. Neither the Burmese Government nor the military is ready for international cooperation. They have left the international community out of the process of trying to address these issues. They have rejected the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees--no international monitoring allowed and freedom of the press curtailed. The Rohingya people are right to be wary of how they will be repatriated without significant international involvement, without strongly developed measures for their safety, without a changed attitude by the government. That is why, yesterday in the Senate, I introduced a resolution calling for international pressure and oversight to be brought to bear on the repatriation process. It calls upon the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to play a central role in ensuring that any repatriation of the Rohingya people is safe, voluntary, and dignified. The concern for the treatment of the Rohingya is bipartisan. I appreciate the 14 Senators who have already cosponsored my resolution. Particular thanks go to Senator John McCain and to Senator Todd Young not only for supporting this resolution but also for being advocates for the Rohingya people and for global human rights. I was profoundly shocked when the Burmese military started these massive assaults back in August. I knew it was important for our government to pay attention, for the people of the United States to pay attention, and for Members of this Senate to pay attention and to weigh in and try to create pressure to end the persecution and create a different path for the future. In the month that followed, there was a lot of international outcry about how wrong this was, and First State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, who is Burma's head of state, responded with a speech to the world through the United Nations. She invited the world ``to go with us into the troubled areas. . . . See for yourself what is happening and think for yourself: what can we do to remove these problems?'' I applauded that attitude and that invitation to the world to be engaged and be involved and see what was happening. Senator Durbin and I, along with three Members of the House--Congresswoman Betty McCollum from Minnesota, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from Illinois, and Congressman David Cicilline from Rhode Island--came together and accepted her invitation. We accepted her offer, and we planned a trip for November to go see the troubled areas in Burma, just as Aung San Suu Kyi had suggested. We intended to go to the afflicted areas. We intended to see for ourselves what was happening. We intended to talk to those left behind to get as full a story as possible. And we intended, as she indicated, to think of what we can do to reverse the situation. The Burmese Government worked with us to plan this trip. It involved a tremendous amount of logistics on how we could get to northern Rakhine State. But at the very last moment, just as we were getting ready to leave Washington, DC, the government reversed course. The Government of Burma said: We invited you, but now we will block you from visiting these afflicted areas. Clearly, the Burmese Government and military had a lot to hide. Their invitation to the world from the Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, turned out not to be sincere. She did not stand behind her invitation. She did not ensure that the world could come and see what was going on. We were not allowed to visit the villages that had been burned. We were not allowed to visit camps from the previous repatriation of individuals, called internally displaced persons camps, or IDP camps. We were allowed to fly into the capital of Rakhine State, Sittwe. In the capital of Sittwe, there was something there that I didn't expect at all. In the capital, there is a section of the city that is referred to as the Muslim quarter, the Muslim neighborhood. It is called Aung Mingalar. We were told we could go visit the Muslim quarter, Aung Mingalar, and so we did. This is a street in Aung Mingalar. At the end of the street, you have a police station, and you have a fence. In fact, every route out of this neighborhood is blocked by police. The people who live there are not currently trapped by high walls and extensive barbed wire, but it is illegal for them to leave this neighborhood--think of the early stages of the Warsaw ghetto in Poland. I had no idea this existed, and it is an indication of the situation the Rohingya live in, not just in this quarter, but there are 120,000 of them in camps that have been set up where they are not allowed to operate as a normal individual, in a normal economy, in a normal village. This neighborhood is functionally sealed off from the rest of the city. They cannot leave and go a short distance away to open their shops, so they have no means to support themselves. They are trapped in a neighborhood cage with the barriers, police station, and consequences if they leave without permission. If they have a medical emergency, then what they have to do is get permission to leave to travel to an IDP camp--internally displaced persons camp--see a doctor at the IDP camp, get a referral to the hospital, return back to their neighborhood, and then go to the hospital that is just 5 minutes away. So it is a trip of many hours in order to go to the healthcare facility that is just minutes away. Can you imagine what that is like in a health emergency? Why? It is just a direct affliction on these Muslim residents in this Buddhist nation. They are dependent to survive on relatives who have found a path to other countries who can send money back to them so they can purchase goods, and they are also dependent upon the government. The government provides teachers for the higher high school-level classrooms, and those teachers disappeared after the August assaults and haven't returned. The children of this neighborhood are not allowed to go to the universities. So this may not look so horrific unless you know the facts; that it is a zone that is essentially a prison inside the capital city for the Muslim residents. In order to learn more, our delegation traveled to Bangladesh to the refugee camps. We went to a camp called Balukhali, and that visit brought home the breadth and horror of the human rights crisis that these men, women, and children have endured. Speak to any member of the delegation, and they will tell you that articles and reports written about what has happened are not the same as hearing firsthand and face- to-face the stories of the atrocities the Rohingya refugees have suffered. At Balukhali, Senator Durbin and I went into a temporary classroom with tarp over the top where women had gathered to learn about sanitation and disease prevention, and I asked the interpreter who was with us: Would you ask these women if they have stories they would like to share? I wasn't sure these Muslim women, covered in traditional Muslim clothing, would be willing to share a story with an outsider, but they immediately responded. One woman jumped up, and she pulled the cloth off her arm to show the scars from the burns she had as her village hut came down around her as she tried to escape. Then other women jumped up to tell other stories--of a child being killed in front of her, of a husband being slaughtered, of the trials and tribulations of trying to escape the assault from the military. Every person in that room had tragic and horrifying stories to share--entire villages burned to the ground, entire villages fleeing for the border, being shot at by solders as they tried to cross the border into Bangladesh. They themselves did not share stories about the rapes, but they shared those stories with the doctors and others who shared the stories with us. As you walk around the camp, you see a lot of young kids, a lot of children. Some are helping out with their families. Some are orphans. Some are kicking balls around. I watched one young man run with a little sheet of plastic that he had put split bamboo on to create a little tiny kite, and they could get that thing about 10 feet in the air. He had a smile on his face, and you could almost envision these were regular children growing up like others around the world. Then I went and visited with a group of the children who were doing drawings, and when you saw their drawings, you realized what they had been through. Here I am talking to a young boy who is showing me his drawing of a helicopter and a military vehicle coming into the village. Here is one of the drawings that was held up. You see the helicopter shooting at the village and the drawing of the machineguns. The village house is under assault. Here is another child's drawings, and again there are helicopters. You see the houses built on stilts. Here is a military man on the ground shooting at them as they are playing. These children have been through horrific, horrific trauma. Their families have been fractured, they may not have a mother or father, and somehow they are going forward in life. I would like to say that the situation has improved since our trip, but the situation is still extremely bad. Take a look at this map from Human Rights Watch. These red dots are villages that have been burned-- all of these, these two lines of villages. At last count, 354 villages burned, and it wasn't just in August and September but the burning continued. The Human Rights Watch said in October and November, another 40 villages were burned. In fact, one was burning on November 25 right after our delegation returned to the United States of America. Is it any wonder the Burmese Government didn't want us going in to see any of these sites firsthand? We are not the only ones who were denied access. All of the U.N. organizations, including a factfinding mission and an investigator named Yanghee Lee, were stopped from visiting these afflicted areas. International aid groups like the Red Cross were denied access. A mass grave containing the bodies of a group of Muslims was uncovered in Rakhine State's Inn Din village just north of Sittwe, the capital where we were. In a rather shocking first, the Burmese military actually accepted responsibility for the deaths, claiming that soldiers and villagers reacted to provocation from terrorists and that those who were involved would be punished. Do you think they are really going to be punished? I will tell you who gets punished. It is reporters, and these are the two reporters who reported it. Where are they? They are in prison--Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two reporters for Reuters. Shouldn't the United States and the international community demand that they be set free and demand those who perpetrated these crimes against humanity be the ones in prison? These two young men have been charged with violating the country's Official Secrets Act and are facing 14 years in prison for ``illegally'' acquiring information and sharing it with foreign media. It sounds to me like these two reporters were doing exactly what Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate, said: Come and see. There is a continuing cycle of violence and radicalization. Burma justifies their actions as a response to attacks by ARSA, but let's recognize a very small group of attacks occurred, and then the response was hundreds of thousands of people had their villages burned to the ground and were driven out of the country. Well, there is going to be perpetuation of a cycle of violence unless the mindset of the Government of Burma changes dramatically. Right now, we need to be engaged in the possibility of repatriation because it is urgent that these refugees get a chance to return to their villages and rebuild them, but it will not happen unless we insist on deep involvement by the United Nations. Reflecting on the Rwandan genocide 4 years afterward, President Clinton said: We owe to those who died and to those who survived who loved them, our every effort to increase our vigilance and strengthen our stand against those who would commit such atrocities in the future here or elsewhere. Indeed, we owe it to all the peoples of the world who are at risk because each bloodletting hastens the next as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable. For the thousands of Rohingya slaughtered and the hundreds of thousands more who survived and fled, the unimaginable has become all too conceivable. Five months after these atrocities began, 5 months tomorrow, in fact, the world has not heard from our President about this horrific ethnic cleansing. I encourage President Trump to weigh in on this, to speak with moral clarity, to condemn the Burmese Government for executing this horrific case of ethnic cleansing, to praise and support Bangladesh for opening its doors, to call on the world to provide Bangladesh with international resources to help address the plight of the refugees, to demand the safe and internationally monitored opportunity for the Rohingya refugees to return to their villages, rebuild their homes, and rebuild their lives. We in the Senate must not be silenced. Thank you, again, to my 14 colleagues who have already signed on to this resolution. Our repatriation resolution calls on Nobel laureate and head of state Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's other civilian leaders and military leaders to recognize that longstanding prejudices haunt Burma and commit to implementing all the recommendations of Kofi Annan's Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, which seeks to end the discrimination against the Rohingya and reduce the tension with other minorities. The Burmese Government could begin doing so immediately by lifting restrictions on the IDP camps and the Aung Mingalar, while planning to shut down the IDP camps entirely and restoring the opportunity for full participation in society. We call upon Burma to work with Bangladesh and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to ensure the voluntary and safe repatriation of refugees. Safety must be assured for these refugees. There must be no forcible repatriation. It must be voluntary, it must be safe, and it must be monitored by an international organization. We can make sure they get assistance in returning to rebuild their homes and their lives. We must call on Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi to embrace transparency, to grant humanitarian aid groups access, to release the two journalists in prison for doing their jobs. Finally, we must call on the international community to invest in the future of the Rohingya people. Everyone has a part to play in the economic development of the Rakhine State--the poorest state in Burma--for the benefit of all. In closing, anyone who looks at the events that have occurred since last August can plainly see the massive scale of human catastrophe. Let it not continue. The world that cried out ``never again'' so passionately decades ago, that rallied against the war crimes of Kosovo, that condemned the Rwandan genocide has an obligation to stand up once again--this time in Burma--for the universal right of every human to live in peace, free from fear and free from persecution. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. As I am standing here, I am in support of the proposal the Senator put forward, and I think every Member on this side of the aisle is. We are ready to open it up for 3 days, just as we were determined not to have a shutdown in the first place. So let's end this Trump shutdown and encourage our Republican colleagues to quit hatching and continuing this plan to extract this penalty, this damage, to our Nation.

Mr. MERKLEY. So the President, the House, and then the Republican leadership launched this plan to shut down the government. They succeeded. They rejected at least three times the Democratic effort to have a bipartisan proposal to keep the government open or after they shut it down--the Trump shutdown--to reopen it. Yet, even as you put forward this proposal, at this moment, they are still determined to keep the government shut down.

Mr. MERKLEY. No matter how important it is to keep the government open, the majority refused to entertain any proposal toward that effect, even if it had bipartisan support.

Mr. MERKLEY. So the whole reason we have a Trump shutdown right now-- as you pointed out, the President wanted it, but it is also because the majority leader, on behalf of the majority, also wanted to keep us shut down and refused to entertain the Democratic bipartisan proposals to open it up.

Mr. MERKLEY. I thank the Senator. I appreciate his speech and proposal. Certainly, so many of us are ready to vote right now, as we were before, to have a 3-day period in order to force intensive negotiations, because what we have seen, when the Republicans do a continuing resolution of a month or longer, they wait until the last 2 days to actually work on the issues, and we want to work on them right now. We think it is important that we address opioids. I think that is what your constituents in Virginia would like to see us do.

Mr. MERKLEY. So the citizens of the United States anticipate or expect that this body--once referred to as a great deliberative body-- would have a chance for different ideas to be put forward and different proposals to be considered. But that has not happened in this situation. There has been no opportunity for anyone to put forward any proposal to modify the legislation that has come from the House.

Mr. MERKLEY. They really want to see us reopen our community health centers and get those funded because they are so important.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to address some questions with my colleague from Virginia.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator very much for laying out the history of some of the key elements of how we got here. If your unanimous consent request had been agreed to by the Republicans, we would have a vote to reopen the government; is that the case?

Mr. MERKLEY. And is this not essentially the same consent request that was put forward by our colleague from Montana, Senator Tester, just on Friday night?

Mr. MERKLEY. So, repeatedly, the majority that controls this Chamber and has locked up the amendment box--the opportunity for anyone to put forth any proposals--they have locked it up. We have asked unanimous consent to essentially unlock that and put forward a proposal to keep the government open--because it hadn't yet shut down when it was first put forward--and now to reopen the government. They are absolutely refusing to entertain the prospect of this amendment being heard.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Missouri for sharing Frankie's story with us today, the fight for progress, and the life she lived. I was thinking last night as we were debating here on the floor about one of the ways that Martin Luther King summarized how we move forward toward justice. He said that it takes ``the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.'' That is what it takes to move us forward, and it sounds as though she was every bit the tireless individual, the passionate individual, who worked to advance justice. I thank my colleague for sharing that story. Speaking of fighting and justice, we have a lot to talk about. We are here in the middle of the Trump shutdown. Last night was quite interesting. Democrats came to the floor and said that we need to keep the government open. We want to have a debate and a vote on a provision to extend the government by 24 hours so that we could really force leadership to get in the room and work out a resolution on multiple issues that are already bipartisan issues. It shouldn't be that hard, but the majority leader, who is in control of this body, proceeded to say that he objected. It takes unanimous consent to get to a bill, so he sealed the deal on the Trump shutdown. He made sure this body couldn't debate or vote on keeping the government open for another day. Senator Nelson put that forward, and then Senator Tester tried to say: OK, let's take a little more time. If you don't think you can do it in a day, how about 3 days? Senator Tester moved to proceed to consideration of an amendment that would provide a continuing resolution for 3 days--to keep the government open 3 days to force our leadership on both sides to sit down and work out the details on these bipartisan proposals. Again, the majority leader objected. He sealed the deal on the Trump shutdown. Then he had the gall to come to this floor and blame others when he is in charge. This blame game by those who are in charge is fascinating. Republicans are in control of the Presidency. Republicans are in control of the House. Republicans are in control of the Senate. The Republican leader objected to debating an extension for our government to stay open. Not once, but twice last night, he blocked it. Well, it is very clear where the responsibility lies for this situation, which never occurs here in the United States--no. President Trump, back in 2013, said that the responsibility for a shutdown--this was when President Obama was in office. He said that it always comes back to the President. Well, how true those words are today. In 2013, there wasn't unified control. You didn't have the same party in charge of the Presidency and the House and the Senate, so it was a little bit of a more mixed-up story. But then Citizen Trump said: It is all the President's fault. Now we have a different situation where the same party controls all three settings. Let me tell you that the mechanism by which the Senate operates has changed dramatically. You can think of the possibility of offering amendments on the floor of the Senate. Here is an amendment box. You can take and put your proposal in that box so that you can get it in line to be debated. But the majority leader has the ability to close that box and put a padlock on it. That is what Mitch McConnell did. The technical term here is ``filling the tree,'' but that is a little hard to picture, so let's talk about the amendment box. He put a padlock on it and said that there would be no Democratic amendments considered. He has that power under the rules of the Senate. Then he did something else, which is interesting, which really is a new level of obstruction of dialogue here in the Senate. He took that box, and he put a tarp over the top of it. That tarp is another type of motion that has to be resolved before you can even get to the amendments to propose that one be taken out of the box so another can be put in. In fact, if you were following the Senate last night, you saw this very crazy motion in which the majority leader himself took the tarp off the box--a resolution related to a motion to move the bill to committee and back--so that he could change the amendments that he put in the box. But that box remained completely forbidden ground for Democrats to be able to participate in, to be able to put a bill on this floor. So it takes particular--I don't know what the right word for it is--I guess ``determination'' to spin the politics for that individual who has locked up the amendment box, preventing Democrats from putting a proposal on the floor--even a bipartisan proposal supported by Republicans--and then to blame Democrats, whom he has locked out of the process. Our responsibility is absolutely clear here. This Trump shutdown sits with the President, who made an offer a week ago Tuesday and took it back a week ago Thursday. He made another offer a couple of days ago. A few hours later, he withdrew it. Yes, I want to take on these issues. No, I don't. Yes, I do. No, I don't. The Democratic leader said it is like negotiating with Jell-O. There is just no ``there'' there to be able to have rational policy consideration. This Trump shutdown is doing a lot of damage across this country. It will do more damage with every succeeding day. And I say this directly to the President of the United States: Get engaged. Your job is to govern, to be part of the dialogue, not to be going off to Pennsylvania to campaign, not to be ignoring issues until it is only 24 hours out before we hit a deadline, not to be spending every weekend golfing and making your personal schedule off limits so that the public won't see that you are virtually never paying attention to governing. Mr. President--and I am speaking to President Trump--get engaged. You have a job to do. This is your shutdown, just as you said it was the President's responsibility in 2013. These issues that we are wrestling with go back to the middle of last year because it was in the middle of last year when we were approaching the deadline for the fiscal year, which ends at the end of September. So it was time to get a bill for children's healthcare to this floor and debate it and reauthorize it, renew it before we hit September 30. It was the time to get the bill for our community health clinics to the floor to be debated and reauthorized so that our community health clinics would stay open. It was the time to get to the floor a bill to take on the opioid epidemic. But what was the Republican Party engaged in? They weren't engaged in facilitating addressing healthcare problems. Oh, no. They were engaged in a bill to try to wipe out healthcare for 30 million Americans. We had five different versions of this bill here on the floor that wiped out healthcare for 22 million to 30 million Americans, and by a bare margin of a vote, we were able to block those bills. I thank my Republican colleagues who joined in that effort. They weren't interested in talking about children's healthcare, community healthcare clinics, or the opioid crisis. Finally, when the healthcare debate was sealed, what did they turn to? Not the governing issue of spending bills that should have been done by October 1. Oh, no, they had a different plan--a tax bill to deliver $1 trillion-plus to the richest Americans. That was more important than children's healthcare. Increasing wealth inequality was more important than our children. Increasing income inequality was more important than our children. We, the Democrats, are saying stop--stop taking up the time of this body on making the situation worse in America on healthcare, making the deficit worse here in America, robbing the common fund to enrich the richest Americans. Stop all of that. Instead, let's address all these issues right before us. The members of our communities who have gone to grade school, high school, community colleges, colleges, who are working in our businesses, doing so much for our community, their immigration status isn't nailed down. There is bipartisan support to nail that down. That is just and fair and right. All of us have members in our communities who are contributing so much, and they are being left in just an incredibly stressful limbo. They deserve better. I think the Democrats and the Republicans who have sent us--here it is, a bipartisan deal waiting to happen, but President Trump says yes today and no tomorrow. He says yes in the morning and no in the afternoon. Quite frankly, the Republican leadership does the same thing. So quit saying yes and no and just say yes. Let's get this bipartisan deal done. Let's get the opioid funding done. It is an epidemic. It is killing more people in America than traffic accidents. Let's get help in the right place. Yes, let's get the children's healthcare bill done. Senator Stabenow asked unanimous consent for immediate consideration of the bill for permanent CHIP funding. Who said no? The Republican leader came to the floor and blocked it because he is in charge. He has the amendment box all locked up, so Democrats can't even put a bipartisan proposal before this body. I thank Senator Nelson for fiercely fighting to keep us open for another day for negotiations. I thank Senator Tester for fighting and putting forward the proposal to stay open for 3 more days while we force negotiations to get these important issues addressed. I thank Senator McCaskill, who just spoke, for working hard to get a bill before this body that would ensure that the pay and death benefits for members of the armed services are taken care of. Who said no in every situation? Who said: I am keeping a lock on the amendment lockbox? Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate--complete control. This is no longer a deliberative body. A deliberative body debates issues. A deliberative body invites proposals from all Members. This is completely unlike the Senate I saw as a young man when I first came here as an intern for Senator Hatfield in 1976. Then, each side offered amendments, and they argued their hearts out. They voted, and a simple majority sent an issue forward or killed it. Now we can't even start a conversation, and when we do get an amendment, it is by a supermajority. That is a rare event. Outside of the reconciliation bills, which were a special provision for the budget, we virtually have not had a single Democratic amendment all through 2017. That is what has happened to the Senate, and that is why we are here. The responsibility is clear. This Trump shutdown should never have happened. President Trump needs to get his act together and get engaged. The majority needs to quit locking the amendment box so we can have actual dialogue and debate on the floor. Republicans have to quit blocking things both Democrats and Republicans have agreed to on children's health, on community health clinics, on opioids, and on legal status for our Dreamers. This should not be a hard deal to close. Let's open up this government, and let's get these issues dealt with and done for the benefit of the citizens of the United States of America. Thank you.