Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, climate disruption is the seminal challenge of our generation. It affects everything from our farming to our fishing to our forestry. We see the impact in disappearing glaciers, shrinking ice sheets, melting permafrost, dying coral reefs, more powerful storms, and migrating animals and insects. In response, communities across the globe are transforming their energy economies. They are increasing the energy efficiency of their buildings and their vehicles and their appliances, and they are replacing carbon-polluting fossil fuel energy with clean, renewable energy. How much do you know about the changes underway? Let's find out. Welcome to episode No. 2 of the Senate Climate Disruption Quiz. First question: Which car company announced just last week that all of its new models will have an electric motor starting in 2019? Was it Toyota, which has the Prius currently, the Prius plug-in? Was it Volvo, known for its safety, or Honda, which advocates its fuel efficiency, or Ford, which has the all-electric Focus? The answer is B: Volvo. On July 5, Volvo announced that beginning in 2019, every new model in its fleet will have some form of electric propulsion. These cars will include so-called ``mild'' hybrids featuring regenerative braking like the Prius, plug-in hybrids like the Volt, and fully electric cars like the Tesla. Volvo intends to do all of these forms. Now with electric cars in mind, let's move on to question No. 2: Which European country plans to ban the sale of new diesel and gas vehicles by the year 2040? Is it France or Spain or the United Kingdom or Switzerland? The answer is France. Last week, on July 6, France's Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot announced a new environmental plan for his country to reflect France's commitment to the Paris climate agreement. Minister Hulot not only said that France will ban the sale of new diesel and gas cars starting in 2040, but will seek to shut down all of its coal-powered electric plants over the next 5 years--by the year 2022--and to pursue a ``carbon-neutral'' economy by the year 2050. That is the same as a net zero production of carbon dioxide. Let's turn to a different part of the world. Let's go to the Southern Hemisphere. A crack in the Antarctic ice shelf will soon create an iceberg of what size? Will it be the size of Oregon, my home State, which is roughly 100,000 square miles; or the size of the Superdome in New Orleans, about 6 acres; or how about the size of Manhattan, 23 square miles; or Delaware, which is much larger, at about 2,000 square miles? The answer is D, Delaware. The crack in this ice shelf will create an iceberg about the size of Delaware. This is Antarctica's fourth largest ice shelf. The crack is now 120 miles long, and in some spots now it is 2 miles wide, and there are just 3 miles left in which it is attached to the ice shelf. So given the stresses that are being applied to that vast sheet of ice, the break is expected to happen in the next couple of weeks. When that happens, we will have an iceberg larger than 2,000 square miles--about the size of Delaware--and this will be such a large iceberg that it will contain roughly 1 trillion tons of ice. Question No. 4: Global production of what fossil fuel fell by 6.2 percent in 2016? Was it coal or was it oil or was it natural gas? The answer is A: coal. According to British Petroleum's annual report, global coal production fell by over 6 percent last year--the largest decline since they started keeping statistics in 1950. What is driving the decline? It is shrinking coal production in both the United States and in China. What is happening in the other two sectors--oil and gas? There was a slight increase in the production of oil last year, and the production of natural gas was basically flat. Now, compare these to renewable energy, which grew very quickly last year. Global wind energy grew by more than 15 percent in a single year, but that is a small amount compared to global solar energy, which grew by almost 30 percent--in a single year, almost a one-third increase in global production. And renewable energy is now taking up a larger share of the primary energy production worldwide. Finally question No. 5: How many U.S. cities have joined the ``We Are Still In'' coalition? That is the coalition that was formed after President Trump announced he was going to withdraw the United States from the Paris accord. Is it 15 cities, 125 cities, 500 cities, or just 100 cities? The correct answer is B, and of course the number is increasing even as we speak. President Trump announced on June 1 that he would pull the United States out of the Paris accord and, in just that short period since--a little over 5 weeks--125 cities, 9 States, 900 businesses and investors, and 183 colleges and universities have declared that they are committed to the vision of the Paris Agreement and to taking steps to be part of obtaining and securing that vision. Together, this coalition represents 120 million Americans and a $6.2 trillion share of the U.S. economy. It includes cities from the West, like Los Angeles, and the East, such as Baltimore. It includes cities in red States, like Houston, TX, and Tucson, AZ. It includes cities from the Southwest and Southeast, like Santa Fe, NM, from the Southwest, and Charleston, SC, in the Southeast. These are just a few of the 125 cities--cities led by Democrats and Republicans--because the fact is, the threat of climate disruption to our planet is not a partisan issue. It is not a red issue or a blue issue; it is an issue that impacts everyone on this globe, regardless of political ideology. So there you have it, folks. Episode No. 2 of the Senate Climate Disruption Quiz--questions ripped right from the headlines. How did you score? Every week we have surprising new facts--new facts on the ground about the changes in the environment and new facts about the response of communities across the globe. There is no question that we are racing the clock to take this on as human civilization, and there is no time to spare. So stay engaged in the fight. In the near future, I will bring you Episode No. 3 of the Senate Climate Disruption Quiz to present some of the new issues that will unfold in the coming days. If you are following this quiz at home and have a good idea for a climate disruption question, please tweet it to me at @SenJeffMerkley on Twitter, using the hash tag ClimateQ4Jeff. Let's fight together and save our beautiful blue-green planet. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I extend to my colleague from Hawaii every blessing for her successful health treatment. I know the thoughts and prayers of every Member of the Senate are with her tomorrow and beyond as she undertakes that healing path.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of the Senator from Hawaii tonight. They are certainly very relevant to the issue of healthcare here in America because each of us hopes that if a loved one gets ill, they will have the peace of mind that they know they will be able to get the healthcare they need and they will not go bankrupt in the process. Yet here we are tonight debating a bill titled ``Better Care Act.'' Better Care, has ever there been a bill in the history of the United States of America so more perversely named than this Better Care Act which strips care from 22 million Americans? I was very struck by one equation of this bill; that is, that it provides to the richest 400 Americans $33 billion over a 10-year period. That is enough to pay for healthcare under Medicaid for 700,000 individuals--700,000 individuals. It rips the healthcare away from them to give $33 billion to the richest 400 families. That is obscene. That is certainly not better care. It is hard for me to imagine that a single Member of this body would vote to proceed to this bill, but here we are. Until we get agreement that we are not going to proceed, we have to continue to carry on this fight. We know that 15 million people, CBO estimates, will lose healthcare in the next 12 months. That is even worse than the House bill. Last week, I came to this floor to call the Senate draft mean and meaner. The House bill was mean. The Senate's is meaner. Now we have the CBO estimate that says, yes, it is worse. One million more people would lose healthcare in a short period of time. Furthermore, the rate at which standard Medicaid is compressed-- Medicaid, as it existed before ObamaCare, that rate has increased to further diminish healthcare, having nothing to do with ObamaCare, just to add to the cruelty of this bill. So millions lose, but we deliver billions of dollars to the richest Americans. In my home State of Oregon, just the elimination of the expansion of Medicaid, the Oregon health plan--just that would eliminate 400,000 Oregonians off healthcare. Imagine those individuals holding hands, 400,000 Oregonians, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the State of Idaho. Anyone who has driven across Oregon would realize it is 400 miles across Oregon. If you are driving it, it is 7 hours of driving. For 7 hours, at 50 miles an hour, 60 miles an hour, you are passing a stream of people who would lose their healthcare just from the elimination of the expansion of Medicaid. My colleagues across the aisle have crafted this so as to put it beyond the next Presidential election, beyond the 2018 election and beyond the 2020 election. Why? They are so terrified of the impact of this on the election they decided to postpone it until after 2018 and 2020, as if that makes it acceptable to rip healthcare from millions of people. That type of cynical, cynical act, purely political, is not going to be viewed well by the American public. If you are so ashamed of this bill, if someone is so ashamed that they want to postpone the effects beyond the next Presidential election 3\1/2\ years from now, then maybe you should be so ashamed as not to vote to move to the bill here in the short term. One of our colleagues across the aisle noted today: I can't imagine-- not quite the exact word-for-word, but it is close. I can't imagine that anyone in America would have a chance to review this bill and truly understand it in time to proceed to it this week, including myself. Well, that is certainly true. Has there ever been a case where a bill profoundly affecting so many has not had the benefit of committee deliberation here in the Senate? Are we a legislative body or are we a dictatorship where everything is done behind closed doors and then rammed through? That is not the American way, and that is not the constitutional vision for how the Senate should work. There is supposed to be time to consult healthcare experts and time to go home to consult our constituents and find out how they feel. If one is so terrified of this bill that you are afraid of your constituents, then you shouldn't vote to proceed to the bill. If one is so terrified you don't want to consult the experts, you shouldn't proceed to this bill. If you are so terrified that the reaction from the public will be so strong that it will put you in an awkward spot, then you shouldn't proceed to this bill--because you have the responsibility to consult with your folks back home, a responsibility to consult with healthcare experts, to understand every nuance of this bill. One of those facts is going to have a devastating impact on those who would go to nursing homes. Folks who are under Medicaid and in a nursing home have given up their entire income and assets before they can get Medicaid support. I was in Klamath Falls the weekend before this last weekend, went to a nursing home, and they said: Senator, almost 100 percent of the folks here on long-term care are paid for by Medicaid. I thought they were going to say 60 percent or two-thirds, because that is the national statistic. No, in rural Oregon, in Klamath Falls, almost 100 percent. Then we had the CEO of the Oregon Health Association reach out and address this issue of how it is going to affect seniors. Here are his exact words: I was on a call early today looking at some projections of how hard Oregon and Medicaid-funded long-term care service would be hit. If this bill passes, it literally could force the closure of the majority of nursing facilities in Oregon by 2025. One thing I can't get out of my mind. At another nursing home I went to is a woman named Deborah. I explained I was coming by to talk to people because I wanted to understand better the impact of this bill on long-term care. She said: Senator, I am paid for by Medicaid. If Medicaid disappears, I am on the street, and that is a problem because I can't walk. That is exactly what Deborah said. And, of course, it is a problem, not only because she can't walk but because she needs extensive care, which is why she is in long-term care to begin with. The anxiety was palpable among the nursing home residents, among the long-term care residents, because they have no backup plan, because they had to spend down their assets before they qualified for Medicare. Don't think of this just as ripping healthcare away from millions of working families, millions of struggling families, millions of children, but also from our seniors who are in long-term care, who need extensive care, and who have given up their assets in order to qualify for Medicaid. They used those assets to pay for it as long as they could, and now they are on Medicaid. We are prepared to take those folks, many of them in wheelchairs--like Deborah, unable to walk--and throw them into the street and say: too bad. The President called the House bill mean and indicated he wanted a bill with more heart. This is not a bill with more heart. We should not move to proceed to this bill.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, on May 4 of this year, there was a party at the White House, a celebration--a celebration that the House had passed TrumpCare. Indeed, the President wanted to invite people over and say what a great job they had done and what a great bill they had passed. He called it a ``great plan.'' He said the House plan was ``very, very incredibly well-crafted.'' That was on May 4--a party at the White House, a celebration--but what a difference a month can make. A week ago, on Tuesday, June 13, the President had another gathering, and at this gathering he said that the bill from the House was ``mean,'' and he went on to use a very derogatory phrase to describe it. So what happened between May 4 and June 13? Did the bill change in some way? Absolutely not. It had already been passed out of the House. Apparently what happened is that someone explained to the President what was in it, and he said: That is terrible. We can't do that. It is a mean bill. And he used other vivid language to say just how bad it was. What feature of the TrumpCare bill did the President get briefed on that made him say that it was mean? It certainly is a mean-spirited bill. It certainly is a hard-hearted bill. It certainly is destructive to the quality of life of millions and millions of Americans. So which aspect of the bill was he referring to? I asked that question of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, when he came to the Senate for a hearing last week. I asked the Secretary if he shared the President's opinion that the TrumpCare bill was a mean bill. He didn't have an answer for that. He wouldn't say whether, as a leader in the administration on healthcare, he shared the President's opinion. I asked whether he thought the President thought it was a mean- spirited bill because it ripped healthcare from 23 million Americans. The Secretary of healthcare didn't answer. I asked whether it was mean because it eliminated essential health benefits like emergency care and rehabilitation services and mental health and addiction treatment and maternity coverage for women having a child. The Secretary again refused to answer. And he proceeded to say things like ``Well, I wasn't in the meeting,'' and that he hadn't talked to the President about why the President didn't like the bill. One would think that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, upon hearing that the President thought that the bill he had advocated for was terrible, would actually go to him and say: What is it you thought was so terrible? That might inform the conversations here in the Senate. But he said that he hadn't talked to the President about it. The Secretary of Health and Human Services didn't want to know why the President disliked this bill. I asked if the President thought that this was a mean bill because it has vast premium increases for older Americans. An individual in their mid-sixties, prior to the age for Medicare, a 64-year-old earning $26,500--how much would they pay under current law and how much would they pay under TrumpCare? Under current law, the answer is about $140 a month. And under TrumpCare from the House, the answer is $1,200 per month--an eightfold increase. How can anyone earning a little over $2,000 a month spend $1,200 on health insurance? It is an impossible situation. So, of course, those Americans in that situation would not be able to buy health insurance, would not be able to access healthcare. Is that why the President thought it was mean? Did the President get briefed on the damage it would do to our older Americans? Or was the President concerned about the impact on our older Americans who need to have care in a nursing home? Is the President finally aware that Medicaid pays for more than 6 out of 10 individuals who are in a nursing home because they need a level of care that can't be provided in the home? I went and visited a nursing home over the weekend in urban Oregon and then visited one in rural Oregon, in Klamath County. In Klamath County they told me that almost 100 percent of their citizens in long- term care are paid for by Medicaid. Nationally, it is a little more than 6 out of 10, but in this rural community, almost 100 percent. I thought about the residents there and what happens to them. Under this bill, when Medicaid is slashed massively and 23 million folks lose access to it, what happens to them? One woman, Deborah, said: Senator, Medicaid pays for my bill and if it doesn't exist for me--if it is taken away--I am on the street, and that is a problem because I can't walk. So picture an older American, a senior American who needs an intensive level of care that can't be provided in the home being thrown into the street in a wheelchair, unable to walk, and, by the way, no support structure because in order to qualify for Medicaid to pay your bill, you have to have spent down all your own resources, so it isn't like somebody has a backup plan. Maybe there are family members who will take them in and provide an intensive level of care. Maybe a few will have friends who will take them in and provide an intensive level of care. But for the vast majority, that support structure isn't there, and that means they are going to be on the street. Is that why the President said it was mean? Was it because the bill said States can charge more, allow insurance companies to charge more for individuals with preexisting conditions? That is certainly a huge problem. Community pricing has given access to insurance at the same price to everyone in America, regardless of preexisting conditions, but, unfortunately, TrumpCare changes that. I think we need to recognize that now, here in the Senate, 13 Senators are working to craft a Senate version of TrumpCare, and they are terrified--terrified of the public seeing their bill. It is a vampire bill. It is afraid of the sunlight--the sunlight of public commentary, input, even a public discussion from experts. They are afraid of their citizens. They are afraid of the expert commentary. And they want to hide it until the last second so they can bring it to the floor--next Thursday, a week from this Thursday--and try to pass it in a moment's time, less than a day. I was fascinated that our Secretary of Health and Human Services-- after there were more than 100 hearings and roundtables and walk- throughs of the healthcare bill in 2009, after consideration of more than 300 amendments in the Senate, after more than 100 Republican amendments that were adopted, minority amendments adopted, after more than 25 days of debate on the Senate floor--complained that the bill and the process were not transparent. If that wasn't transparent, how do you score the transparency of a bill where there have been zero committee meetings, zero chance for legislators to weigh in, zero chance for public input by experts, zero chance for the citizens of the United States to see this bill and share their feelings, zero chance for us to go back to our own States and have townhalls and ask for input? Well, you give it an F. It is a process completely out of sync with the responsibilities that every Senator took when they took the oath of office to be a Member of a legislative body--not a secret body, a legislative body, which implies deliberation in committee and deliberation on the floor and deliberation with constituents back home. There is a phrase for the Senate--probably not merited; in fact, I am sure it is no longer merited--that the Senate was the world's greatest deliberative body. But crafting legislation in secret that affects the quality of life of millions and millions of Americans, with no deliberation, that is not a legislative process. That is not what was envisioned under our Constitution, our ``we the people'' Constitution. It wasn't a ``we the secret group of powerful folks accommodating powerful special interests, government by and for the powerful.'' That wasn't the introduction to our Constitution. Perhaps Members might read the first three words of the Constitution. Perhaps folks might go back and look at our history of why we have this floor to debate the issues, because that is what a system of government of, by, and for the people is all about. In my home State, the elimination of Medicaid expansion--that is, the Oregon Health Plan expansion--would throw 400,000 people off of healthcare. Stretching that timeline from a couple years to 7 years doesn't change the fact that 400,000 people lose healthcare. That is mean-spirited. That is hard-hearted. That is terrible healthcare policy. It is not just those individuals who are affected. The uncompensated care rate has dropped enormously in Oregon, from 15 percent to 5 percent. The result is that there is much more income to our clinics and to our hospitals, and the result is better healthcare for everyone--everyone in our rural communities, everyone in our urban communities. Nonetheless, the majority persists in wanting to destroy this improvement. I am hearing from people like Elizabeth from Portland, who wrote to say that the Oregon Health Plan saved her life. The Oregon Health Plan, or Medicaid, saved her life. She was in school, and she had some health problems that were getting worse because of stress. But she didn't have a job and didn't have insurance, and things were getting bad. Then the Affordable Care Act came around, and it extended coverage. Since then, she has gotten her health problems under control, finished school, and was able to get a job. In Elizabeth's own words: I am once again contributing to society. I just need a little bit of time and help and I'm back on my feet. Isn't it the right thing to provide a foundation for every single American to have access to quality healthcare, so that when they get sick, it helps them get back on their feet? Ask yourself: What is your value? Is it your value that every American should have access to affordable healthcare? That is my value. That is what I am fighting for. What are you fighting for? Are you fighting to destroy healthcare for millions of Americans? Is that your value--to make life difficult and hard and mean-spirited and hard- hearted and terrible and painful for millions of Americans? Is that your value? If so, then keep up with this secret plan to destroy healthcare for millions of Americans. But if you value your constituents' quality of life, if you value their peace of mind, then put a stop to this abomination, this anti-democratic process. Insist that there is at least a month of consideration of the bill so that citizens can weigh in, so experts can weigh in, so committees can deliberate, so committees can propose amendments and improvements. Insist on that. We just need three Members of the majority party to believe in the responsibility of this Chamber to hold a public debate and insist that they will not vote to proceed to the bill unless we have at least a month of opportunity. That is only one-ninth of what we had in 2009. It is only a fraction of the committee meetings, roundtables, and walk- throughs we had in 2009. It would be only a fraction of the amendments offered in 2009. It would only be a fraction of the time here on the Senate floor we had in 2009. Don't you believe we should have at least a fraction of the public deliberation we had just 8 years ago before jamming this through and destroying healthcare for millions of Americans? What does peace of mind mean to you? I will tell you what it means to my constituents. It means that when their loved one gets sick, their loved one will get the care they need. It means that when their loved one gets sick, they won't go bankrupt. That is the peace of mind we are talking about, and that is the peace of mind that is so profoundly disturbed when you have a secret group meeting with powerful special interests, devising a bill they are afraid to show to the public of the United States of America. I would never want to have to vote on such a major bill without being able to hear what my citizens in Oregon think. I don't think any Member of this Senate should agree to vote on a bill with no deliberation and no public hearing. So we need three champions. Just three out of 52. It should be 52 out of 52 who insist on a quality public process. We have heard the comments in the hallways, many Members of the majority dislike the fact that there is a secret process that their majority leader is insisting on. We have heard that they don't like it. It is not right. But do you know what? Every Member here has a chance to say no to the secret operation, the secret committee of 13, and the last-second presentation of such a bill on the floor. The issue of the changes in healthcare without public deliberation terrifies folks like Deborah from Hillsboro, OR. She was diagnosed with Crohn's disease 8 years ago and has to take regular injections and medications to keep it under control. She does a lot of things right. She doesn't smoke, she exercises, and she follows her doctor's recommended diet. Other than her regular medications, she lives a normal, healthy life, and she is looking forward to retiring in the near future with her husband. They have been working hard their whole lives. They have been saving up for it. It is so close that they can almost taste it. But it is a dream that could be shattered by the Republican healthcare plan--the TrumpCare plan--being concocted secretly by 13 Members of this body. As she says: Without affordable coverage for pre-existing conditions I cannot even switch jobs easily. If Medicare is reduced or eliminated, as the GOP is trying to do, I may never be able to retire . . . we should not now, or ever, eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions (or price that coverage such that most of us will never be able to afford it). She is worried that changes that refer to Medicaid and the Oregon Health Plan will ruin her ability to retire and her ability to access healthcare. I don't know exactly what the President was briefed on that made him call TrumpCare ``mean'' and then speak in a very derogatory fashion about the bill from the House. I don't know exactly what he learned. I don't know if it was because he learned that folks on long-term care could lose that long-term care and Medicaid pays for more than 6 out of 10 Americans who are in long-term care. I don't know if it was because he learned about preexisting conditions. I don't know if it was because he learned it would throw 23 million people out of the healthcare system. I don't know if it was because he learned this would have devastating consequences to rural healthcare because of the impact on the finances of clinics and hospitals. Whatever he meant, he was right. He was right to make that transition from a month earlier when he held a celebration at the White House because this terrific, wonderful bill had been passed by the House, and when he sobered up and discovered that it was a mean-spirited, hard- hearted bill. But for all these reasons, no healthcare should be crafted and jammed through without deliberation. No significant bill affecting the lives of Americans should be pushed through in this manner. Americans deserve better. They expect more from this Chamber than such a secret, callous, poorly informed process. They don't like that powerful special interests are meeting with the Senators in private-- those private 13--to develop a plan, because here is what they have heard: They know this bill gives huge tax breaks to powerful parts of the healthcare industry, that it gives huge amounts of money away to those who make medical equipment and huge amounts of money away to health insurance companies, meanwhile stripping healthcare from millions of Americans. They know it also gives a massive tax break to the richest Americans. So here we are with a bill that Trump has called ``mean,'' giving away the Treasury to powerful special interests, meeting in private with my colleagues, giving away the Treasury to the richest Americans, while on the other hand lowering the boom on our seniors in long-term care, lowering the boom on struggling and working families, lowering the boom on 20 million or so Americans who would lose healthcare, and lowering the boom on the clinics and hospitals that provide care for everyone. That is what they see: special favors for the powerful and thrown into the street the working and struggling families. That is morally wrong. That is wrong from a policy point of trying to improve the quality of life of Americans, and it is why every Senator here should absolutely say no to moving to this bill on the floor without a full month, at least, for committee deliberations and for the citizens of the United States to weigh in. That is the difference between what happens in a dictatorship with no deliberation and a democratic republic with a legislative process that values deliberation and openness. That is the difference. Which model do my colleagues support? Let's fight for the ``we the people'' vision of our Constitution, and let's fight for quality healthcare for every American, and let's say no to moving to any bill that hasn't had public deliberation and at least a full month of deliberation in this Chamber. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, this weekend, I was out doing townhalls in rural Oregon. I was in Klamath County and Lake County--counties that on any map would be described as solidly red. At my townhalls, people were turning out with one huge anxiety; that is, the healthcare bill that might be considered next week, with no consideration in committee, no consideration for amendments, no opportunity for experts to weigh in, and, most importantly, no opportunity for the citizens of America to weigh in. So two veterans came up to me after one of the townhalls, at the Paisley Saloon, and they asked: Does DC understand the despair, the anxiety in rural Oregon over this healthcare bill plan? The answer, of course, at this point is no, but we hope the answer will be yes. Then I was visiting a nursing home, and two different individuals I spoke to noted that virtually everyone on long-term care was there through Medicaid. They said: You know, if we lose Medicaid, we are out on the street. As one woman said: I will be out on the street, and I can't walk so that is a problem. Well, yes, it is a problem for folks on long-term care to be dumped onto the street. That is why, at this moment, I am asking for our normal process for any bill, any modest bill, but certainly a major bill to get thorough democratic consideration in this beautiful, ``we the people,'' democratic Republic, and that means committee hearings, that means experts testifying, and that means input from citizens. Mr. President, that is why I ask unanimous consent that no motion to proceed to Calendar No. 120, H.R. 1628, the American Health Care Act, be in order until the bill has been the subject of executive session meetings in the Committee on Finance and the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, during which amendments from the majority and the minority have the opportunity to be presented and considered, and the American people have the chance to weigh in, and the bill has been reported favorably from the committee.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, will my colleague yield for a moment? The majority leader has returned to the floor to hear a unanimous consent request--actually two of them--which we will make very brief and then yield back to the Senator from New Jersey.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I appreciate the remarks from my colleague from Wisconsin, who came here to champion the citizens of her State and the citizens of all of America. As she spoke so passionately about the need to make sure we have affordable, quality healthcare, that is really the theme that we are talking about. That is the value we are talking about, that in this great big, beautiful, wonderful Nation, the United States of America, everyone should have access to affordable, quality healthcare. There are some colleagues here who do not share that value. They consider healthcare to be a privilege for the wealthy--healthcare for the wealthy, healthcare for the healthy--but not healthcare for all Americans. They say: You can't afford healthcare? Too bad. They have a plan of 13 Republicans meeting in secret--the secret 13-- even meeting in a room to which the hallway is not accessible to press because they are afraid to have the cameras showing them as they go into the room and out of the room. If you are ashamed to see yourself going in and out of a room and for your constituents to see that, shouldn't you be ashamed of what you are concocting? Shouldn't you really wonder if you are doing the right thing in saying to your constituents: I am not going to show you the bill because I know you will not like it. I am going to keep it secret, and I am going to bring it out at the last minute. I am going to employ a tactic that does not belong in the Senate. This is supposed to be a deliberative body--once called the world's greatest deliberative body--but under this leadership, it is now the body of zero deliberation, zero committee meetings, zero markups, zero chance for the public to weigh in, zero chance of hearing the experts and taking their insights into account. That has to change. We need three of our colleagues who believe in this Nation, who believe in the Constitution, written with those beautiful three words ``We the People.'' They need to stop thinking about ``we the powerful'' and ``we the privileged.'' They have to stop thinking about how they help their friends in the gated communities of America or in the corporate suites of America. How do you help working Americans? How do you help struggling Americans? Franklin Roosevelt said that the test of our progress should not be whether we do more--add to the abundance of those who have much--but whether we do enough for those who have little. Yet the philosophy of this bill that the secret 13 is cooking up is about giving more to the abundance of those who have much and taking away from those who have little. It is the opposite. It is government by and for the wealthy and government by and for the powerful and government by and for the privileged. Have they forgotten the first three words of our Constitution? Have they forgotten that the philosophy, as Jefferson put it, was that we would have outcomes that would reflect the will of the people? If you are afraid to share the bill with the people of America, you are certainly not pursuing the will of the people of the United States of America. What is really in this bill? On the one hand, we understand that it is going to take healthcare away from millions of Americans. They are saying that it might do it a little more slowly than did the TrumpCare bill. As for the TrumpCare bill, the President himself said it was ``mean,'' and he used a derogative slogan, which I will not repeat on this floor, to say how terrible it was. Why did the President call it ``mean''? Was it that it was taking away healthcare from an estimated 23 million people? My colleagues, we understand, are going to do it more slowly, inflict that damage over a number of extra years. Does that make it right to hurt people? Does that make it right? In the meantime, they are going to hand out an insurance bag of goodies to the health insurers of $127 billion. Strip healthcare over here. Give goodies to the insurance companies over here. What happens to those who are in long-term care and nursing homes? More than 6 out of 10 Americans who are in long-term care are there because they are paid through Medicaid. They have to pay down all of their income and their wealth before they can use Medicaid. This is the last resort. It is the last thing they have. Medicaid comes to the rescue. I visited a couple of nursing homes over the weekend, one in an urban area and one in a rural area. I encourage my colleagues to go visit a nursing home and talk to the men and women who are there. They are so thankful that they have that care. One woman said to me: ``Medicaid is how I am paid for.'' Her name is Deborah. Deborah said: ``Medicaid is how I can afford to be here. If you take it away, I am out on the street. Being on the street is a problem because my legs do not work.'' Picture that individual being thrown into the street. She is in her wheelchair because her legs do not work. Where is she going to sleep? How is she going to feed herself? Where is she going to bathe? Then I went to a nursing home in rural Oregon, which was down in the south, Klamath County. At that nursing home, they told me that almost 100 percent of their long-term care patients are paid for by Medicaid-- almost one 100 percent. Imagine that entire hallway of individuals swept out, tossed out. And why? What else do we have in this bill? Oh. Give tax deductions and gifts to the health insurance executives. First we have gifts to the health insurers and then another $18 billion to the health insurance executives. Then my colleagues say: Let's make insurance cheaper by getting rid of the essential benefits. That way, people can have an insurance policy for less. But unfortunately it is not worth the paper it is written on. We have been there. We have seen that. There is a reason you set a floor as to what the benefits are. It is so that when you actually get sick and need to go to the emergency room, you can actually go. When you actually get sick and need an operation, you can actually get it. When you break a leg, you can actually get it set. When you need treatment for a disease, you can actually get the treatment. When you are having a child, you can actually get maternity care. These are the fundamentals. They are not the fancy end of healthcare. It is not the fancy end that you might find with some executive healthcare packages. These are the basics, the essential basics. My colleagues want to strip that away. On the other hand, they say: Hey, we have so much money that we can give tax giveaways to the prescription drugmakers--$29 billion to the prescription drugmakers. Then they want to destroy the rural healthcare clinics and hospitals. I was in four of my rural counties this weekend. I was in Klamath and Lake, and I was in Grant and Wheeler. I held townhalls. People came out and spoke to me. These folks said: Do you know that our rural clinics are the heart of our communities, and they are what allow people to live here with the confidence that they can get the healthcare they need instead of having to go to some city that is hundreds of miles away or maybe not even be able to get care at all on a timely basis? They love their hospitals that provide care in the bit larger communities in rural Oregon. Yet, as for the heads of these hospitals and the heads of these clinics, what do they say? They say that without the Affordable Care Act and the vast decrease in uncompensated coverage, they would have to fire a whole lot of employees and provide a whole lot less healthcare. One doctor from a clinic in the northeast corner of the State came to me and said: We doubled--roughly doubled--the amount of healthcare we are able to provide, and we are so remote, and it is so important to be able to have that nearby. So why do my colleagues really dislike healthcare in rural America? Why do they want to undermine it? Well, they can give away more money to medical device makers--$20 billion to medical device makers--and all of this is before we look at the fact that they are giving more than $200 billion away to the richest Americans. So over here, let's strip the essential benefits. Let's destroy the health clinics. Let's undermine the rural hospitals. Let's make it challenging for those with preexisting conditions. Let's take those in nursing homes and make sure they are not able to be in nursing homes and, magically, maybe they will get cared for some other way so we can give tax giveaways to the health insurers, tax gifts to the insurance executives, tax goodies to the prescription drug makers, and special tax provisions to the medical device makers, and then give $200 billion to the richest Americans. Isn't that the opposite of the test of our progress? Here, in the United States of America, under a system of government that is supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people--this bill is by the privileged and powerful, for the privileged and powerful. And not just that, but let's really hurt ordinary working people and struggling Americans in the process right where it really gets them--right here-- at the fundamental heart of the peace of mind they get from knowing that currently they have access to healthcare. I don't know that anything is quite so disturbing as worrying about the fact that if your loved one gets sick, will he or she be able to get the care he or she needs? If your loved one gets sick, will he or she go broke? And what about your neighbor, and what about your extended family? This Republican bill is all about creating stress and anxiety and bad outcomes for ordinary working Americans, ordinary middle-class Americans, ordinary struggling Americans. They didn't send us here to the Senate to do this. That is why the secret 13 are meeting in secret. That is why they don't want to meet in a room that has a hallway where the reporters can be. That is why they don't want to answer the questions in the hallway about whether they will vote to proceed to a bill without letting the people of America weigh in on it. Shouldn't everyone here be willing to answer that question: Are you willing to vote to move to a bill that has had no public process? Aren't you working for the people of America? Or, as this bill says, are you just working for the companies and the rich? That is it, and too bad for everyone else. Aaron in Portland wrote to me. Because she has been diagnosed with diabetes, she is terrified that if TrumpCare goes through, her condition will be considered a preexisting condition, and she won't be able to afford the coverage she needs. She says: ``Although through committed lifestyle changes and family support, I have done well managing this condition, I will be marked as high risk along with my age.'' Ellen from Medford, the southern part of our State, tells me that she has the challenge that her baby daughter was in a catastrophic accident just days before her second birthday. Her husband had just switched jobs and didn't have health insurance yet. But, fortunately, Medicaid-- that would be the Oregon Health Plan--was there for them, and her daughter got the lifesaving care she needed. That is anxiety for an ordinary person. Do you have health coverage when you are switching jobs? Is there one health insurance you can afford? My colleagues want to strip healthcare from Ellen in Medford so they can cut $800 billion in Medicaid overall, so they can give tax giveaways to powerful corporations and the richest Americans. It is just wrong, morally wrong, and wrong in every possible way. Marilyn from Ontario says that she is living with two autoimmune diseases--difficult to pronounce, so I won't. She was diagnosed before the ACA became law, but rather than be denied coverage outright by her insurance company, she was told she could be covered if she paid a monthly premium of about $1,000 with a $20,000 deductible--$20,000 deductible. Needless to say, that wasn't helpful to her. Marilyn went 5 years without insurance, and she ended up being very sick. She had to borrow against her home, leverage her home. She had to deplete her retirement savings. And she had to make payments on $64,000 worth of credit card debt, run up in order to cover her healthcare. Then the ACA came along, and Marilyn was able to afford insurance, and she got community pricing. In other words, despite these preexisting conditions, you pay the same price as everyone else. That is so important to peace of mind about healthcare. Just saying that you will have ``access to healthcare''--a favorite phrase some of my colleagues use--if you can pay extraordinarily high prices that I know you will not be able to pay, that is not access. That is teasing people. That is cruelty to say: Oh, yes, we are going to make sure you have access; as long as you are a millionaire and you can pay a ton every month, you have access. We have taken care of you. You have access. No, that is not access. Affordability is critical to having a functioning healthcare system, and Marilyn will probably be priced out of the market again with the Republican strategy. How about Lisa in Corvallis, a single parent of three children, two with serious medical conditions that have placed them on permanent disability. Lisa faces some hard times, and I will let her words speak for themselves. She says: Our family was very fortunate and eternally grateful that the ACA passed while I held that job, because in 2015, my middle child was hospitalized for the first of four times in the last two years. And, in March of 2016, I developed a serious heart condition which my doctor attributes in part to stress. She goes on to say: In June of 2016, my employer declined to renew my contract, and if it weren't for the ACA, I would have been out of a job and completely without medical coverage, this time with a serious and expensive preexisting condition. The stories are coming in through emails. They are coming in through my townhalls. They are coming in over the phones. They are letting us all know--and not just in States represented by folks on this side of the aisle, but every Senator here is getting these letters. So I say to my fellow Senators: Read these letters from your constituents because I know that your constituents are in the same position my constituents are in. Be a champion for them. Be a champion for struggling families, for working families, for middle-class families. Honor the role and responsibility of representing all of the people of your State, not simply powerful companies and your richest constituents but all of your citizens. That was the vision on which our country was founded, and that is the spirit in which Franklin Roosevelt said: This test of our progress is not whether we give more of the abundance to those who have the most, but enough to those who have little. Enough means affordable, accessible healthcare for every single person in America. Tearing that down is wrong morally and wrong to do it secretly and wrong in terms of the enormous damage that it will cause. I am pleased to see my colleague from Pennsylvania, who has been a champion for working Americans every day he serves in this Chamber. He particularly makes sure that all of us are thinking about the impact on children, and there is so much of this secret Republican plan that is going to hurt the children of America. I appreciate the insights that he shares with all of us as he urges us to ponder and do better every time we consider legislation. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, yesterday we had a horrific tragedy here in the capital area. I know I speak for all of my colleagues who are holding the victims of that attack in their hearts and in their prayers: Congressman Steve Scalise, still in critical condition; Zack Barth, legislative correspondent who works for Congressman Williams of Texas, who was injured; Matt Mika of Tyson's Foods, who represents them here on the Hill; and two of our police officers, David Bailey and Crystal Griner of the U.S. Capitol Police. Without those two police officers present, this could have been a much more tragic event. We have to reinforce the understanding that we are blessed to have the opportunity to raise our voices in our democratic Republic. We are able to raise them by speaking to our members who are elected in local and State and Federal Government, by writing to them, by meeting with them in townhalls. In my State, you can call them up, and they will sit down with you in a cafe. We have an opportunity to weigh in through writing letters to the editor, by protesting in the streets, by overflowing the email lines and flooding the phone lines. We have all kinds of ways to weigh in, in America, but violence is absolutely unacceptable. We have to try to diminish and eliminate the hate speech, which so often becomes the foundation for hate violence. We have had a very divisive 18 months here in America, where various folks have sought to increase the divisions between groups of Americans, to attack women, to attack African Americans, to attack Hispanics, to attack Muslims, to attack LGBT citizens. We need to eliminate that strategy of division. Here, in America, we are a tapestry of talents from all over the world, of different cultural backgrounds who come together to make this Nation incredibly strong. Unless you are 100 percent Native American, you are either an immigrant yourself or the son or daughter of immigrants. We bring that diversity to bear and we make this Nation powerful in ways few other nations could even come close to having. Let's take this as a moment in which we seek to encourage public participation in all the legitimate forms of free speech but put hate speech out of bounds and hate violence out of bounds.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, climate disruption is a significant concern for the health of our planet. It is affecting everything from our agriculture to our economy, to our forests, to our world's glaciers, to our ice sheets, and, certainly, to the distribution of the world's insects and the diseases they carry. President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement has attracted additional attention to the role that America should play in taking on this major challenge. How significant are the impacts of climate disruption to our forests and our farming and our fishing? What are the business opportunities of transforming an economy from that based on fossil fuels to that based on clean and renewable energy? What are other nations doing? How fast do we need to move to save the planet? There will be many scholarly speeches on these topics here on the floor--many who will have been informed by the experiences that Senators will have had in their home States, both in the evolution of wind and solar energy and the changes that they are seeing in their forests and their farming and their fishing. I hope to draw attention and, hopefully, insights as to these issues in a more lighthearted fashion by presenting periodic episodes of a Senate Climate Disruption Quiz. Today, I am presenting episode No. 1 of this Disruption Quiz series. Let's get started. Question No. 1: Which famous CEO resigned from three Presidential councils after President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement? Was it Bob Iger of Disney? Was it Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX? Was it Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber? Consider which of these individuals made this decision. The right answer is Elon Musk. Congratulations if that is what you guessed. Bob Iger of Disney resigned from a Presidential council, but he resigned only from one, not three. He resigned from the Presidential Strategic and Policy Forum, and he has been quite significant in putting forward other environmental issues, such as the zero waste of Disney's theme parks. He said when he resigned: Protecting our planet and driving economic growth are critical to our future, and they aren't mutually exclusive. He continued: I deeply disagree with the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Travis Kalanick, the controversial and besieged Uber CEO, also resigned from the same council, that being the Presidential Strategic and Policy Forum, but he did so in response to the President's Muslim ban, not to the announcement that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. That takes us to Elon Musk, who resigned from three councils--the President's Strategic and Policy Forum, Manufacturing Initiative, and Executive Council on Infrastructure. He tweeted: Am departing Presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or for the world. So that is the first question. Now get ready to see if you can answer the second question correctly. Question No. 2: As of today, which two countries are not party to the Paris Agreement? Is it Syria and Nicaragua? Is it Iran and North Korea, two members of the axis of evil? Is it Togo and Indonesia, or is it India and Cambodia? I am sure you have heard climate news about all of these countries, but you may not know which ones are the only two countries in the world that are not members of the Paris Agreement. By the way, the United States is not on this list because even though we have announced we are withdrawing, that takes some time, and we are actually still a member. The correct answer is Syria and Nicaragua. Nicaragua hasn't signed on because they don't believe the Paris Agreement goes far enough in its fight against climate disruption. Today, more than half of Nicaragua's electricity comes from renewable resources--wind, solar, wave, and geothermal. The Government of Nicaragua predicts that within a few years, the percentage of electricity from renewables will rise to 80 percent. Because of the abundance of these resources, a 2013 World Bank report labeled Nicaragua ``a renewable energy paradise.'' The reason Syria didn't participate or sign on to the Paris Agreement is because it is in the midst of a horrific 6-year-long civil war that has claimed the lives of 300,000 men, women, and children and driven millions out of the country. Now we will turn to question No. 3. Thanks in part to warmer temperatures and milder winters, cases of which tick-borne illness have more than doubled since 1991? Is the answer Colorado tick fever or tularemia or Lyme disease or Heartland virus? By the way, all of these are real diseases. Well, Colorado tick fever is a viral infection that is mostly found in the mountain areas of the Western United States and Canada and is transmitted by the bite of an infected Rocky Mountain wood tick. Tularemia, which is also known as rabbit fever or deer fly fever or O'Hara's fever, is certainly a scary- sounding disease. Lyme disease is mostly transmitted by deer tick bites and is predominantly found in the Northeast and upper Midwest, the Mid- Atlantic regions of the country. And then there is the Heartland virus, which is transmitted by the lone star tick. Well, the correct answer is--drum roll--C, Lyme disease. Since 1991, the number of cases of Lyme disease in the United States has doubled. Approximately 30,000 people are diagnosed with the disease each year, but because it is very difficult to diagnosis, the Centers for Disease Control thinks the real number of cases is about 10 times that, or 300,000 people per year here in the United States. The main reason for the increase we have seen in Lyme disease is warmer temperatures and milder winters. Cold winters kill ticks; warm winters don't. That is what it boils down to. On to question No. 4. Who was recently quoted as saying that ``the fuel of choice right now, certainly for us, is wind''? Was it Bono, the lead singer of U2 and founder of the One Campaign, known for its activist work in Africa? Was it Gwyneth Paltrow, the award-winning actress? Was it Ben Fowke, the CEO of Xcel Energy, which owns and operates 13 coal plants around the country? Was it Pope Francis, who gave our President a copy of his encyclical when the President visited with him just a few weeks ago? Well, it turns out the answer is C, the CEO of Xcel Energy. That is a little bit surprising given that they operate more than a dozen coal plants, but it is also a company that generates one-fifth of its electricity from wind. In January, the company shut down a large natural gas plant in Colorado for 2 days, and wind, on average, provided the power for half of its customer demand. Wind is Xcel's fuel of choice because once the turbines are built, the cost of the fuel to operate the turbines is zero. The fuel, plainly speaking, is free. And that is what led him to this comment saying that it is a preferred choice. Anytime you can get free fuel, it beats gearing up your coal plant or your natural gas plant. Now we will turn to question No. 5, our final question. The Power Minister of which country recently announced that they intend to sell only electric cars by the year 2030? Is the answer India, which is home to 1.3 billion citizens, the world's third largest oil importer and a country with 300 million individuals who don't yet have access to electricity? Is it Germany, a manufacturing powerhouse, which has had a large feed-in tariff--a subsidy, if you will--to encourage distributed solar, solar panels on the tops of commercial buildings and homes? Is it China, where the use of cars has absolutely exploded. And the pollution in Beijing is among the worst pollution in the world, driven largely by the combustion of fossil fuels. Is it Canada, which has a new Prime Minister, Prime Minister Trudeau, who has prioritized tackling climate disruption? If you guessed Germany, you are almost right but not quite. Germany's Bundesrat, the country's upper legislative chamber, passed a nonbinding resolution last October calling for a phaseout of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2030. But that is not quite the question that was asked. The question is, Which country's Power Minister said they would only sell electric cars by the year 2030? And the answer to that is India. Speaking at this year's annual conference of the Confederation of Indian Industry, Power Minister Piyush Goyal said: We are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way. We are going to make electric vehicles self-sufficient. The idea is that by 2030, not a single petrol or diesel car should be sold in the country. India, by the way, is already on track to be the world's third largest solar market, with the country's solar capacity expected to reach 18.7 gigawatts by the year's end. The country is also adding 50 percent more solar and wind generation than currently installed here in the United States. They are replacing 770 million street and household lights with energy-saving and long-lasting LEDs, and they are bringing access to electricity to thousands of poor rural villages through the provision of solar. And they are doing all this faster than anyone could have anticipated. So that is the full five questions for this week's Senate Climate Disruption Quiz. Climate disruption is the seminal challenge of our generation. We need to start taking strong, decisive action now to avoid reaching the point where the damage we are doing to our planet becomes irreversible. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I thank my friend and colleague Senator Wyden for submitting this resolution. I am proud to partner with him as we address this senseless, deadly attack that occurred back home in Oregon just 12 days ago. Robert Kennedy once said: ``We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred.'' We have been reminded of that in this part of our history in the last year and a half in which we have seen acts of hatred flourishing across the country, preying on divisions among parts of our society. It is incumbent on all of us to call out the unacceptability of hate speech and certainly to work to bring unity where there has been division. This all came together in dramatic, deadly fashion on the MAX train when a man spouting hatred and anti-Muslim rhetoric accosted two young women sitting on the train. Three men stood up and sprang into action and told him that was unacceptable. I wish we could turn back the clock and have the incident stop right there with that intervention. These men, by being willing to stand up in that setting, are champions of justice. They were saying that this is unacceptable. They were saying that it must stop. But then this confrontation turned deadly, with the man spouting the hate speech pulling a knife, stabbing all three of these champions, killing two of them, and nearly killing the third. These individuals, Rick Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, paid with their lives. The third individual, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, came very close to losing his as well. We have been holding the families in our hearts and in our prayers. The community came together and had a vigil and another ceremony at the Muslim educational center and at the funerals to let the families know that, across Oregon, people are carrying them in their hearts and prayers. Certainly, one of those prayers was for the full recovery of Micah David-Cole Fletcher. He is back on his feet, and it is just a beautiful thing to see that he is out of the hospital. He spoke very eloquent words that I would like to share with you. In the days after the attack, he said: I want you to imagine that for a second, being the little girl on that MAX. This man is screaming at you. His face is a pile of knives, his body is a gun, everything about him is cocked, loaded and ready to kill you. There's a history here with this. You can feel that this has happened before. And the only thing that was different was the names and faces. Micah continued. He said: And then a stranger, two strangers, three strangers, come to your aid, they try to help you, and that pile of knives just throws itself at them. Kills them. Well, this was an extraordinarily traumatic experience for these young girls simply to be accosted on the train and all the more so to see that those who came to their rescue were stabbed, with two of them dying and the third badly injured. Our hearts are, again, so connected to the families. We must have a determination as a society to put healing where there has been division, to put empathy where there has been antipathy, to replace hatred with a connection, with a love. Robert Kennedy said in that same speech when he was commenting on the fact that nothing has ever been ennobled or enriched by hatred--he continued to say this: But we can perhaps remember--if only for a time--that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life, that they seek--as do we-- nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment that they can. Can't we come together as a society and enable each person to be able to live out their lives in purpose and happiness and set aside this divisiveness and this hatred? I hope on this occasion, as we honor the incredible heroism of the three men who sprang into action and as we mourn the loss of two of them, that we all will dedicate ourselves to this purpose of creating a connection, creating unity, and creating respect and that we shall see the banishment of hate speech and hate violence. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the most important words in our Constitution are the first three--``We the People''--written in a beautiful script and written in a font size so that one can see it from across the room. They set out the mission statement for our Constitution, for our vision of government--not government of, by, and for the privileged and the powerful but government of, by, and for the people, as President Lincoln so eloquently summarized. It is our responsibility as elected officials to look out for decisions that serve this mission of government of, by, and for the people, to fight in times of trouble for policies that provide a ladder of opportunity and a foundation for families to thrive. But at this very moment, a secret group of 13 Senators is devising a healthcare plan with the intention of bringing it to this floor with no public debate, no committee meeting, and no public notice. They want to just bring it to the floor, have a few hours of debate, and put it forward, even though it will affect millions of Americans. It probably will hurt millions of Americans, but the secret 13 want to craft this policy. And why in secret? Because they are plotting a plan that will hurt so many people, they don't want the public involved in the process. They don't want to hear from the citizens from rural America or urban America who are so concerned about the TrumpCare bill--the bill that will immediately destroy healthcare for 14 million Americans; the bill that will immediately undermine the solvency and success of our rural healthcare clinics and our rural hospitals; the bill that breaks every promise the President put forward on healthcare. It breaks the promise that every person will be covered, breaks the promise that people with preexisting connections will get the same price as everyone else, breaks the promise that the policies will be even better, higher quality. Instead, it guts the essential benefits. It breaks the promise that the insurance will be at a lower cost. In fact, for someone roughly 64 years of age earning about $26,500, their healthcare bill would go from $140 a month to $1,200 a month--a sum that is clearly impossible to pay on an annual income of $26,500. That is why it is being done in secret--because it involves broken promise after broken promise, destroying healthcare in every town and hamlet across America. That is quite a contrast to the way ObamaCare was forged. ObamaCare had a yearlong debate. It proceeded to be in committee markup--that means with amendments being offered--in the HELP Committee for about 5 weeks, with television cameras rolling and 150 Republican amendments accepted during that process. Then the Finance Committee had its turn, and it had a very long markup, and it had dozens and dozens, if not 100 or more, Republican amendments adopted. The debate was all over the country. It was in the newspapers. It was in every forum. It was right there, square center, nothing hidden. But this is quite different. The majority leader today has started the rule XIV process, specifically intending to bypass those Senate committees and bring the TrumpCare bill to the Senate floor, completely bypassing government of, by, and for the people. This is unacceptable. I think my colleagues know it is unacceptable, but they are hoping to do it so quickly and so fast that they will have a minimum of criticism across the country. There should be a maximum amount of criticism on the floor of the Senate. Every Senator who believes that this democracy--this democratic Republic--is one in which we do the people's work should see the light of day. The debate should see the light of day in the forging of the bill, as well as the final debate here on the floor. We know another reason this bill--this replacement or addition or modification of the House bill--is being crafted in secret. That is because the very premise of it is to give a massive tax break to the wealthiest Americans, another promise broken in which Trump said that this would not be done. But there it is, TrumpCare out of the House, $600 billion given away to the richest Americans while devastating healthcare for working Americans. Has no one noticed that we have an incredible gap in income in this country, with massive numbers of people earning very little and a few at the top earning massive amounts? Has no one noticed that we have a huge wealth gap in this Nation, with those at the bottom having few, if any, savings and those at the top having billions upon billions? If we have noticed, then we should care that that is not a foundation for families to thrive. Indeed, it is something that is only made much worse in a bill that takes away the foundation of healthcare-- essentially, the quality of life for families across America--and, in turn, takes the savings and gives it to the wealthiest families. There is a reason to hide this bill. There are a lot of reasons to hide this bill. But it is undemocratic to have this secret group developing this bill with an intention to bring it to the floor without a committee hearing, without public exposure. Folks back home are very worried, and I would like to share a few of their stories. Lynda of Talent, OR, who survived her battle with stomach cancer, thanks to the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion--Lynda's friend wrote to share her story. Lynda was a self-employed plumber, working hard to get her business off the ground, but she was diagnosed with stage IV stomach cancer. Lynda couldn't afford insurance, and she and her husband couldn't afford to pay for treatment out of pocket because they were already paying off enormous debt from care her husband had received. So what did Lynda do? She ignored the symptoms. She tried to go about her life as best as she could. As her friend wrote, ``She would have died rather than take on more debt that she was not sure she could pay.'' But that changed with the Affordable Care Act the day Lynda found out she would receive coverage under the Oregon Health Plan-- Oregon's Medicaid expansion. Now there is good news to share. Lynda received treatment. She has been cancer-free for almost a year, and her friend describes this as ``nothing short of a miracle.'' ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act, delivered a miracle to an individual who was planning just to die rather than get treatment and then could get treatment, thanks to Medicaid expansion, and is now in remission. TrumpCare is being reworked in secret by 13 of my colleagues out of public sight. It wants to strip away that expansion of Medicaid, wants to rip away the chance for people like Lynda to receive lifesaving care. Yvonne from Elmira, OR, sent a note to us about the high-risk pools that Republicans want to institute under TrumpCare. She says: Before the ACA existed, I was in our state's high risk pool because no company would insure me because I had Asthma and had an ovary removed because of cysts. The $1500 deductible and $550 per month was hard to pay and then it only covered 70%. When I was severely injured in an accident and required reconstructive surgery I ended up bankrupt. But then, 2 years ago, she qualified for the Oregon Health Plan. Now Yvonne has her medical needs covered at an affordable price and can't be denied coverage or charged a higher premium because of her preexisting conditions. Yvonne, like so many others, would suffer under the Republican plan to strip away the protection for preexisting conditions. She has had an accident, she has had an ovary removed, she has had asthma. It would be extraordinarily difficult for her to get insurance without the protection of everyone being in the same healthcare pool together. If she could get insurance--which is not at all clear--it would be at sky-high, unaffordable prices. Bernard from Portland wrote to us. He said that an important thing that often gets lost in this whole debate over the future of the Affordable Care Act is the support it gives for Americans to innovate. In 2011, Bernard in Portland chose to leave his job and pursue his passion of becoming a freelance artist. Here is what he said, in his words: With my departure, I left behind the security of medical coverage. For two years, I was not covered by medical insurance, and fortunately nothing happened, but that is a gamble nobody should have to take. And it's a gamble that I could take being under 40 years old, and in relatively good health. A person should not have to stay in a job they may not even like, and could be better filled by someone else, just for fear of not having medical coverage. He is right. One of the powerful things that has occurred under ObamaCare is that individuals worked for firms and wanted to become entrepreneurs but were afraid to do so because of the loss of healthcare coverage, but now, either through the expansion of Medicaid or through the exchanges, they can acquire insurance without being part of a large company. That has unleashed entrepreneurship across the country. People are pursuing their dreams and contributing to the economy in all kinds of ways because they can now access healthcare without being part of a company that provides healthcare. Eventually, Bernard was able to afford a basic coverage plan. But it didn't provide much, and it cost a significant portion of his income, but it all changed with the ACA. An October 2016 survey of American small businesses and a January 2017 followup survey found that one-third of 5,400 small business owners interviewed had the confidence to start their own businesses because they had access to healthcare through the ACA. According to the Department of Labor, between 2013 when the ACA went into effect and the end of 2015, the number of self-employed Americans increased by 3.5 percent. These are just different ways of noting what we hear about all the time--people launching their entrepreneurial efforts, launching their companies because of the confidence they have that they can get healthcare. That is the powerful unleashing of creativity. It is an economic engine. It is a small business driver. Lisa from Phoenix also wrote to share her powerful story. Lisa's daughter suffers from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, so Lisa has stayed home and cared for her for the last 15 years while her husband worked. Now, thanks to ACA's Medicaid expansion, her family has been able to hire in-home help and it has been transformative. Lisa's daughter has become more connected to the community, gained new skills and independence, is contributing to household chores, and has shown a great deal more vitality and engagement since the family was able to get some assistance. It has gotten to the point where Lisa can start thinking about her own needs a bit more. In fact, for the first time in quite a while, she is considering taking on a job outside her home to help provide more income. The ACA isn't just saving lives in emergency health situations or by addressing diseases. It is improving the quality of life for millions of American families like Lisa's. I will share one more constituent story today. It is hard to pick just one more because there are so many stories coming in each and every day. As we continue to talk about the assault on the health and peace of mind of millions of Americans, I will be coming back to the floor to share those stories coming in from other Oregonians. But this last story comes from Warren in Tigard, OR. Warren and his wife Joyce have been happily married for over 60 years, but in the last few years, Joyce has been suffering from Alzheimer's. Joyce's disease has progressed very far. Among other things, she has lost her mobility, much of her cognition, and she is wheelchair bound. Her condition has progressed so far that Warren and the home caregivers who were helping him care for his wife just couldn't meet the need requirements any longer, so they admitted Joyce to a nearby adult care facility, where she is now secure, stable, and comfortable. But, as we know, the kind of care Joyce is receiving is expensive. Warren writes: This care costs $4,000 per month. Our long-term care insurance is currently covering most of this cost, but only about 4 months' worth of insurance coverage remains. So we will have to obtain Medicaid coverage for her continued care. But proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act could jeopardize this coverage. I have not anticipated this disastrous change, but fear it would be a tragedy for both of us. Yes, it would be a tragedy for Warren and for Joyce to have TrumpCare pass and dismantle Medicaid and dismantle the exchanges. It would be a tragedy for so many others in similar situations across the country. Many people don't realize that Medicaid helps pay for nursing home care for more than half of the nursing home residents--residents like Joyce. But here is TrumpCare, planning to cut $880 billion in direct Medicaid spending. It is basically: Well, too bad Warren and too bad Joyce. We want to save some money so we can give big tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. I must say, there is not a lot of caring in that perspective. It embodies a principle, but is it really the principle we want in the United States of America--the principle that the goal of the majority party is to take away from those who have little to give more to those who have most? Is that really the principle my Republican colleagues want to embrace on the floor of the Senate? Is that really the principle the secret 13 with their secret meetings out of public sight to develop a new version of TrumpCare want to embrace? I would suggest that is simply wrong. It is wrong from the point of view of providing an opportunity for all Americans to thrive. It is wrong from a moral point of view to pull healthcare--and the peace of mind that comes with healthcare--out of the hands of struggling Americans and working Americans across our country. Finally, I want to address one more issue. We heard earlier today that Anthem is pulling out of Ohio. Why are they pulling out? Because of President Trump. Why is that connected? Because he refuses to confirm that his administration will make the cost-sharing reduction payments that have been part of the Affordable Care Act. Those payments reduce the premiums. Those payments proceed also to reduce the level of deductibles so you get more care sooner. So insurance companies don't know whether to raise their insurance policy a little or a tremendous amount, and that instability means they simply can't price their policies. In addition, my Republican colleagues have assaulted the risk quarters, or reinsurance programs, that make it possible for an insurance company to go into a new market and know that if they get a disproportionate share of sick patients, they will get compensated for that risk and that result. So that reinsurance is essential for more companies to be in a particular market. Moreover, the administration proceeded to not spend the money on advertising in the last stage of signups and reduced the number of people who were in the markets. So that is another assault on the stability of health insurance in America. This is a deliberate, straight-out effort to undermine healthcare in America to the disadvantage of millions of Americans. It is being done by the President without any action even happening on TrumpCare here in the Senate. It is wrong. It is hurting a lot of people, and the President should stop. With that, I conclude my comments. 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, just a little less than 2 weeks ago, President Trump released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2018, which would begin October 1. He named his plan ``A New Foundation for American Greatness.'' While unveiling this budget, Director Mulvaney, the OMB Director, declared that ``We are no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs, but by the number of people we help get off of those programs.'' When I read this and looked at the budget, I was reminded of the story of the two hikers who got to the top of a mountain. They stood near a big cliff and one hiker said: It is a beautiful vista. The other hiker said: I am so exhausted from hiking all the way up; I wish I could get down quickly. The first hiker then said: Let me help you with that. And he shoved him off the cliff. That is what this budget does. It doesn't help people get off programs through education and training; it shuts down the programs. It shoves people off the cliff. In this budget, millions of struggling, rural, middle-class, low- income, and working Americans are thrown off the cliff. They are thrown out of these programs as these programs are just struck down, not because programs have served their purpose and are no longer needed but because the President wants to do two things. He wants to build a lot more in terms of the military, and he wants to give a tax giveaway of some $6 trillion in the budget, with most of it going to the very richest Americans. This is not an ``America first'' budget; this is a ``billionaires first'' and a ``rural and working Americans last'' budget. We see this vision implemented through dramatic cuts to food stamps, children's healthcare, job training, after-school programs, scientific research, and other anti-poverty programs. One program after another designed to help American families who are devastated will be eliminated, all in the name of building a wall, building more missiles and more bombs, and giving this massive, massive giveaway of the Treasury to the privileged and powerful. Now there is good news. The good news is that I think we are going to have a bipartisan coalition we can build to defeat this budget. Even some of our colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus, who often talk about slashing government spending and eliminating programs, are saying that this proposal and its impact on rural Americans and rural America is draconian and unacceptable. It is not often that you hear folks throughout the entire political spectrum come together to say the same thing--that this budget is shortsighted and ill-conceived--but that is where we are now. This budget tells us a lot because a budget is an expression of values. When President Trump placed this budget before us, we gained insight into his values. What we quickly learned is that President Trump doesn't place value on struggling and working American families, helping them climb a ladder to a better point. What this budget does tell us is that our President is all about raiding the National Treasury for the privileged and the powerful--quite the opposite of what we heard when he was campaigning. Franklin Roosevelt once said that, as a nation, ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.'' By ``enough'' he meant, do we provide a ladder of opportunity for families to get their economic footing, to be able to buy a house, to be able to find a job, to be able to educate their children? In this budget, President Trump puts out a different test. With this budget, he is saying that the test of our progress is whether we destroy programs for working Americans in order to fund a $6 trillion giveaway to the privileged and powerful. That is Donald Trump's test of progress, and I think we find very few in the country who might agree with that vision of making economic and educational progress for working Americans much more difficult. It is not an ``America first'' budget. It is not a foundation for American greatness. It is more akin to a great train robbery, a great raid on the National Treasury to benefit those who are already at the very top. It is a budget that hurts children. It is a budget that hurts struggling, hard-working Americans. It cuts 20 percent from the Children's Health Insurance Program, critical for the health of our children. Shouldn't every child in America have access to affordable healthcare? That is a value I can get behind. But slashing healthcare for children and making it harder for them to succeed in life--I can't agree with that. Let's make children hungrier by cutting the basic food stamp program or school programs that 44 million Americans rely on, cutting it by $193 billion. Making children hungrier doesn't help them learn. Helping children learn is a value I can get behind. Making it harder for them to succeed in school may be a Trump value, but it is not mine, and I don't think it is shared by many Members of this Chamber. We find that he proposes to get rid of the subsidization of interest on student loans, making the cost of college even more unaffordable for low-income and working graduates. He freezes the Pell grants that already have not kept pace with inflation. He proceeds to wipe out the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program that erases student loans after a decade of service to the public. All of this is about making college more expensive. I can get behind the value of making higher education more affordable, whether it is apprenticeship training, career technical education, or a 4-year college program. I can get behind making those programs more affordable, making community college programs more affordable because some form of education, whether it is in the technical education world or community college world or a 4-year program--some aspect of that is important to virtually every job in America. Making it more affordable is what virtually every other developed country has done. In Germany, going to a public university is free in terms of tuition--not so here in the United States of America. Our students are burdened by massive, massive debt. It is growing and growing and growing. I can get behind the value of saying we shouldn't make college a financial gauntlet because it is so essential to the success of our children. But Trump has a different value. His value is let's make it harder. Let's make it more difficult. Let's put students further into debt. Those are not values I can support. Again, I think very few in this Chamber would share in that. The list goes on and on. This isn't just an attack on the ladder of opportunity for working Americans; this is an attack on rural America. During the last couple of years, I served as the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture and Rural Development and FDA, and in that time I have seen the tremendous impact many of these programs have had in providing opportunity and strengthening the economy in rural America. I value making rural America stronger, but that is not the value Trump put into his budget. He put into this budget: Let's undercut, let's undermine, let's make it more difficult for rural America. This is truly a ``rural America last'' budget. It eliminates funding for Essential Air Service. The Essential Air Service is essential to key small towns across our Nation, including one in my home State. If the Essential Air Service is wiped out, the economy of that town, Pendleton, would be dramatically impacted. It slashes the Contract Tower Program that supports even more airports--six of them in my State--rural airports that need that contract tower support to be able to remain open. Small towns from Aurora to Klamath Falls would be dramatically impacted. How about rural infrastructure? He takes out the rural water and wastewater disposal program. As I hold townhalls around my State--and I go to every county every year, all 36. Before I hold a public townhall where people can ask any question they want, I meet with the local county commissioners, city commissioners, and all the locally elected. In virtually every county, every year, I hear about the challenge of water infrastructure, expanding the clean water supply or waste water treatment. These two challenges are enormous. Yet here is President Trump wiping out the rural water and wastewater programs. How about critical housing programs? Well, here is the issue. In our rural communities, often the economy is hindered by the lack of availability of affordable housing. I have been in town after town after town saying: We have interest by a company to move here because of some of the key assets we have. Then they decide not to because they don't have affordable housing in the community for them to be able to hire the staff they need. So we have these programs at the Federal level--direct single-family housing loans, direct multifamily housing loans, low-income housing repair loans, farm labor housing loans, self- help housing grants. Here again, the Trump budget wipes them out. The Community Development Block Grant Program provides flexible strength for rural communities to address local problems. We talk a lot about flexibility in the Senate, enabling local areas to decide how best to use funds. The CDBG, the Community Development Block Grant, does exactly that. Yet it is not valued by our President, who probably doesn't even know what the program is, but he wiped it out. How about the Rural Business-Cooperative Service that offers programs to support business development and job training? It is gone too. His budget slashes USDA's rural development programs by about $1 billion, a little less than $1 billion. This is a part of the agency where programs focus on supporting economic development, housing, and infrastructure in rural communities. Then we have the impact on rural healthcare. This budget impacts rural healthcare in several different ways. It cuts the Rural Hospital Outreach Grant Program that helps small rural hospitals get resources to create collaboratives for long-term care facilities or with ambulance services. It eliminates the State offices of rural health. In addition, this budget destroys healthcare for 23 million Americans, and many of those live in rural America. In fact, in Oregon, about one out of three individuals, almost one out of three in our small towns find healthcare through the Oregon Health Plan, the Oregon Health Plan funded by Medicaid. Rolling back Medicaid would throw some 400,000 people off of healthcare in Oregon just by itself, and that would make a huge impact in rural Oregon. I have been holding a lot of townhalls in rural Oregon. This year I have had over 12 in what you would see on a map as pretty red counties, and people are coming up to me at townhalls and saying that they are scared to death about this budget's impact on healthcare. They are not just scared; they are terrified. And they are not just terrified; they are angry because they finally have the peace of mind that if a loved one gets sick, that loved one will get the care they need, that loved one will not end up bankrupt. That is a huge improvement in quality of life, but this budget from the President destroys that peace of mind. It is not just impacting those who directly benefit from the Oregon Health Plan; it also impacts everybody else in the rural communities because the health plan has enabled our rural clinics and hospitals to do much better financially. Out in the northeast corner of my State--it is a very remote and beautiful place--a person told me that his local clinic had gone from 20-some employees to about 50 employees, roughly doubling the healthcare provided. Why were they able to do that? Because they had had so much uncompensated care before people had access to insurance. Now that has dropped dramatically, and their finances are much better. So they are able to hire a lot more people and provide a lot more healthcare to this rural part of the State. But that changes with this Trump budget. Let me list a few more details about some of these areas, starting with the USDA Rural Development Water Programs. Last year, 14 projects in my State received $10.7 million in loans and $6.5 million in grants in order to provide reliable, clean drinking water and waste disposal, affecting 12,000 folks in rural Oregon. Vernonia, which is in northwest Oregon, relied on these programs so as to finally improve the town's wastewater system--a project almost 20 years in the making. I have visited Vernonia a number of times. In 1996 it suffered a terrible flood, and then, again, in 2007, there was another major flood. The floods overwhelmed Vernonia's wastewater treatment systems and lagoons and caused overflows on public and private properties as well as into the nearby Nehalem River. Thanks to loans and grants from the USDA's rural water programs, the town of Vernonia was able to purchase new equipment, upgrade its wastewater systems, and protect the water for its residents. That is just one community that has benefited. Let's talk a little bit more about housing. The budget singles out many housing programs to cut. It eliminates the USDA Rural Development's direct housing loan programs and most of the housing grant programs and community facilities programs, which include programs like the rural Single Family Housing Direct Loans, the rural Multi-Family Housing Direct Loans, the self-help housing program, housing repair loans, and the Farm Labor Housing Program. With so many States and so many communities across our Nation suffering from a shortage of affordable and available housing, how can we consider it a positive thing to slice and dice these programs? Last year, 6,000 rural Oregonian families were living in 211 affordable apartment complexes thanks to USDA financing. But keeping these programs and strengthening our housing initiatives isn't just good for our Nation's families. It is also critical for the economic development of rural towns and communities. As I have mentioned so often, I have heard from town leaders that they have a potential deal within their grasp, and it falls out of their grip because of the shortage of housing. We need to do better in this area, not worse. Let's talk about another program--the Forest Service Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. This program is an all-lands approach to collaboratively encouraging science-based ecosystem restoration of priority forest landscapes. Let me put it more simply. Often, in terms of forest health, we have a challenge. The work in the woods can be quite expensive to improve forest health, and, often, you have disputes between the environmental community and the timber community on just how this should be done. A collaborative brings together these elements--the environmental side and the timber side-- with the goal of both making the forest healthier and providing a steady supply of sawlogs to the mill. This is something that happened in the Fremont-Winema National Forest, and it has given environmental and conservation groups confidence that Fremont-Winema is on a track to having a healthier ecosystem. At the same time, their work has helped to ensure that there is a balance between the timber industry and environmental protection, which means that timber is still coming and will keep coming to the local mill, which will help to create local jobs, like at the Collins Mill in Klamath Falls. That mill is able to continue employing more than 80 workers because of the steady supply of logs that makes its way from Fremont-Winema due to the eco-friendly forest management practices. This ``billionaires first'' and ``rural America and workers last'' budget is going to die here in the Senate because there is going to be a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans who say that undermining the success of our families in order to provide a massive giveaway--a raid, if you will, on the National Treasury--and a handout to the privileged and powerful is, simply, the wrong way to go. This is, really, Robin Hood in reverse. This is a situation in which the working families are undermined to provide a $6 trillion raid on the Treasury, with most being given away to our richest American families. I do not know that there is anyone in this Chamber who is not already aware that we have massive income inequality here in the United States of America. I do not think there is any Senator among the 100 Senators of the Senate who is unaware that we have a massive wealth gap in America. It has gotten larger and larger and larger until it has become equal to that level or near that level at which it was before the Great Depression. That is not a way for America to thrive--to raid working families in order to provide even more giveaways to those who have the most. I must say that this budget does not surprise me. It does not surprise me that the President submitted this. The President himself is a billionaire. The President lives in that world of billionaires, and he was persuaded to think that helping the billionaires to have even millions more would, somehow, be good for America. I would like to take the President to real working America so that he may see the real impact on the ground of destroying rural health clinics, see the real impact on the ground of destroying rural water systems, and see the real impact on the ground of destroying rural housing programs. We need to get the President outside of his billionaire bubble and seeing the impact so that, somehow, he gets a grip on what it means to guide this country in education policy and economic policy and so that we strengthen that ladder of opportunity rather than destroy it. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that that my intern, Kelsey Sherman, be granted privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, our Nation and our government were founded on a principle that can be summed up in three words: ``We the People,'' the first three words of our Constitution, the three words that our Founders wrote in supersized font so that no matter who you were you would remember that this is the guiding mission of our form of government. This is the guiding mission of the Constitution. From across the room, you can't read the fine print of article I and article II and so forth, but you can see what the Constitution is all about: we the people. Lincoln captured that notion when he spoke in his Gettysburg Address and said: ``We are a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' He didn't describe our system of government as of, by, and for the privileged. Our Founders didn't write ``We, the powerful and privileged'' at the start of our Constitution. That is what makes us different from the governments that dominated Europe, where the rich and powerful governed on behalf of the rich and powerful. America turned that on its head with our system of government. Our system of democratic republic governance. Therefore, we are at a very strange moment right now because just 20 days ago, 217 Members, a small majority over in the House, voted for a bill that was all about government of and by the powerful, for the powerful, of and by the privileged, for the privileged, not by the people, for the people. They voted for TrumpCare. We witnessed the House passing this horrific piece of legislation that will ensure that millions of low-income and middle-class Americans are worse off, will receive less care, and will have to pay more for their healthcare, assuming they can even get it. But, on the other hand, the bill delivers $600 billion in platinum-plated tax benefits to the richest Americans. Picture the situation: our President holding a celebration at the White House, standing on a platform, crushing more than 20 million people in terms of their access to healthcare, while celebrating a golden plate with platinum-plated gifts to the wealthiest Americans. That is what happened 20 days ago in the House of Representatives. That is not a pretty sight and certainly doesn't fit the mission of our Nation. Franklin Roosevelt shared his vision of how we progress in the following fashion. He said: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.'' But the Trump principle that was supported by 217 House Members 20 days ago is the opposite. The Trump principle is that the test of our progress is whether we add more to the abundance of those who have most, while taking away from those who do not have enough. That is what happened. That is the difference between Franklin Roosevelt and government of, by, and for the people, and President Trump and 217 House Members who passed a bill of, by, and for the powerful and the privileged. It is astonishing to me that this happened. American citizens, when they heard about the first version of this bill, TrumpCare 1.0, they overflowed the inboxes, they proceeded to fill the streets, they flooded the phone lines, and people up here heard them and said: We understand. We don't have the votes to pass this TrumpCare 1.0 in the House because we hear you telling us how horrific this bill is. So they went back to work. But in TrumpCare 2.0 they produced a bill that is even worse than TrumpCare 1.0. They took an already bad bill, they made it more painful and more damaging, and they jammed it through without a hearing on the House side. They jammed it through without a CBO estimate of how many people it would hurt or what it would cost. They jammed it through because they didn't want to listen to the American people who said: What you are doing is diabolical and wrong. They didn't want to listen to the experts who said the same thing. The experts weighed in from every direction--nonpartisans and analysts, health policy experts, the associations that work in healthcare, the groups that represent doctors, nurses, and patients. The American Medical Association said: ``We are deeply concerned that the AHCA,'' which I will simply call TrumpCare to keep away the confusion--``We are deeply concerned that TrumpCare would result in millions of Americans losing their current health insurance coverage,'' and that ``nothing in the MacArthur amendment remedies the shortcomings of the underlying bill.'' The AARP called the bill ``a bad deal for older Americans ages 50- 64,'' because it ``would significantly increase premiums for all older adults and spike costs dramatically for lower- and moderate-income older adults.'' The AARP went on to state that the amendment that converted TrumpCare 1.0 into TrumpCare 2.0 was making ``a bad bill worse'' because it ``establishes state waivers that allow insurance companies to charge older Americans and people with preexisting health conditions higher premiums and weaken critical consumer protections.'' The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network weighed in; the American Diabetes Association weighed in; the American Academy of Pediatrics weighed in; the American Heart Association; the American Lung Association; the March of Dimes and many, many, many other groups that are familiar, household-known organizations. These groups that understand our healthcare system all came out and made it public that this plan, this TrumpCare 2.0, is a bad plan. It endangers Americans' health. But 217 Members of the House didn't listen. The 217 Members voted for the Trump principle of crushing ordinary Americans to deliver $600 billion in platinum-plated benefits to the richest Americans. If the House had listened and put that bill 6 feet under with a stake through its heart, I wouldn't be standing here today, but they sent that bill over to the Senate. It is here for the Senate to consider. There are 100 Senators who now have to decide: Are they behind the principle of ``we the people,'' or have they decided that they want a different constitution--one that is about ``we the privileged'' and ``we the powerful''? I know that when I took my oath of office, I liked the Constitution the way it was written. I liked the principle behind this Constitution. So it is of major concern that the Senate might proceed to adopt TrumpCare 2.0 or modify it into TrumpCare 3.0. Today, the Congressional Budget Office's score was released, which told us of and evaluated TrumpCare 2.0. It found that more than 20 million Americans--in its estimate, 23 million to be exact--will be uninsured under TrumpCare than under the Affordable Care Act. That would bring the total of uninsured to a much higher total of 51 million people under the age of 65 by the year 2026--nearly double the number of uninsured. That hurts real people. It hurts every single one of those individuals who lose their healthcare. In my State of Oregon, just one piece, one provision of this bill, which crushes the expansion of Medicaid--in Oregon, it is the Oregon Health Plan--strips the healthcare of about 400,000 Oregonians. That is a lot of human carnage. It is enough people that, if they were standing hand to hand, they would stretch 400 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the border with Idaho. That is how many Oregonians would be impacted by this. That is just the people who lose access to healthcare. There are many others who would go to their clinics or go to their hospitals and find that the clinics and hospitals have either limited their services or shut down because, you see, our clinics have gained tremendously from the investment under ObamaCare. In addition, they have gained tremendously from the fact that the people who came in the door had insurance to pay their bills. It is the reduction in uninsured individuals who come through the door--the ones who cannot pay for their care--that has dropped so much. With more people paying for their care, the finances of the clinics and the hospitals are stronger. So TrumpCare not only hurts the 23 million who will lose insurance, but it hurts everybody, every American, by degrading our clinics and degrading our hospitals. Individuals share their stories and their concerns, people like Lauren Rizzo in Portland. She is a single mother and small business owner who is alive today thanks to the health insurance she received through ObamaCare. About 2 years ago, Lauren was not feeling well, so she went to get checked out at a clinic. Lauren figured she would be given a prescription for antibiotics and sent on her way. Instead, she was told to head straight to the emergency room, where she received emergency surgery to remove a 7\1/2\-inch mass from her abdomen. If Lauren had not gotten insurance through the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, she would not have gotten checked out, and she certainly could not have afforded the $40,000 surgery bill and the nearly $60,000 in followup care without going bankrupt. Very likely, without insurance, she would have had this mass continue to grow in her abdomen and maybe threaten her life. This may have been a life-and-death issue for her. Here is what Lauren has to say in her own words: I am a healthy and contributing member of society who is able to contribute and pay my way and continue to grow and succeed rather than someone who is slipping through the cracks and needing assistance to get by. It seems to me that turning people who are getting by into people who are falling behind is good for no one. Even if there is no compassion in our leadership's healthcare plan, I would have hoped someone would have injected a note of common sense. Her point, made very poetically and poignantly, is that if you cannot get healthcare, you cannot remain a productive member of society. It is not just about your quality of life, and it is not just about the fact that you might suffer and that you might die, it is also about whether you can be healed and contribute. That is an important piece of why healthcare is so important. Paul Bright of Sweet Home wrote to my office to share his story about finally having healthcare thanks to the Medicaid expansion. Paul wrote: I'm one of those hardworking Americans the Republicans praise mightily--an entrepreneur, self-employed, buying American--and I'm on Medicaid thanks to the ACA. Without the ACA--that is ObamaCare--I'd have no insurance at all to cover my prescriptions that keep me healthy so I can continue to work. Do I want to be making so little income that I qualify for Medicaid? No. I want to be making a good income. The only way I can continue working 60 hours a week to increase my household income is if I can keep my prescriptions and doctor appointments. Without the medicine I need, I will become permanently dependent on government services, not just health insurance, but I will start requiring food stamps, housing assistance, utilities assistance. He concludes: The smart economic decision is to keep me healthy so I can grow our economy. Paul is right. Keeping him healthy isn't just the moral thing to do, it is a smart economic decision. Yet, under TrumpCare 2.0, Paul probably would not stay healthy because he would not be able to afford the appointments and he would not be able to afford the prescriptions. He would fall through the cracks. Then there is a grandmother in Lake Oswego, OR, who wrote to me about her 12-year-old grandson who is living with a neurological disorder and who has been hospitalized three times over the past 5 years. The first time this woman's grandson was hospitalized at the age of 8, his father's insurance covered a 3-week hospital stay. At the time, that was enough to get the care he needed. But then we fast-forward to last year. Her grandson, now 12, needed to be hospitalized for several weeks, followed by residential treatment, followed by a brief period in a transitional school--a 10-month period in total. Those 10 months were covered because of ObamaCare, because of the ACA. For the past several months, this young boy has been home and recovering successfully. The ACA made that possible. Carol Nelson of Turner, OR, writes to me and shares her words. She does not know how she will manage if her husband is kicked out of his nursing home because of TrumpCare 2.0. She writes: My husband lives in a nursing home. He does not remember me after 33 years of marriage. I worry now. Will the new healthcare laws and Medicare, which I will get in 2018, cover us? Will he have to come home for me to take care of him even though I cannot stand for more than a few minutes due to congestive heart failure? Carol continued: I think there should be incentives to do what's best for your health written into the law but not to take it away. Without the ACA, I surely will die. So here is a woman who has been married to her husband for 33 years, but he has dementia so badly that he does not recognize his wife. She would love to care for him at home, but she cannot. She has congestive heart failure, and his condition is extremely severe. Medicaid funds more than half of the nursing home admissions in the United States of America. It is not simply about assisting struggling families or hard-working or low-income families; it is also about taking care of our seniors. She has a double challenge--her own care and her husband's care. ``Without the ACA,'' she said, ``I surely will die.'' Should that be the healthcare system we have in the United States and because of which people are at the point of losing their access to healthcare and putting their own lives at stake? I think back to that issue of peace of mind. In a good healthcare system, all have the peace of mind that their loved ones will get the care when they are sick and that their loved ones will not go bankrupt when they get sick. We have made big strides in that direction. In Oregon, the 400,000 folks who are covered by the expansion of Medicaid alone represent a big stride in that direction, the tens of thousands who have gained access to care on the exchange because they can now get community pricing and not be fended off by a preexisting condition or blocked by a preexisting condition. They have more peace of mind. We can do better. We could have a much simpler system, and we could have a much more efficient system, but let's not go backward and throw millions and millions of Americans off of healthcare. Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking with Carol on the phone and talking to her a little more about her life. She told me about the cataract surgery she needed in order to be able to continue to see. She said that without that, she would have lost her license, and if she had not had a license, she could not have gone to the grocery store to feed herself and her son, because they live out in the country--an hour's drive from everything. She told me about the various preexisting conditions she has had to manage--conditions that would certainly prevent her from getting healthcare without her having the ACA, conditions that, without medical appointments and prescriptions, would cause her health to deteriorate rapidly without the ACA. That is what she means when she says: ``I surely will die.'' It is a powerful story, but it is certainly not unique. Every day, I am receiving stories like Carol's--story after story of folks who just want the peace of mind of having access to healthcare--as well as stories from constituents who are angry at President Trump and who are, quite frankly, angry at the 217 Republicans who voted for a government by and for the powerful and privileged over in the House 20 days ago. They are also upset about the breaking of promises to the American people. They heard the promises over the past campaign year. The President made promise after promise on healthcare, and his healthcare bill breaks promise after promise. President Trump promised his plan would provide healthcare for all, but it does not. According to the analysis we received just today, 14 million Americans would lose healthcare almost immediately. Within another 10 years, that would grow to about 23 million Americans. That is not healthcare for all; that is healthcare for 23 million fewer. Promise broken. Over and over again, President Trump said his plan would make healthcare cheaper. The CBO estimates that premiums under TrumpCare 2.0 will go up 20 percent next year. Check this out. Here is the basic math. A 64-year-old man who earns $26,500 a year would have his monthly cost for healthcare go up from about $140 a month to about $1,200 a month. When you are earning $26,500, by the time you pay for your rent and your utilities and your car payment and your groceries, you do not have much left, but you can still get health insurance if it is costing you $140 a month. But if out of that little more than $2,000 a month you earn, you would have to pay $1,200 a month, there is no way you can afford that insurance. So President Trump promised that healthcare would be more affordable--promise broken. The President promised that under his plan, Americans would have better healthcare. Currently you are guaranteed essential benefits, including emergency services, rehabilitation services, maternity and newborn care, mental health and addiction treatment, hospital treatment, pediatric services--essential benefits. Those are the things you expect, in a healthcare system, to be covered. But TrumpCare throws out the requirement to have essential care benefits. It means a State could choose to let insurers sell barebones plans that cover virtually nothing. So you are making your payment and you think you have insurance, and then you get injured or you get sick and you find out it doesn't cover anything. That is not healthcare. That is predatory insurance policies, and that is what is allowed under TrumpCare. So, Mr. President, you promised better healthcare and you delivered predatory policies--promise broken. The President said he would make sure we kept the protections for preexisting conditions. He promised it. He repromised it. He triple promised it. He continued to promise it. But the amendment that he accepted for TrumpCare 2.0--passed 20 days ago by 217 Members of the House, in favor of government of, by, and for the powerful and the privileged--broke that promise and said States could allow the elimination of community pricing. What that means is that you have preexisting conditions, but you can get the policy at the same price as everyone else. If you destroy community pricing, it means that when you file for your policy, the insurance company says: Well, let's see just what your problems are. Oh, we see you have asthma. We are going to charge you more. Oh, we see you have diabetes, we are going to charge you a lot more. We see you have delivered a child, which can create health problems. We are going to charge you more because you are a mother. We see that you had an episode of cancer. It is in remission--good news--but the odds of your getting it are higher than someone else; so we are going to charge you more. That is because their goal is to make sure those people who have preexisting conditions are not in their insurance pool, because they will make more money. That is an assault on the premise that everyone will be able to have affordable healthcare because those folks are told: Because you have this condition or that condition, we are going to charge you more. The charges will be so high--and will be intended to be so high--that they will not be able to buy insurance. So they won't be covered. That is part of the reason that the CBO has analyzed the fact that there will be 23 million more people without insurance come 2026 under TrumpCare than under current law. We can think of this as a tax. For those who actually can summon the funds, it is a set tax on sick people, and the sicker you are, the higher the tax bill you pay under TrumpCare. So when the President promised not once or twice or thrice but multiple times to make sure that we keep the protection for people with preexisting conditions, that was a promise broken. The President promised not to cut Medicaid. As I was waiting to speak last night, I was watching a local television channel, and they were playing tapes of one rally after another where President Trump went out there and said: I am different; we will not touch Medicaid or Medicare or Social Security. He was emphatic. He was passionate. He was convincing. He broke that promise under TrumpCare. It cuts $880 billion out of Medicaid. On top of that, the budget he released yesterday calls for $600 billion more on top of the $880 billion. If you cut $1.5 trillion from Medicaid, that is the promise broken. It is not broken by a little. When the President said he wouldn't touch Medicaid, he didn't proceed to break that promise in a tiny little way. No, he smashed it with a sledge hammer. He demolished it. He turned it into dust because he cuts $1.5 trillion out of Medicaid. Medicaid doesn't just help provide healthcare to hard-working, struggling families. It pays for nearly half of all births in America. It provides coverage for one out of three children--healthcare for one out of three children in America. It pays for nursing home care for more than half of the American seniors who need nursing home care. Medicaid is the single largest payer for mental health and substance abuse disorders. A lot of folks here have come down to this floor--from both parties-- to talk about taking on the opioid epidemic, a substance abuse epidemic, a highly addictive drug doing great damage across America. Medicaid is the largest payer for substance abuse disorders in America, and TrumpCare cuts it by $1.5 trillion. Two out of three school districts rely on Medicaid funds to provide services to children with disabilities. So there we have it--one broken promise after another. Now we turn to the Senate because it is time for this Chamber to respond. The only appropriate response is for us all to get together, dig a deep hole here on the floor of the Chamber, throw that House bill--TrumpCare 2.0--into it, light it on fire, drive a stake through it, and make sure it never sees the light of day. That is the only reaction that honors our ``we the people'' government. That is the only action that would honor the promises that President Trump made to the Nation while campaigning. Now, a group of my colleagues are holding secret meetings far from the public to work out a new version of TrumpCare--TrumpCare 3.0. There is no bipartisan dialogue on this, and I am certainly not invited to listen in. So I can't tell you what they are coming up with, but I can tell you this: It is a process completely different than when we had a bipartisan, over a year-long process to debate and examine the question of the Affordable Care Act--ObamaCare. The Finance Committee held 53 hearings. They spent 8 days marking up the bill. That was the committee's longest markup in over two decades. They considered 135 amendments. That was one of the two major committees that worked on ObamaCare. The other was the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, known as the HELP Committee. They held 47 hearings--not secret meetings in some room but public and bipartisan meetings with all committee members welcome and the press welcome, hearings, roundtables, and walkthroughs. Then, they had a month-long markup--a month long. I was there. I was on the committee. We had a square table--two sides with my Republican colleagues and two sides with my Democratic colleagues. During that markup, amendment after amendment was considered. Three hundred amendments were considered--bipartisan amendments, amendments from Democrats, amendments from Republicans--and 160 amendments were adopted from my Republican colleagues--160 amendments from across the aisle. That is the type of bipartisan work that was done. Let's compare that to TrumpCare: no hearings in the House, no public display of the bill for a lengthy period for it to be publicly analyzed. There was virtually no chance for the public to see the actual text and weigh in. It passed under a process of rapid transit through the floor of the House, and then it came over here to the Senate. Is the Finance Committee now holding hearings similar to what we did years ago on ObamaCare? We had 53 hearings. How many hearings has the Finance Committee had on TrumpCare 3.0? None, not one. The HELP Committee--the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee--held 47 hearings, roundtables, and walkthroughs. How many hearings has the HELP Committee had here in the Senate on TrumpCare 3.0? Not a single one. Secrecy is the guiding principle of the day--secrecy that might produce another version of TrumpCare that will be devastating to millions and millions and millions of Americans. So, of course, they don't want the public to watch that process. Of course, they don't want to have weeks of hearings and markups that enable people to have hundreds of bipartisan amendments. If you are trying to push through something to destroy healthcare in America, you want to do it as secretly as possible. That is what is happening in the Senate at this very moment. That is not the kind of process you should have in a democratic republic. That is the kind of process you have when you are about to do something diabolical and destructive that will hurt we the people. ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act, isn't perfect. We could work together to make it much better. We could say no to all of the strategies that the Trump administration is doing right now to undermine the success of the marketplace. Remember, the marketplace was the Republican idea. That was the Republican plan: Have a marketplace where private healthcare insurance companies could compete. That is what came from across the aisle. But now the Trump administration is doing everything it can to undermine that particular strategy. They are hesitating about whether to provide the cost-savings funds that allow the companies to provide lower premiums and lower deductibles. That hesitation means the insurance companies can't price out their policies for next year. So they either have to exit the exchange or they have to raise the price of their policies a lot higher. The Trump administration is deliberately sabotaging the marketplace. Then there is the fact that the whole point of the markets was to make it simple for an insurance company to go from one State to another State, to reach all of the customers at the same time of year--all making decisions--and you can reach out and talk to them. You can sell your policy easily. But the point is, a new company coming into the marketplace is concerned they will get a disproportionate share of those who are very ill, so there is an adjustment that takes place to say: No. You can come into this marketplace, and we will guarantee that you will get an adjustment if your patients end up being sicker than the average patients. That is intended to make multiple insurers come in and compete with each other. But my Republican colleagues destroyed that provision. It is called risk corridors. They destroyed that provision. They are destroying the ability of companies to competently, responsibly come into the insurance marketplace and participate in the exchanges. So not only do we have the diabolical TrumpCare 2.0 and the secret 13 proceeding to develop TrumpCare 3.0, we also have the administration destroying the ObamaCare exchanges, the marketplaces, which were the Republican idea brought into that bill. I will do all I can to make sure we don't throw out healthcare for 23 million Americans. I hope every single Senator here, having come to this body and I know holding dearly this Constitution, will fight for ``we the people'' and not ``we the powerful and privileged'' and will fight against a bill that not only hurts healthcare for those 23 million people but also destroys healthcare institutions for everybody else because it undermines the financing of both the clinics and the hospitals. In our own States, we are all hearing our Lauras and our Pauls and our Carols and our grandmothers talking about their 12-year-old grandsons. We are hearing them all say: Just say no. Do your job. Make our healthcare system work better. Live up to your commitment to ``we the people,'' a democratic republic, to fight for a nation of, by, and for the people. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY. I withhold my request.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the most important words in our Constitution are the first three words ``We the People,'' written in beautiful script and written many times larger than the rest of the document so that even if you are across the room, you know what this Constitution stands for--not a government by and for the powerful, not a government by and for the privileged, but as President Lincoln so eloquently said in his Gettysburg Address, a ``government of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' As a ``we the people'' nation, we adhere to a core set of principles that have guided us through good times as well as in dark moments. One of those key principles is the rule of law, that we are a nation in which not only is there the rule of law but in which no one is above the law. If we walked out of this Chamber right now, proceeded through the double doorways, and down the steps of the Capitol, we would be staring at the beautiful building of the Supreme Court. The entire building symbolizes the role of justice in our society. As you look at that magnificent Supreme Court--the broad, marble steps leading up to the door--you see these simple words inscribed above: ``Equal justice under the law.'' It is right there. You can almost see it from where I am standing now: ``Equal justice under the law.'' That is the principle that is part of the ethic of every courthouse in America--from the smallest, most rural courthouse to the big city courthouse square. We see those same principles personified as Lady Justice. There she is, holding the scales, blindfolded so as to make sure everyone is treated equally. Yet, over the past few months, we have been in a period in which we have been staring into the abyss of a constitutional crisis because this very core principle of ``no one is above the law'' and ``equal justice under the law'' has been under assault. We have a President whose campaign team is under investigation because of substantial information that suggests the possibility of coordination and collaboration with Russia to change the outcome of the Presidential election--an assault on one of the most fundamental premises of a free society; that of free and equal elections. We have a President who gave code-word classified information to an adversary--Russia--just a few days ago. We have confidential information, we have secret information, we have top secret information, and we have code-word information at the very top. These are the most sensitive secrets of the American Government, and our President gave that information to Russia. If anyone else did that, he would be facing criminal charges. We have a President who sought to shut down an investigation into one of his former team members--retired LTG Michael Flynn. We know Lieutenant General Flynn was in contact with Russian officials, and he was fired for lying about it. President Trump fired the head of the FBI because he would not drop the investigation into General Flynn's Russian connections and conduct. We have a President, President Trump, who asked his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General to develop a cover story to tell the American people the reason he fired the Director of the FBI, which is that he was upset about the Director of the FBI's treatment of his former Presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton. If anyone believes the President woke up in the middle of the night and decided to fire the Director of the FBI because he was concerned about the way Hillary Clinton was treated, then you have not been paying attention this last year and a half. Now, if in the course of an investigation it is found that members of the Trump campaign coordinated or collaborated with the Russians to undermine the integrity of our elections, then that is treasonous conduct. If the President asked for, encouraged, or knew about such activity, then he would be party to such treasonous conduct. If the President used his office to attempt to shut down either the investigation of Michael Flynn or the investigation into the collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russians, then that obstruction is potentially a serious crime of obstruction of justice, and it has to be fully pursued. If the President fired his former FBI Director in order to slow down or shut down these investigations, then that compiles the evidence of obstruction of justice. These sets of facts point to serious misconduct. We have to fully investigate whether there was, in fact, such misconduct. That is why, for more than 3 months--going back to February 15 and Michael Flynn's resignation--I have been calling for a special prosecutor to conduct a thorough, impartial investigation into these matters. Over these 3 months, the case for why we need an independent special prosecutor has only grown stronger with each new event, each new story, each new piece of evidence. If there were any lingering doubt about the need for a special prosecutor, that doubt was washed away last week when President Trump fired Director Comey for pursuing the investigation into the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. That is why many of my colleagues and countless Americans all across the country stood up and demanded that no nominee fill Director Comey's shoes unless a special prosecutor had been appointed. So I was very pleased when last night Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein appointed such a special prosecutor. Now, he will be coming to this Chamber to speak with us in a short period of time, later this afternoon. But whatever else transpired, stepping up and appointing that special prosecutor was the right thing to do. He announced the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel--the words ``special counsel'' and ``special prosecutor'' are largely interchangeable--with wide-ranging authority to conduct a thorough and independent investigation into ``any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and, any matters that arose or may arise from the investigation; and, any other matters within the scope of the investigation.'' Last night's announcement was a tremendous victory for justice--the principle of justice. It was a tremendous victory for a country with the rule of law. It was a tremendous victory for the principle that no individual is above the law in the United States of America. We need to have confidence that there will be a robust investigation to get to the truth, no matter where that leads us. Certainly, our confidence has been improved by the appointment of the special prosecutor last night--and not just any individual, but an individual qualified and respected to lead such an investigation. For 12 years, from just before the September 11, 2001, attacks and right through 2013, this man, Robert Mueller, led the FBI. He led it for the second longest period in U.S. history. He led it for 2 years more than the standard term for the head of the FBI. He is known as a thorough, by-the-book prosecutor who can't be influenced or intimidated, and I have every faith that he will conduct a professional, robust, and thorough investigation and give the American people the answers to all of these issues. But as we applaud this strong movement toward justice, to truth, and to accountability, this strong stride in support of our ``we the people'' democratic Republic, we cannot rest. We need to make sure that Mr. Mueller, as a special prosecutor, gets every resource he needs to aggressively pursue justice and the complete independence he needs to undertake this incredibly important task. At the same time, we have to keep pressing here in the Senate, encouraging our Intelligence Committee, as well as the House Intelligence Committee, to aggressively pursue information. We cannot cede our obligation to represent and fight for the best interests of the American people or for our ``we the people'' Nation, and that includes speaking truth to power and holding our leaders accountable for their actions. Mr. Mueller will have, as I noted, wide-ranging authority to conduct his investigation. His investigation and the investigation here in the Senate by the Senate Intelligence Committee will be looking at a number of connections that have occurred over the course of this last year and a half. Now, we know a lot about what the Russians did to hack the American Presidential election. The intelligence community told us in a report this past January that, with ``high confidence'' Russian President Vladimir Putin ``ordered and influenced the campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election'' and that he did so in order to ``undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.'' The report goes on to say that the Russian Government ``aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.'' We know many of the elements of this aggressive Russian campaign. They used the resource ``Russia Today'' to spread fake news stories, to develop those stories, and to publicize those stories. They hired thousands of internet trolls to comment in social media on the affairs in America, as if they were Americans weighing in. They proceeded to hack the DNC, or the Democratic National Committee, files and the Clinton campaign files, and they released damaging documents from those hacks. They used bots; that is, remote computers instructed by code that was placed onto those computers to weigh in on social media as if they were people weighing in. So we had thousands of machines weighing in with comments as if they were individuals weighing in. Why did they do that? To take the fake news story and proceed to amplify it with comments from thousands of trolls and, probably, tens of thousands of bots, in order to get those issues trending so they would appear in the everyday news that Americans see. We are talking about a massive campaign of interference in the Presidential election. What we need to know is whether anyone on the Trump campaign was connected, in any possible way, to these activities. To find that out, we have to investigate the growing web of connections between members of the Trump campaign and Russia. Just consider some of the connections that have been explored already in the press. One individual is Carter Page, who served as President Trump's foreign policy adviser on the campaign trail. Mr. Page lived in Russia for 3 years while working for Merrill Lynch. He participated in several deals during his time there with Gazprom, the Kremlin-owned energy giant whose chairman was Vladimir Putin's deputy while Prime Minister. He became friendly and emailed back and forth for months with Victor Podobnyy, a Russian spy who was recorded on tape saying he was trying to recruit Page. Last year, while employed as a member of the Trump campaign, Mr. Page traveled to Moscow to deliver a speech bashing U.S. policy toward Russia, saying: ``Washington and other Western powers have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.'' Then there is Paul Manafort, the former chairman of the President's campaign. He was hired to manage the Republican Convention and to wrangle delegates, but he was promoted to campaign chairman and chief strategist, until he resigned because of his questionable foreign dealings. From 2004 until 2014, Manafort worked as an adviser to the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian strongman who, over the years, adopted policies that moved his country away from the European Union and closer to Russia. Manafort is regularly credited with helping Yanukovych win the Presidency in 2010. In 2014, a revolution rose up against Yanukovych, and he was ousted from power. He now lives in exile in Russia. But Mr. Manafort continued working in Ukraine, helping rebrand the former President's Party of Regions as an opposition party, mostly from eastern Ukraine, which advocates for stronger relations with Russia. Then, we have Roger Stone, President Trump's longtime ally, friend, and adviser since they first met back in 1979. That is three-plus decades. Ironically, it was Mr. Stone who introduced Donald Trump to former President Richard Nixon back in the 1980s, and there are stories in the media that Mr. Stone pressured the President to fire Director Comey. Over the years, Mr. Stone has appeared many times in Russia Today, the Kremlin's English language news network that developed and publicized fake news stories during last year's Presidential election. In his appearances, Mr. Stone regularly criticized the U.S. intelligence community, he attacked our media, he attacked our free press, he praised Russia and its policies, and he even praised WikiLeaks--the organization responsible for releasing massive amounts of confidential and damaging documents about our Nation's intelligence services and capabilities. More than that, Mr. Stone has bragged about his communications with hackers--hackers like Guccifer 2.0. And who is Guccifer 2.0? The individual responsible for hacking the DNC and releasing emails during the campaign. Another person whose connections to both the Trump campaign and Russia will be looked at is our former colleague and now our Attorney General. During the course of his confirmation hearings, Mr. Sessions misled fellow Senators about his interactions with Russian officials. When asked what he would do as Attorney General if he learned that anyone connected with the Trump campaign had communicated with the Russian Government, he said: I'm not aware of any of those activities . . . I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians. But he did have communications, meeting with Russian Ambassador Kislyak on two separate occasions last year. Then, we have Michael Flynn, a very major part of the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia--a retired lieutenant general and appointed to be National Security Advisor by President Trump. He was intimately involved in the series of events that led us to yesterday, with the appointment of a special prosecutor. Beginning in February 2016, General Flynn served as an adviser to the Trump campaign, and he was even considered as a potential running mate for President Trump. As we know, he followed President Trump into the White House as National Security Advisor. But as I noted before, that role was short-lived, as his Russian connections came to light. Back in 2015, he was paid to attend a 10th anniversary gala for Russian TV and sat at a table with Mr. Putin. He didn't disclose this on his security forms. During the Trump administration's transition, he talked with Ambassador Kislyak by phone, including one call on the very day that President Obama ordered sanctions against Russia as punishment. Punishment for what? Punishment for interfering with the American election. When that information was discovered, the White House contended that General Flynn's conversations with the Russian Ambassador were nothing more than ironing out logistics for an eventual call between the President and Vladimir Putin. Even Vice President Pence went on the record defending Flynn, telling CBS News that the two ``did not discuss anything having to do with the United States' decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.'' But General Flynn's conversation with the Ambassador was picked up during routine surveillance of the Russian Ambassador. And what were they discussing? They were discussing the sanctions President Obama was placing on Russia. Why did he place those sanctions? Because of Russian interference in the election. Acting Attorney General Sally Yates made it known that she warned the White House that Flynn was lying to the Vice President and that he was compromised. She met twice with Dan McGahn, the White House Counsel, to warn him about Flynn. But in exchange for making sure the White House knew about the fact that the National Security Advisor was compromised and then lied to the Vice President, she was fired--fired by the President. Eighteen days after Sally Yates' warning, Michael Flynn resigned, after the Washington Post revealed that he had, in fact, discussed sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak. Now, according to his lawyer, ``General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it.'' Well, I hope, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and as the special prosecutor pursue the investigations, that he will have every chance to tell it and will tell it with a fullness and an accuracy that will be complete. That is the web of visible connections we already know about, and they suggest the possibility of coordination, consultation, and collaboration with the Russians to influence the American elections. We have to get to the bottom of whether, in fact, that is the case. Did it go beyond a series of conversations to actual coordination, consultation, and collaboration? This is what we need to know. Now, the President says that there is no ``there,'' there. That is why we need an investigation, in order to find out. The President has called this a witch hunt. An investigation, I would convey to President Trump, is not a witch hunt. An investigation is pursuit of the truth. An investigation is in the highest tradition of equal justice for all. A very large development, as we all now know, occurred last week with the firing of FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the Bureau's investigation into these matters. Director Comey confirmed while testifying in the House on March 20 that the FBI was, in fact, conducting an investigation into Trump's campaign--something we now know really bothered the President. But at the outset, the President's White House claimed that Comey's firing was about the Director's handling of the Clinton email investigations, not because of the Russia investigation. That story on its face caused eyebrows to raise across the country. Did people really believe the President woke up and was determined to right a wrong because the FBI Director had unfairly treated Hillary Clinton? Yet he asked his team to develop this story to share it with the American people. He asked his team--his Attorney General and his Deputy Attorney General--to essentially put out a story to mislead the American people. That in itself deeply damages the integrity of the White House. This cover story also claimed that Comey was fired because he lost the trust of the rank-and-file FBI agents. Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe came to the Hill to testify before the Intelligence Committee last week, and he conveyed that this is simply not true. The cover story also involved Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein being the instigator of the firing by preparing this memo on his own and recommending it to the President. That also turned out to be a part of the deception, and the President himself made that clear, taking responsibility that it was his decision to fire, not a decision based on a recommendation that came from Rosenstein. In an NBC News interview with Lester Holt, President Trump admitted that he ``was going to fire regardless of recommendation'' and that he was thinking of ``this Russia thing,'' as he called it--``this Russia thing''--when he finally decided to fire the Director. He also told Lester Holt that he had asked Director Comey three times whether he himself was under investigation. The President admitted on camera to the American people that he fired the man in charge of the investigation against his campaign because he was frustrated that the investigation was still going on. The American people received reports subsequently that the President had asked Director Comey to pledge his loyalty to the President. This is news report of the memo that Director Comey wrote after meeting with the President. We find that the FBI Director is not going to be loyal to anyone but Lady Justice. The President had the audacity to publicly threaten Director Comey after firing him. ``James Comey,'' said the President, ``better hope there are no `tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!'' Attempting to intimidate future statements and possible statements in an investigation after a person has been fired is another factor that is totally inappropriate. Everyone with any shred of common sense knows such intimidation is inappropriate, but in the context of a criminal investigation, it may be more than inappropriate. We don't know if there actually were tapes. Our Intelligence Committee has requested the memos Director Comey wrote on his various conversations with the President. Remember, this is an experienced, seasoned FBI agent-turned-Director who has spent his life documenting conversations. It is considered to be a high level of integrity when such information is recorded in this fashion. Those memos carry a lot of weight. Some are classified, some are unclassified. They need to be provided immediately to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and if they aren't provided, then the Intelligence Committee needs to subpoena them and needs to subpoena the tapes. If they exist, they need to be delivered. If they are not tapes but they are transcripts, they need to be delivered. If they are not tapes but a thumb drive or they exist on a piece of hardware, they need to be delivered, and our special prosecutor, Mr. Mueller, needs to have them as well. I think that as one steps back from this incredible amount of information--the information about how Russia hacked the campaign, not just hacking into the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign but then releasing that information in strategic moments; hiring a thousand individuals to comment in social media as if they were American citizens; establishing a botnet of computers to weigh in as if they were people to amplify this false social media, to get it trending and to get it into the mainstream news--when we consider all of this, we know how terribly wrong it was, and we have to learn every piece about what went on in order to make sure we are in the best prepared way to stop it from ever happening again. We need to make sure we are in the best possible place to ensure that we can assist other democratic republics in making sure they are not victims of the Russians. We need to make sure that if any American, no matter who he or she is, collaborated or coordinated with the Russians in this effort to hack our campaigns, that they are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Mr. MERKLEY

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 the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, there is a Chinese curse that reads: ``May you live in interesting times.'' To call the times that we find ourselves in right now ``interesting'' would be certainly an understatement. The fact is, we find ourselves and our country in a moment that is profoundly testing the rule of law here in America, profoundly testing the strength of our democratic institutions. We have a President who has now engaged in a pattern of removing individuals from office who are executing their responsibilities under the law. First, on January 30, just 11 days into the Trump administration, it was Sally Yates, the Acting Attorney General, who warned the administration that Michael Flynn had been compromised by his connections to Russia--an incredibly responsible act for her to take, but she was fired. On March 10, it was Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in New York, who was reportedly investigating whether Secretary Price had profited from his position in Congress. He had been told he would be retained by this administration when suddenly he was fired. Then this week, Tuesday, the President fired James Comey, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; James Comey, who was leading the FBI's investigation into the possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the Presidential election and who was scheduled to testify before the U.S. Senate this week; James Comey; who had just recently asked for more funding and resources in order to appropriately and substantially investigate Russian interference in our elections and possible connections to the Trump campaign; James Comey, whose investigation just handed down its first round of subpoenas. The firing of James Comey has more than a passing resemblance to Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, the infamous incident in October of 1973, when President Nixon ordered the Attorney General to fire the special prosecutor who was investigating Watergate. Nixon wanted to derail that investigation. The Attorney General, Elliott Richardson, refused to do so and resigned. His deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to do so and resigned. Day by day, we have seen more connections, bits and pieces, come to light--conversations involving Michael Flynn, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Attorney General Sessions. The President insists there is no ``there'' there, but we have seen a pattern of conversations that we don't fully understand. Was there coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians to interfere in the U.S. Presidential election? Was there collaboration? We don't know. We know there were a lot of conversations, but what was the substance of those conversations? And who instructed those meetings to take place? What is the full pattern of these events? It is important that we get to the bottom of it because what every American understands is, if you conspire with a foreign government to undermine the integrity of the American elections, you are conspiring to undermine the integrity of the American Government itself; that this is a terrible assault, a terrible crime against our country. The President's team says this firing of Director Comey had nothing to do with the Russia investigation. They did so through a series of documents, including a letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions to the President, a memo to Jeff Sessions from Rod Rosenstein, and the President writing a letter to James Comey saying you are fired. So the memo from Rosenstein to the AG, the AG's letter to the President, the President's letter saying you are fired, and all of this claiming the basis of the investigation was because they were dissatisfied with the way James Comey had treated Secretary Clinton. Now, that doesn't really fit with the history we are familiar with. The President told audiences at a campaign rally in October: ``I tell you what, what he did, he brought back his reputation.'' He is referring to James Comey. ``He brought it back.'' And then when the President talked to ``60 Minutes,'' he said: ``I respect him a lot,'' when he was asked about Director Comey in the context of the actions he had taken in regard to Secretary Hillary Clinton. We remember the chants at his rallies: ``Lock her up.'' I don't think there is a single American--not a single Member of this body of 100 Senators--who believes for a moment--not for a microsecond--that the reasoning in this memo from the Deputy AG to the AG and the letter from the AG to the President and the President's memo to James Comey, that the arguments made here were the basis of his firing. If you believe the President woke up and said: I am so concerned about the way James Comey treated Hillary Clinton that he just has to be dismissed, then I have some oceanfront property in Arizona I would be happy to sell you. We know from the reporting of the last few days that there is quite another story--an accurate story--about why the President fired James Comey. We now know the President had become increasingly frustrated with Director Comey because he wouldn't go along with the story line the President wanted. The President wanted him to support his claim that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump Tower, but Director Comey, caring about the integrity of his team at the FBI and the office, refused to do so. In fact, he clarified that there is absolutely no information that corroborates the President's claim that Trump Tower had been wiretapped by President Obama. We know the President was frustrated that the Director was doing his job to explore--that is, to investigate--Russia's actions in our campaign, in our Presidential campaign, and that he was frustrated that there was looking into potential ties between his campaign and the Russians. He didn't like a lot about the fact that Director Comey was asking for more resources to be able to do a thorough investigation. Well, we know the result. According to a report in the Washington Post this morning, President Trump made his final decision to fire the Director last weekend while he was golfing on his property in New Jersey. He then tasked the AG and the Deputy Attorney General to come up with a cover story. This is an astonishing chain of events. What we have here is the President making a decision based on the appropriate efforts of the FBI to investigate a potential crime against the United States of America. What we have here is a President determining he wanted to derail that investigation, and he went to the AG and the Deputy AG to say: Help me do this. Help me derail this investigation. Give me a cover story I can sell to the American public. And Attorney General Sessions complied and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein complied. Now, that is quite different than what happened in the Saturday Night Massacre. In the Saturday Night Massacre, when the President said to the Attorney General: Get rid of that special prosecutor so I can derail the investigation, the Attorney General stood up and said: No way, and resigned--the Deputy Attorney General resigned, but that is not what we have here. We have now our AG agreeing to develop a cover story for the President. Now, this memo from Attorney General Sessions reads as follows: ``As Attorney General, I am committed to a high level of discipline, integrity, and the rule of law to the Department of Justice.'' Let me ask this question, Where is the integrity in collaborating in a false story in order to derail an investigation, an important investigation to the very heart of the integrity of our system of government? Where, I ask the Attorney General, is the integrity in developing a cover story--a false story to cover up the action of derailing an investigation. That is the opposite of integrity. To the Deputy, who also agreed to conspire in this deception of the American public, where is your integrity? Where was your commitment to justice? So here we have events that are deeply disturbing not only in terms of the President's decision to falsely mislead the American public but also to the Attorney General's decision to collaborate in that and the Deputy Attorney General's decision to support it. How is this not obstruction of justice? If anyone here thinks for a moment that the President is going to nominate a new head of the FBI and ask that individual to conduct a robust investigation of Russia's entanglement in the U.S. elections, I have another thought for you: It is not going to happen. The President has deliberately, intentionally derailed this investigation, and the Justice Department has no intention of making it go forward again. We need to hear from these top officials. We need to have these officials come to the U.S. Senate, to a committee of the whole, to tell us their story and answer these questions about what they have just done to violate the integrity of the Department of Justice. We need to have a special prosecutor. We know the head of the FBI, when we have one again, is not going to be able to conduct a robust investigation. Therefore, we need a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of this. The American people deserve no less. The restoration of integrity of the U.S. Government deserves no less. Lady Justice carries scales in her hands, and where is the blindfold? The whole point is that no one in America is above the law, no one--not Presidents or Vice Presidents, not AGs or Deputy AGs. Lady Justice is all about getting the facts, following the facts where they go, holding individuals accountable, when we get those facts, when we get that information. That is what we need to do now. We need to get to the bottom of this. We need to have that special prosecutor. We need to make sure that if anyone did conspire with the Russians, they are held to the full account of the law because conspiring with a foreign country to undermine the integrity of U.S. elections is treasonous conduct. This is not a traffic ticket. This is a question of treasonous--conspiring with a foreign government, undermining the U.S. Presidential election. I am deeply disturbed about this turn of events. I am deeply disturbed about the information we have. We need to get the full, full story, the complete story, and make sure justice is served. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I compliment our colleague from Florida on his articulating this powerful vision for humankind, which is the ability to look into the night sky and ponder the mysteries of the universe, the mysteries of life, in the most complete way. America has led this scientific adventure, this scientific journey, and we must continue to be at the lead of this journey for all of the reasons he has laid out today. I thank my colleague from Florida for leading Congress in pursuing and advocating for this vision and for developing the instruments on the ground and the instruments in space that will advance our knowledge. Equality Act Mr. President, I rise to speak about a different vision, the vision articulated in our Constitution, those first three words of our Constitution, ``We the People.'' It is this vision of a nation founded on the principle of a government that would serve not the privileged, not the powerful, not the few, not the elite, but serve the entire set of citizenry. Those powerful words were put in supersized font in our Constitution. So from across the room, you might not be able to read the details, but you can read the mission: ``We the People''--a government of, by, and for the people, as President Lincoln so eloquently said. But this vision in the Constitution followed up on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. In 1776, 56 of our Nation's best minds, our best leaders, gathered together in Philadelphia to debate, to work out a document unlike any other in history--a document that changed the course of world history--the Declaration of Independence. It said: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'' Together, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution laid out the vision for our grand experiment in democracy, our grand experiment in establishing a democratic republic--a nation, of, by, and for the people, where each and every person is equal, each and every person has the ability to pursue their happiness, to pursue opportunity. We may not have always succeeded, but for centuries, the story of our Nation--the American story--has been one of striving to live up to that promise of a more perfect union, where every citizen is equal, every citizen has opportunity, and every citizen can pursue happiness. Martin Luther King said in the midst of the civil rights struggle: Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. . . . Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. And it is with that type of tireless exertion and passionate concern that we have been on this path toward equality and opportunity for all. We have made a lot of strides. We have broken down a lot of barriers in overcoming discrimination and in advancing opportunity for one group of Americans after another. For women, for African Americans, for indigenous peoples, for immigrants, for Americans with disabilities, the journey goes on and on. But regardless of how far we have come, it is clear we still have a long way to go. There are still too many of our friends, too many of our neighbors, too many of our coworkers, our brothers and sisters who don't enjoy the same rights and protections as everyone else. They are members of the LGBTQ community, and they continue to go through every single day confronting discrimination simply because of who they are or whom they love. That is simply not right. There should be no room for that kind of hate, for that kind of discrimination here in the United States of America. That is why this week I have reintroduced the Equality Act. I have reintroduced it with powerful support from Senator Tammy Baldwin and Senator Cory Booker, who have really been the leaders who have driven this forward here in the Senate. We have been joined now by 43 additional colleagues, so that is 46 Senators, original cosponsors, in support of this vision of equality. That is a powerful stride from where we were just a few years ago, when we didn't even have an Equality Act to be presented here in the halls of Congress. We launched this act in partnership with the House, where Congressman David Cicilline has been the leader, and he has been joined by 194 of his colleagues as original cosponsors. John Lewis said during the civil rights struggle: ``If not us, then who? If not now, when?'' All of us should be called to action in this fight for the fundamental principle of equality, for us to stand up together and declare once and for all that discrimination based on sexuality and gender identity is not welcome in this country. We must make nondiscrimination the law of the land here in the United States of America. It is certainly true that we have made some progress in recent years. We passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expanded the definition of a Federal hate crime to include assaults based on sexual identity or gender orientation. We repealed don't ask, don't tell, a policy that banned LGBTQ soldiers from serving openly in our military for 17 years and that forced more than 13,000 servicemembers out of the military with dishonorable discharges. What we did was undermine the effectiveness of our military by taking away the enormous talents and skills of those individuals. And 6 years after repealing that policy, our military is stronger for it. In the Affordable Care Act, we make sure that no one can be denied healthcare because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, was unconstitutional, it was discriminatory, it was in fundamental violation of the vision of our Constitution. Then, in 2015, the Supreme Court found, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that love is love, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, and required all States to recognize same-sex marriages and issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. One barrier after another--one barrier after another of discrimination, one barrier after another that presented an obstruction to opportunity has fallen in a relatively short period of time, and that is something all of us should celebrate in the vision of equality and opportunity embedded in the vision of our Nation. But we cannot allow ourselves to lose sight of the fact that as much as these have been steps forward, we are still far from ending discrimination to the LGBTQ community here in America. Today, every State is required to recognize same-sex marriages and issue wedding licenses to same-sex couples. But 30 of those States still do not have a legal framework that ends discrimination. In 30 of those States, the legal framework of the State does not prevent someone from being fired from their job for being gay or lesbian or transitioning; those States do not have a structure which prohibits a same-sex couple to be refused services, to be evicted from an apartment, to be banned from a restaurant, to be denied opportunities to serve on a jury, to be turned away at the door in pursuit of a mortgage. We hear these stories from individuals. Ask the science teacher who was fired after telling her principal that she and her wife were planning to get pregnant or the same-sex couple that was forced to leave a park after kissing in public or how about the woman who was fired from her job as a security guard in a Savannah hospital, and when she took the hospital to court, she lost under the framework of law in that State. Or ask the LGBTQ community in Orlando. What we see is that when we have discriminatory laws, a discriminatory legal structure, that engenders discrimination, and the discrimination facilitates and engenders hate, and hate leads to violence. So we saw in Orlando when last summer a crazed gunman attacked those who were at the Pulse Nightclub and took the lives of 49 innocent people. The States that have no framework are many. They cross our country-- Idaho and Montana and Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, Arizona, Alaska and Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida--no legal structure to end this sort of discrimination. At some point in their lives, approximately two-thirds of all LGBTQ Americans face discrimination because of their sexuality or gender identification. Roughly a quarter of lesbian and gay and bisexual working Americans have lost a promotion because of nothing more than who they are or whom they love. And nearly--in fact, more than a quarter of transgender, working Americans report that in just a single year, they have been fired or not hired or denied advancement. There is no Federal framework to end discrimination. Today, only 20 States and the District of Columbia have passed laws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace, in housing, in public accommodations. Another three States have a partial set of protections. But instead of seeing the remaining States that still have a framework that provides for discrimination, we have seen more and more discriminatory legislation--laws like North Carolina's HB2, the so-called bathroom bill, which said that transgender individuals had to use a bathroom that matches their birth certificate and which blocked local jurisdictions from passing antidiscrimination measures to protect LGBTQ citizens; or Senate bill 149 out of South Dakota, signed into law in March, saying that LGBTQ people who want to adopt or foster children can be rejected by State- funded agencies based on the religious beliefs of the agency. Already this year, there have been more than 100 discriminatory pieces of draft legislation offered in State legislatures across our country. As long as people in our Nation are afraid to put their spouse's photo on their desk at work, as long as citizens are worried about being evicted from their apartment, as long as Americans can be denied service at a restaurant or a hotel room or kicked out of a public park or denied the right to use a bathroom just for being who they are or for whom they love, we need to keep fighting. We need to keep pushing to end discrimination. Imagine, if you will, when you open a business in America, the principle, since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, has been that you open the door to all. You don't let in a person with one color of skin and slam the door on the next who has darker skin. You don't let in one gender and slam the door on the other gender. You don't let in one ethnicity and slam the door on the other ethnicity. These fundamental provisions of equality, where the door is open to each citizen by those who provide services to the public--that is the foundation for each individual to be able to live their life fully, to be able to fully pursue their potential, to fully pursue their opportunity, to fully pursue happiness as envisioned in the Declaration of Independence. A former Senator of this body, who served here when I was an intern in 1974, who served here in 2009 when I came to the U.S. Senate, Ted Kennedy said: ``The promise of America will never be fulfilled as long as justice is denied to even one among us.'' Yet justice is denied every day--every day--in 30 States across our Nation where the door of discrimination is slammed shut on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. We the people in America understand that it is time to stop slamming the door of discrimination shut and open the door to full opportunity and full equality as envisioned in our founding documents. Sixty percent of Americans support same-sex marriages. More than half oppose North Carolina's bathroom bill and other similar bills that discriminate against transgender individuals. According to one study by the Public Religion Research Institute, more than 70 percent of Americans support comprehensive Federal legislation. Public opinion is in support of moving forward--moving forward to keep the door of opportunity open and to stop slamming the door of discrimination in the face of our citizens. It is time for us to stand up for our fellow citizens, time for us to speak out against this discrimination, time for us to declare once and for all that every American, no matter who they are or whom they love, deserves to live free from fear, free from violence, and free from discrimination. It is time for us to stand with our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers, and our brothers and sisters in the LGBTQ community. It is time for us to move forward and create nondiscrimination legislation based on the same sound foundation that has served so well in regards to addressing discrimination in other parts of our society, and that is the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It is time to consider the Equality Act in the Senate of the United States. At a time when so much discrimination, so many daily assaults occur on our fellow citizens, shouldn't we be holding a hearing to have these citizens speak up and share their stories? Shouldn't we be holding a vote to determine whether or not we truly believe in our constitutional vision? Shouldn't we have to confront the fact that we still have discrimination in housing, in employment, in schools, in restaurants, and in theaters? In fact, in every walk of life in America, in 30 States, we still have this discrimination without a legal framework in those States to provide protection. Under the Equality Act, sexual orientation and gender identity receive the same clear level of protection that race, religion, gender, and ethnicity already enjoy, thanks to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Equality Act will help us fulfill the promise of America, as Ted Kennedy presented it, that justice under the law is not complete when it is denied to even one among us. I am a steadfast believer in our Nation's founding principle that all of us were created equal, that we are ``endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'' But you don't have liberty if the door of discrimination is slammed in your face when you seek an apartment. You don't have liberty when the ugly face of discrimination blocks you from an opportunity to serve in a job. You don't have pursuit of happiness when you face a discriminatory framework in 30 of our 50 States. We all ought to have the same freedom to be who we are, to love whom we love, to pursue our lives and careers free of discrimination. I will not rest until that is true for everyone in our country. I say to my colleagues: Let us all not rest until we complete this vision of opportunity and equality for all. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, it looks as though we are at it again. Instead of fighting to make things even a little bit better for hard- working, middle-class Americans, Members of this body just want to make life harder for those hard-working, middle-class Americans. We have had the debate on Capitol Hill about how to strip healthcare from 24 million Americans. We have had a conversation on Capitol Hill on how to reduce the taxes phenomenally on the very richest Americans. We have seen the President's one-page description of a tax plan that consisted of a goody bag for the richest Americans, the multimillionaires and the billionaires. But here we have another provision just trying to sucker punch hard-working Americans because those hard-working Americans work for companies that often don't have a retirement plan, so they do not have a convenient way to put funds away to prepare for retirement. Along came the States. The States said: You know, for those workers who don't have a retirement plan at their work, why don't we design one, present one, so that they could automatically sign up and have their wages--a small amount of them--put away for retirement automatically? Then they would go to a different job, and that job would not have a retirement plan. Well, then, in that new job, they could have a little bit of their wages put away automatically for retirement--not in a manner that requires people to save. They could ``unsign'' themselves up. This is called automatic opt in. They could say: I don't want that 3 percent put into a retirement plan. Make it 2 percent, make it 1 percent, make it 5 percent, or make it 0 percent. They would have the control, but when they first start the job, it automatically puts away a little bit for retirement. I think about my son and daughter--my son who is 21 and my daughter who is 19--and they have worked a whole series of modest little jobs, from pouring coffee to coaching sports teams to working as a lifesaver and so on and so forth. What if for every single job in those companies that were not providing those retirement plans, workers automatically had 3 percent of their funds put away toward retirement in a low-cost option--the same kinds of low-cost options that U.S. Senators have when they come here to the Senate, the same types of low-cost options that every Federal employee has? Why not give that same opportunity to ordinary working Americans? That is what we are here talking about. We already made it harder to set up such stand-in plans--plans that stand in when there is no retirement plan provided by the employer. In March, we passed another CRA making it difficult to impossible for municipalities to create such a plan for their citizens, but the plans probably made more sense at the State level. Now come my friends across the aisle to say: It is not enough. It is not enough that we hit them once by stopping the municipalities from providing a plan. We are going to hit them again--kick them while they are down. That is the attitude of this provision that is before the Senate. What we are really talking about is denying the American dream to millions of citizens across the land who work for employers that don't have retirement plans or who run small businesses and don't have the administrative overhead to be able to set up a plan. This rips away the certainty that comes with knowing that if you work hard and play by the rules, you automatically save through one of these plans and you get a certain level of security and a certain level of dignity in your golden years. Isn't it our job here in the Senate, as representatives of our citizens and our States, to do everything we can to provide a ladder of opportunity, to lift up the men and women of this country? It isn't our job to say: Well, the States provided a ladder of opportunity; so let's go tear it down. Let's take a buzz saw and saw up that ladder of opportunity, because, wow, why would we want the States to help out our citizens? Isn't that not our job--to try to destroy opportunity? But here we are with my colleagues saying: Well, as to these folks who don't have a retirement plan set up by their employer, we are going to make it as hard as possible for them to save money for retirement. I hear the same folks come down here and say: Well, you know what; wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone saved more for retirement? Well, yes, it would be. So why don't we make it easier for them to do so, not harder. A plan that puts no imposition on the small business-- doesn't that make a lot of sense? Isn't that a win-win? Isn't that a blow in favor of helping out working people, rather than a blow that knocks them down? Today, apparently, we have a slim majority that says: No, knock them down. Furthermore, there is apparently a slim majority that likes to preach on States' rights. But when it comes to States trying to address a problem, you have a powerful special interest come to Capitol Hill and say: Don't let it happen because, after all, maybe one of them someday will be a customer of ours, and we wouldn't want them to be able to get help from their State while they are waiting for us to help them. A powerful special interest comes here, and suddenly States' right are out the door, States' rights are out the window. The conversation during the Presidential campaign was that we heard about electing a President who will fight for workers. Well, that was yesterday, because today we are passing a bill that Members of the Senate expect the President himself to sign to take a buzz saw to the ladder of opportunity for working people--the President of the United States, I am talking about, to take an ax to the program that makes it easier for Americans to save money for their retirement. Now, don't we know that public pensions are disappearing and private pensions are disappearing? What we are left with is Social Security. If workers don't have pensions through their jobs, and all they have is Social Security, it is going to be pretty rough in retirement. There is another option: to make it easier for workers to save. According to one study from 2013, 40 percent of small business owners had no retirement savings, 75 percent had no plans for funding their retirement, and 55 million Americans--nearly half of the private sector workers in America--are employed in jobs that do not offer any form of retirement savings or pension plan. Well, that is a lot of Americans who are only going to have Social Security unless they save. We know that it is much easier for them to save if they have a workplace plan and funds go into that plan automatically, and the individual worker can change the amount, the set-asides. They can increase it. They can decrease it. They can stop it. They can reactivate it. But because it is set up automatically, most workers choose to stay in it once they are there. Workers don't want to have a different retirement plan for when they worked at this company and then another one at this company and another one at that company, or companies that didn't have a plan so they had to set up something on their own. The idea is that this plan is portable, that you can take it from employer to employer. These are the things that are appealing to our State governments, which are saying: That is what will work well for the citizens of our State. Shouldn't we enable the States to be a laboratory of invention, a laboratory of innovation? Shouldn't we enable them to test run whether this works or doesn't work, instead of our taking and destroying that pilot project, destroying that laboratory of innovation, destroying that experiment at the State level to see if this would help make American citizens better off? This would all be done at the State level at no cost to businesses. In fact, that is what businesses have liked about it. That is why they have lobbied their State legislatures to say: Hey, maybe you would like to do this. We are too small. It is too difficult for us to set up a retirement plan. Maybe you all would like to design one that would be available. At this moment, 25 States are considering legislation to create retirement savings accounts for small business employees that currently aren't able to participate in a workplace retirement plan because the workplace doesn't have one. Twenty-five States are looking at this. Even if only one State were looking at it, shouldn't we give that State the opportunity? Five States are looking at it--and power to them because maybe one of the five will figure out a way to make it work and the other States will learn from that. Twenty-five States are looking at this because there is such an urgent need for their citizens. Seven of those 25 States are already at work implementing plans. I am very proud that Oregon, my State, is one of those seven. It plans to launch a voluntary pilot group later this summer. If that goes well, it was planning to expand that plan over the next 2 years, and if that goes well, it was planning to make it available to individuals working in any job in Oregon where there wasn't a retirement plan. That is very thoughtful. Start with a little group, expand it to a few more, and see if it is still working. If it is a good model and the feedback is good and you need to make some changes, you can make it on a small scale. When it is ready to roll, if it is doing a good thing for America's workers, for Oregon's workers, give every Oregon worker that opportunity to easily save for retirement. There is so much interest from the States, so much interest from the businesses in those States for the possibility of experimenting with these plans. Last year, the Department of Labor set up the safe harbor rule that helps to clarify a piece of ERISA, our Federal retirement law, to make it possible for States to pursue this. That is what is before us today. Are we going to undo the protection to let States experiment? The AARP likes to point out that these State-sponsored plans would likely increase the number of workers saving for retirement. That is because, as they enter the workforce, they would be automatically enrolled. They would be able to continue using that plan even if they change jobs within the State. That would be helping them from their very first day of employment in the workforce. Imagine your son or daughter, age 15 or 16, getting that first summer job or evening job or early morning job, and already they are starting to save for retirement. It makes a big difference over their working years, which might cover four decades or more. It makes a big difference, whether they have anything to back them up other than Social Security. It is good for small businesses because not only does it free them from feeling badly that they hadn't set up a plan, but it makes their workers happier, more productive employees, and the businesses get to have all that by bearing no additional costs. It is good for taxpayers. It is good for States. It is good for business. It is good for the workers. The only thing it is not good for is for some powerful special interest that has failed to offer plans to these workers but says someday it might and it doesn't want the competition--a powerful special interest coming here to Capitol Hill to rip down a ladder of opportunity for workers. Is the President going to sign that after he campaigned on helping workers? Well, yes, apparently he is because that was yesterday in a campaign, and today is the reality of governing. Apparently, a powerful special interest is talking to the President of the United States, and he is helping that interest, rather than the workers of America. He is fighting for a Federal blockade rather than for States to be the laboratory of innovation and experimentation. He is fighting for the billionaires, rather than for the working people of our Nation, and that is just a terrible development to see. Colleagues, you can change that right here. We are going to have a close vote. So come down to this floor and place your vote with States' rights. Come down to this floor and place your vote in ladders of opportunity. Come down to this floor and place your vote on the side of an average working American. You might live in a bubble. You might live in a gated community. You might live in a fancy world as a Senator, but these are the workers of America who have employers who provide no retirement plan. That is who we are talking about here. So get out of your bubble. Get out of your elite frame of mind. Come down to this floor and fight for the workers of America. Vote no on this blockade to the States' addressing a fundamental need, providing a fundamental opportunity for the workers of America to save for their retirement. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, today I rise to address the important urgency of addressing climate change. Across the country, we are seeing the impacts of the warmer climate, and it is having devastating consequences on our forests, on our farming, on our fishing, and on our urban populations. Years ago, people talked about what we might see if we continued to burn fossil fuels and continued to put carbon dioxide into the air, but no longer do we have to talk about what we might see, because it is here. The facts are on the ground right now. We can look at my home State of Oregon. In Oregon, we have the challenge of forest fire seasons that are longer by several months than they were just decades ago. We have the challenge of warmer winters, resulting in pine beetles doing more damage to our trees. The fact that we have lower snowpacks in the Cascade Mountains means warmer trout streams and less water for irrigation. We have had the worst-ever droughts in the Klamath Basin in the past 15 years. Over on the coast, we have a big impact on oysters. Because we have burned so much in fossil fuels to create so much carbon dioxide that has been absorbed by the oceans and turned into carbonic acid, the oceans have acidified. They are 30 percent more acidic than they were 150 years ago, meaning our oysters are having trouble reaching out and pulling the molecules out of the water to form a shell. In fact, it takes so much energy to do so that they are dying. That is what is happening. That is just in Oregon. We can look across the United States and see impact after impact. If we were in Minnesota, we could talk about the tick populations that are killing the moose because it is not cold enough in the winter to kill the ticks. If we are in Maine, we can talk about the fact that the lobsters are migrating to Canada because that is where the colder waters can be found. If we are in Florida, we can talk about sunny day floods, because the ocean levels have risen and the ocean water--the saltwater--is contaminating the freshwater that cities depend on. If we are up the Atlantic coast, we can talk about Hurricane Sandy and how its devastating power was enhanced by an ocean that is much warmer than it was decades ago. If we are in Texas, we can talk about the spread of mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus affecting folks. So the list goes on and on. But it is not just in the United States of America. It is on the entire planet. As we are talking about oysters on the west coast of the United States, across the globe folks are talking about coral reefs. The Great Barrier Reef has virtually died over the last few years. Scientists say 80 percent of the Great Barrier Reef off Australia has died in the last 3 years. If we are looking at the mountainous regions of the world, you can trace the flow of glaciers and find that across the globe glaciers have diminished by an enormous amount. Some say that if you want to see a glacier in Glacier National Park, you better get there soon. That is just in the United States. If we turn north to the upper reaches of Canada and the permafrost, you can visit what are called the drunken forests, because the permafrost is melting and the trees are starting to lean in every which direction. If you turn to Alaska, you are finding that Native populations are having to relocate because of changing circumstances of a warmer Alaska. Go to the Arctic Ocean and what you see is a massive amount of missing ice, and, because that ice is missing, the ocean is absorbing more energy from the sun, and it is creating a feedback loop that is having further devastating consequences. And so the list goes on and on. It is not just time to address climate change boldly. It is time to address it aggressively. It is time for 100 by 50. What that means is 100 percent clean and renewable energy to power the economy by the year 2050 and the steps to get there in between and to have 50 percent of our energy clean and renewable by the year 2030. That is not far away. That is just 13 years away, and for 2050, add another 20 years. We have to act quickly because right now human civilization is failing the test. Our responsibility is to stop burning fossil fuels and to stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is why we have to rapidly transition from an energy economy based on fossil fuels to one based on clean and renewable energy. Why do I say we are failing the test at the moment? We are failing the test because if you look at the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human civilization, the rate of carbon dioxide pollution has not leveled out. In fact, the speed of pollution and the amount of pollution per year is increasing. So we have a tremendous challenge ahead of us. We have to take and not only reduce the amount but reduce it enormously in a short period of time. Now some say this vision is too bold. Some say this vision is too difficult, that it is too hard. It makes me think of President Kennedy's call. He said decades ago: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. I tell you today that we must, as a Nation, be willing to accept the challenge of transforming our energy economy. We must be unwilling to postpone tackling this challenge of transforming our energy economy, and this challenge is one where we must be committed to winning. It is not just time. It is way past time. I came to the Senate floor last September to lay out the concept of 100 by 50--100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2050. I come today to the Senate floor to say that today a group of Senators are introducing a bill to lay out a roadmap to get there. Just as President Kennedy laid out the vision of putting an American on the moon, NASA went to work and laid out a plan on how we would get there. They didn't know at first how it would be done. They hadn't proceeded to invent the staged rocket that would enable someone to escape the gravity of Earth in a fashion to get us to the moon. They didn't know how to create a lunar landing operation to put people safely on the planet surface. They weren't even sure of the composition of the surface of the moon, but they figured it out. They put forward a draft. They reworked that draft. Today we are putting forth a roadmap. I thank my colleagues who are standing with me today to be the original cosponsors: Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. I know other colleagues will join us as time progresses, but it is important not to wait until we have, if you will, a large population to begin the conversation--a large set of sponsors to begin the conversation of laying out a roadmap. It is important to lay it out now. It is important to lay it out now because it is a statement of values. It is important to lay it out now so that there is a vision that can be discussed--a detailed vision of how to take on different sectors of the energy economy that can be discussed and debated. So we are focused not on whether to get to 100 by 50, but on how we are going to get to 100 by 50. I invite and encourage that debate because each of us can envision a roadmap that is slightly different. So let's have that conversation, but let's not forget the importance of getting to this destination--100 percent clean, renewable energy--and getting thereby the year 2050. Yes, it is audacious when you think about how we use energy today, to think about how we can transform it in just a few decades, but we have many of the tools we need right now. With focused research and development, we can add the other tools that we need. Let us not fail to accept this challenge, because our planet is crying out in anguish. In addition to the facts on the ground that I have been mentioning, we can simply take the temperature of the planet. Month after month after month, year after year, in the past 2 years we have been setting new records for having the hottest month--not the hottest month in Washington, DC, not the hottest month in the United States of America but the hottest March in the history of the planet, the hottest April since we have been measuring the temperature of the planet--May, June, and so on and so forth. So the time for conversing about whether we have a problem is over. Now is the time to say how we will achieve this vision. One important element of achieving this vision is greening the grid. That means that we need to phase out electricity that is generated by fossil fuels. We need to invest in clean and renewable energy that puts green electrons in the grid instead, and we need to advance and develop the deployment of technologies that contribute to this, including high- voltage transmission lines that will move energy between different parts of the United States. We certainly need to develop the ability to store electricity and to use automated demand management and automated supply management so we can match the supply of green energy to the demand at different times of the day or just the demand of different times of the day to make renewable energy fit to the operation of the economy. Now, we have some specific powerful gifts in this effort. One is that we have a dramatically declining cost of solar energy. A second is that we have a dramatically declining cost in wind energy. A third is that we have a dramatically declining cost of battery storage. This isn't an accident. This has happened because of the innovation economy where these ideas were developed and promoted and researched and advanced right here in the United States of America. But it really helps change the conversation. There have been many who are deeply invested in the fossil fuel world who would like to say that advancing to a clean and renewable energy economy will hurt the economy. But now we are coming to the point that it is less expensive to generate renewable energy than to generate fossil fuel energy. The fact is that we can create a tremendous number of jobs as we rebuild this energy economy. If we turn specifically to the issue of a Federal emissions vehicle standard--because that is one of the pieces of this puzzle--it means that we have to make national investments in electrical recharging stations along our roads and highways to support these vehicles. There are already half a million plug-in electric vehicles on our roads today, and these vehicles--these cars--are becoming cheaper as the numbers continue to grow. One of the factors that is enabling the car to become cheaper is the dropping cost of lithium in the batteries that power them. They are getting smaller, lighter, and cheaper. So in the same space you can put more energy with less weight to drive cars further. Since 2008, the cost of these batteries per kilowatt hour has fallen fourfold. They will continuously grow. Having more of these cars on our roads and our highways as the costs keep falling, it is vital that we have an infrastructure in place to support them. We need to ensure that everyone is part of this clean and renewable energy resolution, including low-income and disadvantaged communities. We addressed that in the 100 by 50 legislation. To do this, we established grants to bring affordable clean energy and energy efficiency to individuals' homes and communities. We invest in zero emission public transportation that is affordable and accessible. We also want to ensure that no workers are left behind in this transformation, especially the workers in the fossil fuel industry. That is why we need to provide a just transition for those workers and job training programs. We need to have a strategy to ensure that there are opportunities to move from jobs in the fossil fuel world to positions in the clean and renewable energy industry. Those industries are, in fact, booming, with jobs in solar and wind growing 12 times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy. Already, the number of clean and renewable industry jobs has surpassed those in the fossil fuel industry by a margin of 5 to 1. We want to enable everyone to have the skills they need to succeed in these emerging industries, but to move to this future, we must come to a point at which we stop investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure. We cannot proceed to make this pivot quickly to a cleaner, brighter, renewable future if we continue to tie ourselves and our government to a fossil fuel-powered past. To achieve this clean break, the 100 by 50 Act ends future fossil fuel investments at the Federal level. That would affect projects similar to the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline, and we would end the tax subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. This burning of fossil fuels is destroying our planet. We must stop subsidizing the destruction of our planet. This burning of fossil fuels is destroying our forests, which our rural communities depend on. We must stop subsidizing the destruction of our forests. The burning of these fossil fuels is driving droughts, reducing irrigation water, and hurting our farmers. We must quit subsidizing the destruction of agriculture in America. The burning of fossil fuels is also impacting our fishing--from warmer, smaller trout streams to a fishing industry that depends on the critical ecosystem in the ocean. We must stop subsidizing the destruction of our fishing industry. It is also important to make sure that America remains a leader in the energy economy and leads in the effort to make sure that we do not have a disadvantage with regard to manufacturing in other countries. What that means is that, with regard to countries that are not pursuing this on the same aggressive level, we need to have an effort to drive this transaction. We need to make sure that if there are additional costs, those are offset with a border tax so that we do not encourage the movement of production out of our economy here at home. We have done so with trade policy--in a massively destructive way--to the middle class of America. If we do not make things in America, we will not have a middle class in America, and we need to make sure that we do not do that in the transition of our energy economy. To fund this plan, we propose a new source of revenue. When I say a ``new source of revenue,'' that is a little misleading because we are taking a cue from history, specifically World War II, and modeling bonds--climate bonds--on the war bonds that helped fund our fight against totalitarianism--to fund our fight against Germany and the Soviet Union. Auctioning off climate bonds is a way to raise the funds to drive the grants to power this transformation--to accelerate this transformation--and make sure that we do not leave out disadvantaged communities but, rather, bring them fully into this transition. The 100 by 50 Act is ambitious, but the circumstances require no less. Furthermore, we cannot, simply, propose a Federal Government strategy because we live in the United States of America, where important things are done at many different levels. Here in this Chamber--right now in the U.S. Senate--we do not have a committee chair who is going to say that we need to have committee hearings in order to take on this issue. We do not have a committee chair on the House side who is going to drive this conversation. We do not have a President who understands the damage that is being done to our forests and our fishing and our farming and to our planet and who is going to lead the battle. We have to turn to the wisdom of the American people. We have to turn to the wisdom of the States and the wisdom of the counties and the wisdom of the cities and the wisdom of individuals across America who are willing to go to the leadership of their mosques or the leadership of their temples or the leadership of their churches, who are willing to go to the leadership of nonprofits that they are a part of, who are willing to go to their city councils or their county commissions, who are willing to go to their State legislators. They are going to say that we need to have a 100 by 50 resolution for our nonprofits, for our religious organizations, for our cities, for our counties, for our States because we need to own this issue. We Americans at every level need to own this issue. This is an issue that depends upon citizens across the globe taking hold of this in a powerful way that cannot be blocked by the dark money of the fossil fuel industry. In so doing, by passing that 100 by 50 resolution for the city or the nonprofit or the church or the mosque or the synagogue or the temple, we will also adopt an action plan that involves the specific steps that local organizations are going to take over the next 2 to 3 years. This year, maybe they are going to convert their hot water heaters to electrons rather than burning natural gas. Maybe they are going to sign up for green electrons from their local utilities, which is an option that is offered in many places across America. The following year, maybe they are going to invest in energy-saving retrofits of their buildings. The year after that, maybe they are going to say that we have to revamp our fleet of vehicles and start using rechargeable vehicles, like the Volt or the Bolt or the LEAF or a whole set of cars that has been appearing in the economy over the last few years. One can charge them up and, thereby, run them off green electrons rather than off fossil fuels. These are things that can be owned and done. In fact, it is already happening. It is happening with local organizations across this country that are committing themselves to 100 percent clean and renewable energy. More than 25 cities across the country have already adopted this vision--from Madison, WI, to Abita Springs, LA; from San Diego, CA, to Salt Lake City, UT; from Georgetown, TX, to Greensburg, KS-- cities that are working toward a 100 percent clean and renewable future. There are 88 major businesses that are getting in on the action as well--Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Nike, Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Apple. These are only a few of the major companies that have committed to powering themselves with 100 percent clean and renewable energy. What is driving this move toward clean and renewable energy? It is that Americans everywhere are seeing the effects on the ground. They are calling for action, and community leaders and business leaders are responding. We need to respond here in the U.S. Senate. We should be holding hearings on how to put this plan into action. We should be taking the best ideas from the city actions and the business actions and the nonprofit actions from across the country and from the ideas generated on the right side of the aisle and the left side of the aisle because the destruction we face--the threat we face--is not a blue issue or a red issue; it is a human civilization issue. America has been a driver of the technology that can transform our economy and also the technology that we can sell to the world. In adopting this vision and in fighting for this vision, America can be a leader with other nations around the world. It has been beyond strange to have other countries lecture us over the last few months to maintain our commitment as a Federal Government to this vision. Other countries are saying: America, you have to be part of the solution. You have benefited enormously from the burning of fossil fuels, perhaps more than any other economy in the world. You have one of the highest per capita footprints for carbon. You must be part of this effort because every country in the world is affected. More than 40 countries have now adopted the vision of clean and renewable energy, so there is no time for America to step out and not be part of the solution, not be part of the leadership, not be part of the driving force, not benefit from being on the cutting edge of this transformation of the energy economy. Just as President Kennedy laid out the vision for going to the Moon, Americans from every walk are coming together to lay out the vision for a 100 percent clean and renewable energy economy. They are adopting a framework--a time, a goal--as to where we are going and when we are getting there; 100 by 50 sums it up. After President Kennedy laid out the vision, America went to work to make it happen, and we landed American citizens on the Moon. Now it is time for all of America to get to work and implement this vision and ensure that we succeed in transforming our energy economy within the next few decades by taking important steps every single year--driving ourselves forward, understanding the urgency, applying the technology, accelerating the implementation--to achieve 100 percent clean and renewable energy by 2050. If there were an asteroid coming toward the Earth, we would not be talking politics or political advantage. We would all be working together to take it on--destroy it before it destroyed us. We have the equivalent of an asteroid that is coming at the Earth in global warming. The time to play politics has passed. The time to play partisanship has passed. It is time for every citizen and every organization at every level--every chair representing every Senator from every State in the Union--to come together to take on this challenge together. I call upon my fellow Senators to be part of, perhaps, the most important effort we have to solve the biggest challenge to the health of America and the health of the planet--global warming. Step forward and be part of the effort. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, today I rise to address the important urgency of addressing climate change. Across the country, we are seeing the impacts of the warmer climate, and it is having devastating consequences on our forests, on our farming, on our fishing, and on our urban populations. Years ago, people talked about what we might see if we continued to burn fossil fuels and continued to put carbon dioxide into the air, but no longer do we have to talk about what we might see, because it is here. The facts are on the ground right now. We can look at my home State of Oregon. In Oregon, we have the challenge of forest fire seasons that are longer by several months than they were just decades ago. We have the challenge of warmer winters, resulting in pine beetles doing more damage to our trees. The fact that we have lower snowpacks in the Cascade Mountains means warmer trout streams and less water for irrigation. We have had the worst-ever droughts in the Klamath Basin in the past 15 years. Over on the coast, we have a big impact on oysters. Because we have burned so much in fossil fuels to create so much carbon dioxide that has been absorbed by the oceans and turned into carbonic acid, the oceans have acidified. They are 30 percent more acidic than they were 150 years ago, meaning our oysters are having trouble reaching out and pulling the molecules out of the water to form a shell. In fact, it takes so much energy to do so that they are dying. That is what is happening. That is just in Oregon. We can look across the United States and see impact after impact. If we were in Minnesota, we could talk about the tick populations that are killing the moose because it is not cold enough in the winter to kill the ticks. If we are in Maine, we can talk about the fact that the lobsters are migrating to Canada because that is where the colder waters can be found. If we are in Florida, we can talk about sunny day floods, because the ocean levels have risen and the ocean water--the saltwater--is contaminating the freshwater that cities depend on. If we are up the Atlantic coast, we can talk about Hurricane Sandy and how its devastating power was enhanced by an ocean that is much warmer than it was decades ago. If we are in Texas, we can talk about the spread of mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus affecting folks. So the list goes on and on. But it is not just in the United States of America. It is on the entire planet. As we are talking about oysters on the west coast of the United States, across the globe folks are talking about coral reefs. The Great Barrier Reef has virtually died over the last few years. Scientists say 80 percent of the Great Barrier Reef off Australia has died in the last 3 years. If we are looking at the mountainous regions of the world, you can trace the flow of glaciers and find that across the globe glaciers have diminished by an enormous amount. Some say that if you want to see a glacier in Glacier National Park, you better get there soon. That is just in the United States. If we turn north to the upper reaches of Canada and the permafrost, you can visit what are called the drunken forests, because the permafrost is melting and the trees are starting to lean in every which direction. If you turn to Alaska, you are finding that Native populations are having to relocate because of changing circumstances of a warmer Alaska. Go to the Arctic Ocean and what you see is a massive amount of missing ice, and, because that ice is missing, the ocean is absorbing more energy from the sun, and it is creating a feedback loop that is having further devastating consequences. And so the list goes on and on. It is not just time to address climate change boldly. It is time to address it aggressively. It is time for 100 by 50. What that means is 100 percent clean and renewable energy to power the economy by the year 2050 and the steps to get there in between and to have 50 percent of our energy clean and renewable by the year 2030. That is not far away. That is just 13 years away, and for 2050, add another 20 years. We have to act quickly because right now human civilization is failing the test. Our responsibility is to stop burning fossil fuels and to stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is why we have to rapidly transition from an energy economy based on fossil fuels to one based on clean and renewable energy. Why do I say we are failing the test at the moment? We are failing the test because if you look at the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human civilization, the rate of carbon dioxide pollution has not leveled out. In fact, the speed of pollution and the amount of pollution per year is increasing. So we have a tremendous challenge ahead of us. We have to take and not only reduce the amount but reduce it enormously in a short period of time. Now some say this vision is too bold. Some say this vision is too difficult, that it is too hard. It makes me think of President Kennedy's call. He said decades ago: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. I tell you today that we must, as a Nation, be willing to accept the challenge of transforming our energy economy. We must be unwilling to postpone tackling this challenge of transforming our energy economy, and this challenge is one where we must be committed to winning. It is not just time. It is way past time. I came to the Senate floor last September to lay out the concept of 100 by 50--100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2050. I come today to the Senate floor to say that today a group of Senators are introducing a bill to lay out a roadmap to get there. Just as President Kennedy laid out the vision of putting an American on the moon, NASA went to work and laid out a plan on how we would get there. They didn't know at first how it would be done. They hadn't proceeded to invent the staged rocket that would enable someone to escape the gravity of Earth in a fashion to get us to the moon. They didn't know how to create a lunar landing operation to put people safely on the planet surface. They weren't even sure of the composition of the surface of the moon, but they figured it out. They put forward a draft. They reworked that draft. Today we are putting forth a roadmap. I thank my colleagues who are standing with me today to be the original cosponsors: Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. I know other colleagues will join us as time progresses, but it is important not to wait until we have, if you will, a large population to begin the conversation--a large set of sponsors to begin the conversation of laying out a roadmap. It is important to lay it out now. It is important to lay it out now because it is a statement of values. It is important to lay it out now so that there is a vision that can be discussed--a detailed vision of how to take on different sectors of the energy economy that can be discussed and debated. So we are focused not on whether to get to 100 by 50, but on how we are going to get to 100 by 50. I invite and encourage that debate because each of us can envision a roadmap that is slightly different. So let's have that conversation, but let's not forget the importance of getting to this destination--100 percent clean, renewable energy--and getting thereby the year 2050. Yes, it is audacious when you think about how we use energy today, to think about how we can transform it in just a few decades, but we have many of the tools we need right now. With focused research and development, we can add the other tools that we need. Let us not fail to accept this challenge, because our planet is crying out in anguish. In addition to the facts on the ground that I have been mentioning, we can simply take the temperature of the planet. Month after month after month, year after year, in the past 2 years we have been setting new records for having the hottest month--not the hottest month in Washington, DC, not the hottest month in the United States of America but the hottest March in the history of the planet, the hottest April since we have been measuring the temperature of the planet--May, June, and so on and so forth. So the time for conversing about whether we have a problem is over. Now is the time to say how we will achieve this vision. One important element of achieving this vision is greening the grid. That means that we need to phase out electricity that is generated by fossil fuels. We need to invest in clean and renewable energy that puts green electrons in the grid instead, and we need to advance and develop the deployment of technologies that contribute to this, including high- voltage transmission lines that will move energy between different parts of the United States. We certainly need to develop the ability to store electricity and to use automated demand management and automated supply management so we can match the supply of green energy to the demand at different times of the day or just the demand of different times of the day to make renewable energy fit to the operation of the economy. Now, we have some specific powerful gifts in this effort. One is that we have a dramatically declining cost of solar energy. A second is that we have a dramatically declining cost in wind energy. A third is that we have a dramatically declining cost of battery storage. This isn't an accident. This has happened because of the innovation economy where these ideas were developed and promoted and researched and advanced right here in the United States of America. But it really helps change the conversation. There have been many who are deeply invested in the fossil fuel world who would like to say that advancing to a clean and renewable energy economy will hurt the economy. But now we are coming to the point that it is less expensive to generate renewable energy than to generate fossil fuel energy. The fact is that we can create a tremendous number of jobs as we rebuild this energy economy. If we turn specifically to the issue of a Federal emissions vehicle standard--because that is one of the pieces of this puzzle--it means that we have to make national investments in electrical recharging stations along our roads and highways to support these vehicles. There are already half a million plug-in electric vehicles on our roads today, and these vehicles--these cars--are becoming cheaper as the numbers continue to grow. One of the factors that is enabling the car to become cheaper is the dropping cost of lithium in the batteries that power them. They are getting smaller, lighter, and cheaper. So in the same space you can put more energy with less weight to drive cars further. Since 2008, the cost of these batteries per kilowatt hour has fallen fourfold. They will continuously grow. Having more of these cars on our roads and our highways as the costs keep falling, it is vital that we have an infrastructure in place to support them. We need to ensure that everyone is part of this clean and renewable energy resolution, including low-income and disadvantaged communities. We addressed that in the 100 by 50 legislation. To do this, we established grants to bring affordable clean energy and energy efficiency to individuals' homes and communities. We invest in zero emission public transportation that is affordable and accessible. We also want to ensure that no workers are left behind in this transformation, especially the workers in the fossil fuel industry. That is why we need to provide a just transition for those workers and job training programs. We need to have a strategy to ensure that there are opportunities to move from jobs in the fossil fuel world to positions in the clean and renewable energy industry. Those industries are, in fact, booming, with jobs in solar and wind growing 12 times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy. Already, the number of clean and renewable industry jobs has surpassed those in the fossil fuel industry by a margin of 5 to 1. We want to enable everyone to have the skills they need to succeed in these emerging industries, but to move to this future, we must come to a point at which we stop investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure. We cannot proceed to make this pivot quickly to a cleaner, brighter, renewable future if we continue to tie ourselves and our government to a fossil fuel-powered past. To achieve this clean break, the 100 by 50 Act ends future fossil fuel investments at the Federal level. That would affect projects similar to the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline, and we would end the tax subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. This burning of fossil fuels is destroying our planet. We must stop subsidizing the destruction of our planet. This burning of fossil fuels is destroying our forests, which our rural communities depend on. We must stop subsidizing the destruction of our forests. The burning of these fossil fuels is driving droughts, reducing irrigation water, and hurting our farmers. We must quit subsidizing the destruction of agriculture in America. The burning of fossil fuels is also impacting our fishing--from warmer, smaller trout streams to a fishing industry that depends on the critical ecosystem in the ocean. We must stop subsidizing the destruction of our fishing industry. It is also important to make sure that America remains a leader in the energy economy and leads in the effort to make sure that we do not have a disadvantage with regard to manufacturing in other countries. What that means is that, with regard to countries that are not pursuing this on the same aggressive level, we need to have an effort to drive this transaction. We need to make sure that if there are additional costs, those are offset with a border tax so that we do not encourage the movement of production out of our economy here at home. We have done so with trade policy--in a massively destructive way--to the middle class of America. If we do not make things in America, we will not have a middle class in America, and we need to make sure that we do not do that in the transition of our energy economy. To fund this plan, we propose a new source of revenue. When I say a ``new source of revenue,'' that is a little misleading because we are taking a cue from history, specifically World War II, and modeling bonds--climate bonds--on the war bonds that helped fund our fight against totalitarianism--to fund our fight against Germany and the Soviet Union. Auctioning off climate bonds is a way to raise the funds to drive the grants to power this transformation--to accelerate this transformation--and make sure that we do not leave out disadvantaged communities but, rather, bring them fully into this transition. The 100 by 50 Act is ambitious, but the circumstances require no less. Furthermore, we cannot, simply, propose a Federal Government strategy because we live in the United States of America, where important things are done at many different levels. Here in this Chamber--right now in the U.S. Senate--we do not have a committee chair who is going to say that we need to have committee hearings in order to take on this issue. We do not have a committee chair on the House side who is going to drive this conversation. We do not have a President who understands the damage that is being done to our forests and our fishing and our farming and to our planet and who is going to lead the battle. We have to turn to the wisdom of the American people. We have to turn to the wisdom of the States and the wisdom of the counties and the wisdom of the cities and the wisdom of individuals across America who are willing to go to the leadership of their mosques or the leadership of their temples or the leadership of their churches, who are willing to go to the leadership of nonprofits that they are a part of, who are willing to go to their city councils or their county commissions, who are willing to go to their State legislators. They are going to say that we need to have a 100 by 50 resolution for our nonprofits, for our religious organizations, for our cities, for our counties, for our States because we need to own this issue. We Americans at every level need to own this issue. This is an issue that depends upon citizens across the globe taking hold of this in a powerful way that cannot be blocked by the dark money of the fossil fuel industry. In so doing, by passing that 100 by 50 resolution for the city or the nonprofit or the church or the mosque or the synagogue or the temple, we will also adopt an action plan that involves the specific steps that local organizations are going to take over the next 2 to 3 years. This year, maybe they are going to convert their hot water heaters to electrons rather than burning natural gas. Maybe they are going to sign up for green electrons from their local utilities, which is an option that is offered in many places across America. The following year, maybe they are going to invest in energy-saving retrofits of their buildings. The year after that, maybe they are going to say that we have to revamp our fleet of vehicles and start using rechargeable vehicles, like the Volt or the Bolt or the LEAF or a whole set of cars that has been appearing in the economy over the last few years. One can charge them up and, thereby, run them off green electrons rather than off fossil fuels. These are things that can be owned and done. In fact, it is already happening. It is happening with local organizations across this country that are committing themselves to 100 percent clean and renewable energy. More than 25 cities across the country have already adopted this vision--from Madison, WI, to Abita Springs, LA; from San Diego, CA, to Salt Lake City, UT; from Georgetown, TX, to Greensburg, KS-- cities that are working toward a 100 percent clean and renewable future. There are 88 major businesses that are getting in on the action as well--Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Nike, Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Apple. These are only a few of the major companies that have committed to powering themselves with 100 percent clean and renewable energy. What is driving this move toward clean and renewable energy? It is that Americans everywhere are seeing the effects on the ground. They are calling for action, and community leaders and business leaders are responding. We need to respond here in the U.S. Senate. We should be holding hearings on how to put this plan into action. We should be taking the best ideas from the city actions and the business actions and the nonprofit actions from across the country and from the ideas generated on the right side of the aisle and the left side of the aisle because the destruction we face--the threat we face--is not a blue issue or a red issue; it is a human civilization issue. America has been a driver of the technology that can transform our economy and also the technology that we can sell to the world. In adopting this vision and in fighting for this vision, America can be a leader with other nations around the world. It has been beyond strange to have other countries lecture us over the last few months to maintain our commitment as a Federal Government to this vision. Other countries are saying: America, you have to be part of the solution. You have benefited enormously from the burning of fossil fuels, perhaps more than any other economy in the world. You have one of the highest per capita footprints for carbon. You must be part of this effort because every country in the world is affected. More than 40 countries have now adopted the vision of clean and renewable energy, so there is no time for America to step out and not be part of the solution, not be part of the leadership, not be part of the driving force, not benefit from being on the cutting edge of this transformation of the energy economy. Just as President Kennedy laid out the vision for going to the Moon, Americans from every walk are coming together to lay out the vision for a 100 percent clean and renewable energy economy. They are adopting a framework--a time, a goal--as to where we are going and when we are getting there; 100 by 50 sums it up. After President Kennedy laid out the vision, America went to work to make it happen, and we landed American citizens on the Moon. Now it is time for all of America to get to work and implement this vision and ensure that we succeed in transforming our energy economy within the next few decades by taking important steps every single year--driving ourselves forward, understanding the urgency, applying the technology, accelerating the implementation--to achieve 100 percent clean and renewable energy by 2050. If there were an asteroid coming toward the Earth, we would not be talking politics or political advantage. We would all be working together to take it on--destroy it before it destroyed us. We have the equivalent of an asteroid that is coming at the Earth in global warming. The time to play politics has passed. The time to play partisanship has passed. It is time for every citizen and every organization at every level--every chair representing every Senator from every State in the Union--to come together to take on this challenge together. I call upon my fellow Senators to be part of, perhaps, the most important effort we have to solve the biggest challenge to the health of America and the health of the planet--global warming. Step forward and be part of the effort. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

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