Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Absolutely. I appreciate the point the Senator is accentuating. When the Senator says this has not gotten enough attention, he is absolutely right. The House has refused to have a budget resolution pursued--a continuing resolution that does not have extraneous policy attached to it. They have absolutely said they will not take the Senate version, which did not put on the things the Senator and I might wish to attach, and did not put on the things my colleagues from across the aisle might wish to attach. It said: Let's keep the government open. Let's keep it operating, using, by the way, the budget number proposed by our colleagues in the House. So if our colleagues in the House say, wouldn't it be great if the Senate would compromise with us, well, we went farther than a compromise. We did not say: Let's split the difference between the Senate number and the House number. We will take their number. And let's get rid of these extraneous policy issues and then put it up for a vote. I think it is a simple request to make. Doesn't it make sense to give a bipartisan group the opportunity now, with just 14 minutes left, to actually end this process of driving our economy over a cliff?

Mr. MERKLEY. Yes, absolutely.

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to express my feelings this evening. Quite frankly, I was one of the optimists in this body. Many of my colleagues have been saying the determination to run our economy over a cliff is so powerful, we are going to end up with a government shutdown. I kept saying, I don't think so. I think in this Senate and across the Capitol in the House there are reasonable folks who know that this type of brinkmanship is doing intense damage to our Nation, and I don't believe we will end up there. So here is my faith in the common sense of a collection of 435 Members of the House and 100 Members of the Senate--my faith in their reasonableness. Apparently, that faith has been misplaced, because we are now just 27 minutes away from a government shutdown. And to what point? We have just heard from the House leadership they want to have a conference discussion over the budget. Well, certainly, so do we. Six months ago, we passed a budget. The Senate passed a budget. We sought to have a conference committee to resolve those two budgets as a common foundation for a set of spending bills--our appropriations bills--and our Republican colleagues blocked that budget conference committee. They have come to this floor 18 times and blocked the dialogue necessary to take the conversation forward over our budget and spending plan. That is what led us here tonight. The obstruction didn't start a week ago or 2 weeks ago; it started 6 months ago, in not allowing a common conversation. I am deeply disturbed about the profound dysfunction that now grips this body. I first came to the Senate when I was 19 years old as an intern for Senator Hatfield. When legislation was brought up, it would be debated, there would be a simple majority vote; sometimes we won, sometimes we lost. We then send a bill over to the House. Then we have a conference committee and we get on with things. We make decisions. We test ideas. Sometimes those ideas work well and we keep them and sometimes they don't work so well, and we either amend them or throw them out or the public says, the bums who brought us those ideas that didn't work, we will throw them out. We had a completion of the democratic circle. We don't have that completion now because we can't have a simple majority vote. Our colleagues have so abused the filibuster process; the courtesy of letting everyone have their say is to never let us get to a final up-or-down vote. So instead of 12 appropriations bills being passed year after year after year, we have zero this year. We only had one in 2011-2012, only one. Citizens across the country are seeing this and saying, what is wrong with the Senate and what is wrong with the House? The House has its own form of supermajority: the Hastert rule. They are saying, We are not going to put on the floor things we know will pass unless they belong to the ideology of the far right, because we know that right now, if the Speaker of the House wants to put on the floor of the House the bill passed by the Senate--a clean, simple extension of a continuing resolution--it would be adopted. The leadership does not believe in allowing a vote in that Chamber, just as a minority of colleagues here in this Chamber have blocked us from having a simple majority vote time and time and time again. We need to have a more substantial conversation about how to make both Chambers work better. But in the near term we have to find a path in which we stop careening from crisis to crisis. Let's say, in the final 23 minutes now before midnight, that we were able to find an answer to pass a continuing resolution. Let's say we were able to do that. Is there no harm done? Well, I wish that were the case, because there has been a lot of harm done; because what businesses know across America is that this process of brinkmanship, of hostage-taking, of threatening to throw the economy over the cliff is happening time and time and time again. Already, Members on the House side are saying, Well, let's not only make these arguments tonight, let's make them in a couple of weeks over the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling--the decision on whether to pay the bills we have already incurred; the decision on whether to honor the good faith and credit of the United States of America. President Reagan spoke on this multiple times, telling folks, We don't mess with the good faith and credit of the United States. His team undoubtedly recognized that when we do so, we raise the interest rates, we endanger the dollar as a reserve currency, we weaken our purchasing power around the world, and we do deep damage. But that reasonableness, that common sense that we don't take hostages and we don't threaten to destroy the economy that is going to hurt the middle class is gone. I live in a working class community. Folks don't have a lot of savings. They have been hit hard. They lost a lot of their savings in the 2008 meltdown, a meltdown that came from deregulatory actions, that allowed predatory mortgages and securities based on predatory mortgages. They know that governance matters. They know we could create a lot of jobs if we could pass those bills for low-interest loans, for energy saving renovations that would put a huge amount of the construction industry back to work. That bill passed here in the Senate, but the House hasn't taken it up. They haven't passed it. They know we would have a lot more jobs if we invested in infrastructure. China is spending 10 percent of their GDP on infrastructure. Europe is spending 5 percent of their GDP on infrastructure. And what are we spending here in America? We are spending 2 percent--not enough to repair the infrastructure that is wearing out across America, that needs replacing, let alone establishing infrastructure for the next generation. In a 10-year period, 2 trips to China, I saw Beijing go from bicycles to a bullet train. That is what happens when a society spends 10 percent of GDP on infrastructure. We build the economy of tomorrow for the generation of tomorrow that is going to thrive in that city. When we underinvest, we imperil the future. When we underinvest in education, we imperil the future of our kids, and we are certainly underinvesting in education. But for each of these policy issues we have to be taking on, we can't succeed if a small number in the Senate and in the House can paralyze this process, can go to extraordinary lengths to basically hold hostage and damage the United States of America. This process must end. The Senator from Vermont who spoke a few moments ago said, If we yield to this hostage-taking now, we will see it time and time and time again in the future. We will see the threat to end Social Security, et cetera. Well, we are not going to go in that direction. The House has said they want a conference. Great. Let's not do so at the same time we are taking down the economy. So put the Senate resolution on the floor of the House right now, with 20 minutes left, give it an up-or-down vote, pass that bill so that we have just these few short weeks, from now until November 15, to hold that conference and to work out a deal without taking the American economy down with ObamaCare. We wait for common sense and reasonableness to return to a dialogue so that we can have a legislative process the American people can believe in, because we are tackling the big problems facing America. But as of tonight, with now 18 minutes to go, we do not have that process, and that must change.

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, do I need to request a specific amount of time in which to speak? Are we under any rules?

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I want to make a few comments about the crisis that is unfolding before us. Right now some colleagues in the Senate and others over on the House side are holding the entire American economy hostage to make their favorite point on policy. I must say that this blackmail against ordinary working class Americans-- threatening to steal whatever momentum our economy has rather than build greater momentum and greater job growth--is deeply misguided. That is really as polite a way as I can possibly put it. Think about what working families have been through over the last few years. The deregulation of Wall Street leading to predatory mortgages that hurt millions of families, and then the securities that those were based on, proceeded to derail our entire economy, hurting millions more. Families lost their savings. They lost their jobs. They lost the equity in their house. All that working families are asking for is a little bit of common sense. Don't do further damage to the economy that is struggling to recover. Yet certain colleagues here in the Senate and over in the House seem to believe that the little people don't matter, the working people do not matter, the stability of the foundation for families and living-wage jobs doesn't matter because they can play whatever political games they want and the only people hurt are ones they do not see in their life. Maybe they live in a gated community. Maybe they live in a bubble. But I see those people. I see them every day. They are the salt of the Earth. They are the workshop that takes America forward. They are the small businesses across this Nation. All they are asking for is a little reasonableness and common sense. Some of my colleagues have said this crisis comes because the majority party in the Senate has refused to negotiate. Nothing could be further from the truth. Negotiation in the budget process starts with each side passing a budget resolution and holding a conference committee. But it is Members of the minority of this Chamber who have come to this floor at least 18 times to block the start of a conference committee in order to work out the budget. I cannot imagine in my wildest dreams why they are terrified of there being a conversation between leadership in the House and leadership in the Senate, meeting with the television cameras on to work out the details of a budget compromise. But they seem terrified, petrified, scared to death that there will be a conversation between the House and Senate that would lead to a compromise. So, indeed, there has been obstruction on compromise, and we know exactly where it is. They are the same individuals who are trying to drive the economy over the cliff right now. Moreover, members of this party said let's go further. The Senate has a number. The House has a number. But the budget conference committee is being blocked. Let's simply accept the House number, and not split it down the middle, not insist on our number, let's take the House number. That is going far beyond the middle path, if you will. That is a major compromise. If you are looking for compromise, it is happening with the leadership of the Senate putting forward a compromise that takes the House number for the budget. It appears that certain individuals in this body just do not want to take yes for an answer. I am going to conclude my remarks. I see my colleague, the esteemed Senator from Illinois has arrived. I want to close with this notion. This is not the first crisis that has been artificially manufactured that has damaged the American economy. Let us remember that similarly we faced this in April 2011 with the continuing resolution. We faced a manufactured crisis with the debt ceiling in July of 2011. We faced the December 2012 fiscal cliff that did substantial damage; in March of this year, the continuing resolution, which brings us up to right now. This is not all. The same individuals who are threatening at this moment to drive our economy over a cliff are saying we will do it again in a couple of weeks over another debt ceiling issue and when this continuing resolution expires a few weeks from now, if we get one done, we will do it again a few weeks from now--three crises in a period of just a few weeks. If you want to destroy the economy for working Americans, this is how it is done, and it is unacceptable. We need a bipartisan, commonsense caucus to come together and simply say no to those who are trying to create this terrible blackmail using American working families in the process.

Mr. MERKLEY

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes of proponent time to Senator Sanders.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes of proponent time to Senator Cornyn.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise today to address some of the challenges we face here on September 26. The significance of that date is it is only 4 days before September 30, the close of the financial year, and October 1, the following day, starts a new financial year. So it has been our responsibility as a Congress to prepare for October 1 by passing a budget, reconciling that budget with the House of Representatives, then using that budget to produce 12 appropriations bills, reconciling those 12 appropriations bills, and have a spending plan completely in place so that we smoothly begin the start of a new financial year. No crisis, just adults working out a spending plan for the next 12 months on time. I would like to say that is where we are today. But instead, as I stand here on the floor of the Senate, we are only 5 days away from a shutdown of the U.S. Government, a shutdown because that spending plan has not been put together. For the many Americans who have been following the challenges of the last couple of years, this will sound a little like deja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra, because we have been here before. We have been through this crisis before. Indeed, it was April 2011 when we had a near government shutdown, and that had a huge impact on job creation, and it had a big impact on the stock market. In other words, it wounded our economy at a time when Americans wanted us to build a strong foundation for a better economy, to create jobs for the middle class, to put people back to work, and to get momentum built up to put American families in a better place. Instead, we had this manufactured crisis in April 2011, courtesy of my colleagues, who felt more about exercising partisan warfare than caring about the success of our middle-class families. Quite simply, that is just wrong. Then it was just months later, in July of 2011, when we had a debt ceiling crisis. This is quite interesting, because the debt ceiling is simply a term for paying the bills we have already incurred. President Reagan had something to say about this. President Reagan said: Don't mess with the good faith and credit of the United States of America. We pay our bills on time. And we have always paid our bills on time. We didn't manufacture crises to do damage to the economy because of extremely poisoned partisanship gripping this Chamber and the Chamber on the other side of Capitol Hill. Not only did that combination of crises do significant damage, but in 2012 we faced the big fiscal cliff. This is where the tax structure developed under the Bush Presidency was set to expire, so a new set of policies had to be worked out. We were unable to have that adult, responsible conversation due to the extreme partisanship gripping this Chamber and gripping the other Chamber. So we had a crisis at the close of that year that, quite frankly, did damage as well. Suddenly businesses were seeing that not only did we have the great recession of 2008, as a result of out-of-control failures in regulation that allowed predatory mortgages and predatory securities--securities that melted down and took a large part of America's financial world with them--but we had this follow-on of not being able to have a reasonable, thoughtful, commonsense budget plan in place to take us forward. So 2012 led to March of 2013--3 months later--and now we had the delayed implementation of the sequester. The sequester comes from the Budget Control Act--an Act I voted against because Members on both sides of the aisle described it as ``dumb and dumber,'' so dumb we will not let it happen. I thought it was so dumb it should never be written into law, so I voted against it. But I was on the losing side of that battle. So this diabolical financial plan exploded onto the American scene in March 2013, creating a significant problem for the American economy and doing significant damage to the American economy. And here we are, 6 months later, unable to complete our budget and our appropriations bills for the coming financial year. This has become a pattern where we see ourselves lurching from crisis to crisis--manufactured crises--due to this poisoning partisanship, rather than working together to address the challenges of working families and the middle class. The American people are quite tired of it. That is why they rate the quality of work we are doing so low. That is why they rate Congress so low. There was a time not so long ago when it was a very different story. When I was growing up, the story about Congress was that we had had this Great Depression but we came together as a Nation and recognized many of the problems that contributed to that. Those problems included allowing banks to stop doing loans and start gambling on risky ventures, and we stopped that when we put in Glass-Steagall. It included having mortgages that were balloon mortgages, and those could be called in at any time, which meant an individual had to return to the mortgage market to get a replacement loan. That created a crisis for a family if the loan was called and they couldn't actually get another loan. So we fixed that by creating full amortizing long-term mortgages with no balloon payments, and we got rid of that callable feature. We also created the Securities and Exchange Commission to take on the predatory scams and practices of Wall Street so people would have faith in investing. Faith in investing meant you had the capital to fuel a strong comeback. We created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation so people could trust putting their money in banks, knowing the bank wouldn't collapse and take their money with them. We did all these things as a Congress, coming together to respond to great national problems. Sure, there was some partisanship, some disagreement between the parties, but there was a deeper understanding that we as Americans must work together as Americans, including on the floor of the House and the Senate, for the greater benefit of our American families. Unfortunately, that has apparently been lost. It has been lost not just in these last few days but in these last few years. When World War II was thrust upon us, in a short period of time, with congressional help, we transformed our economy into a war economy and played a big role in basically resolving a terrible worldwide crisis. After World War II we rebuilt, through our loan programs and our trade relationships, much of the world economy as well as our own economy, creating the largest middle class the world has ever known. All of this is what we did in this Chamber and in the Chamber on the other side of Capitol Hill--decisions that were made together to put America back on track. But today we don't have legislators thinking about the health of America. They are thinking about the next election. They are thinking only about their own election. They are thinking about how to undermine our President. Yet he is our President. He is America's President. He is not the Democrats' President or the Republicans' President. He is our President, and he only gets to sign or veto bills that we send to him. It is our responsibility in this Chamber to work together in a respectful, responsible fashion to do the basic work that is at the foundation of our ongoing expenditures--to get the budget in place and to get the spending bills in place. The story of this year is really one that belongs in a fiction novel, because here we go: The U.S. Senate passed a budget, the U.S. House passed a budget. Immediately, the next day, the conference committee should begin. But, no, it didn't happen because Senators in this Chamber decided to filibuster that conference committee and stop any conversation from occurring between the House and Senate about getting a common budget. This is really akin to burning down the house--blocking the House and the Senate. And by ``the house'' I mean a house that encompasses this whole legislative process. It is like lighting a bomb and letting it blow up. Don't let the budget process proceed; don't let there be a conference committee. ``Completely irresponsible'' should be the sign worn on every legislator who has blocked there being a conference committee on the budget. Without a budget we can't get common appropriations bills because they are based on different numbers. Let us look at this appropriations process. There are essentially twelve spending bills, called appropriations bills. If we look at the period from 1988 through 2001--that 13-year period--we passed the vast bulk of appropriations bills every year through this Chamber before the next fiscal year started--the vast bulk of them. Some years we got every one done and some years most of them done, but the process worked. Now let's come to the modern era: 2008, zero appropriations bills passed through here; 2009, we actually got half of them done, six; 2010, zero; 2011, one; 2012, zero; this year, 2013, zero. Any schoolchild in America grading the Senate on their success in getting the spending bills in place would give us an ``F'' for ``failure'' because we can't come together as responsible parties and have a debate on this floor, adopt amendments, and have an up-or-down vote. This does enormous damage in multiple ways. The first source of damage is that we end up with late-night emergency continuing resolutions. And when you have a continuing resolution, it means you keep doing what you did before whether they made sense or not. So for every person who believes we should spend a dollar wisely--and I certainly do--we should take advantage of a year's worth of conversations and testimony about what is not working and we should end those programs, not keep continuing them. And when those hearings show that more money is needed in certain areas to make America work better, then we need to spend more in those areas, not continue spending less. So this effort to blockade the budget process is a determination to continue government waste and inefficiency. I propose that Senators who are blocking the Budget Committee from even getting the numbers and blocking the spending bills should come to this floor and say: Yes, I am for government waste. Because that is what they are doing. They are wasting the taxpayers' dollars. They are investing in inefficiency. Meanwhile, businesses across America are looking at these sets of crises--April 2011, July 2011, December 2012, March 2013, September 2013--and saying: We are not reinvesting in America until this Chamber and the other Chamber on Capitol Hill get their act together--so that we are not legislating from crisis to crisis, doing great damage to the economy. They know they can't sell their wares unless there is a middle class ready to buy them, and there can't be a middle class unless there are jobs, and there can't be jobs lurching from crisis to crisis. The end is not in sight. We have colleagues in this Chamber right now planning to have another crisis over the next debt ceiling, the responsibility to pay the bills we have already incurred. We have Members who are not remembering that President Reagan said: Do not mess with the good faith and credit of the United States of America. They want to mess with the good faith and credit of the United States of America, which increases interest rates, which puts an essential tax on all Americans. So the fact that we don't have momentum of the amount we want in the economy is the result of this deliberative determination to force us to lurch from crisis to crisis. Our middle-class families are worried about a lot. They are deeply concerned about the cost of college. They are deeply concerned about living-wage jobs. They are deeply concerned about funding for K-12. They are concerned about things that affect the real quality of life and the success of our families in every way. And they wonder why it is that we are lurching from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis rather than getting a spending plan in place and doing more of the things that make sense.

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

Mr. MERKLEY. I will wrap up. Anywhere you look in America, you see problems for public safety, for public education, for college education, for living-wage jobs. These are the pillars of success of the middle class. Let's focus on those problems and do right by the American people and quit the irresponsibility and self-manufactured damage that is happening here on Capitol Hill. Mr. President, I look forward to the remarks of my colleague, Senator Baldwin.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for an additional minute.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I thank my senior colleague from Oregon. I appreciate very much his calling up this amendment and for his leadership on energy, and specifically energy efficiency. I would also like to compliment my colleagues from Ohio and New Hampshire, who have worked so hard on this very valuable piece of the energy puzzle: How do we more efficiently utilize energy that we generate? Specifically, this amendment is related to standby power, the power that is wasted keeping devices ready to use at a moment's notice. I prefer the term ``vampire'' power or ``vampire'' electronics. This is the power our electronics suck out of our power system when they are doing absolutely nothing. So this challenge of loss to vampire electronics is certainly something we ought to take on. Many electronic devices, from televisions to desktop computers, cell phone chargers, microwaves, use energy when they are turned off but are still plugged in. Often, you will see that little light that tells you it is still plugged in. This wasted energy accounts for roughly 5 percent of residential electricity use. So about 1 kilowatt in every 20 or $1 in every $20 is utilized to keep those little lights blinking. The United States has yet to establish standards for efficiency in products related to standby power. Some States have done so, and other industrialized nations have taken action. This amendment would simply tell the Department to look at the standards established elsewhere in the world, or in individual States, compare them and analyze them, so we can consider whether a lot more could be done in the United States to make us more efficient. That efficiency is like producing free, available power by ending the waste. In fact, the EPA estimates 100 billion kilowatt hours of electricity are wasted by vampire electronics each year. That adds up to $10 billion in extra energy costs. Depending on the age of components, running a cable box or large- screen TV, a DVD player, a gaming console, surround sound setup, could be like running a significant refrigerator, a significant power draw, and DOE believes it is feasible to reduce this waste from standby power by about 75 percent. The value of that 75-percent reduction would be equivalent to erecting 25,000 3-megawatt wind turbines for free. That is a lot of wind power being utilized. So let's do it. Under this amendment, the Department of Energy is instructed to conduct a study of standards of standby power appliances and electronic devices that have been implemented by other States or other industrialized nations, and to evaluate which of the standards studied would be feasible and appropriate in the United States. It is a simple idea and an important study that can contribute substantially to the use of power effectively here in our economy. I thank my colleagues for bringing this amendment forward.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my intern, Donnie Turner, have privileges of the floor for the balance of the day.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Allan Van Vliet be given floor privileges for the balance of the day. He is an intern in my office.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, on behalf of so many of my colleagues, I want to thank the security forces at the Capitol for the incredible job they do in protecting these rooms where debates and democracy take place. The debate that we are engaged in right now is about how to create a broad path to access education, as education is one of the key factors in developing and realizing the dream of middle-class jobs in America. I was starting to share that this is very personal to me because I come from a working-class family. My parents and my grandparents had not gone to college. I didn't know people on my street who had gone to college. I didn't have siblings who had gone to college. I didn't know anything about college. But it was a scholarship, a loan, and jobs that enabled me to attend a university and pursue an education that took me into this realm of public policy, the realm that we are still in right now. My first deep interest was Third World economic development, and I was blessed with a chance to work in Central America and India and to live as an exchange student in West Africa. Then that same education gave me a chance to go to graduate school, and there I was able to prepare for working here on strategic nuclear policy. Education took me into realms that matter to our Nation, to our world, and matter in terms of creating the foundation to be able to have a living wage. So this is critically important to our children. The proposal we have before us is that we are going to set up a loan program, and the loan program is going to take the cost of funds that are lent out and put on an additional 2.05-percent cap or add-on in interest for those who are getting undergraduate loans. For those who are getting graduate loans, it is going to add a 3.6-percent spread, as it is called. And for parents who are getting loans to help finance their kids' education, it is going to add on a 4.6-percent spread. This 2-percent spread on undergraduates, 3.6-percent spread on graduates, and 4.6-percent spread on parents produces a lot of profits. I had my team consult with CBO to make sure the net profits of this program over the next 10 years are going to be $185 billion, and make sure we understand that they are taking the profits that come from those spreads, the higher interest charged over the cost of money, and they are subtracting out the fact that some loans will be defaulted on. They are subtracting out the cost of administering the program, and they end up with a net profit. How much is that net profit? It is $185 billion. That means we are providing a service to our students, not at cost, but we are building in an equivalent of a massive $185 billion fee on the children of working families who are aspiring to get an education. That is not a great deal. In fact, it is a terrible framework. My colleagues who have worked to put this together point out that right now this may be the only option compared to locking in the 6.8 percent for the next 10 years. In the first few years it produces a lower interest for our undergraduates than they would otherwise get. That is an important point to observe, that for a couple of years the loans our students will be getting will be at a significantly lower rate under the deal that is being proposed today. But over the course of the 10 years, the best estimate from CBO of the profits generated is still $185 billion, in fact $1 billion more, rounding off, than it is under the existing program. To those who believe this is a great long-term solution, I disagree. Is it better in the next couple of years? Yes, it is. But I ask you, exactly why do we believe that adding on $185 billion in fees as a profit center for the U.S. Government is a great idea if our goal is to create an affordable pathway to higher education? I have yet to have anyone explain that. In fact, I often hear: Well, you know, built into the existing law, which doubles to 6.8 from the 3.4 percent right now-- that has profits built into that too. That is a fair point. But let's step back and ask ourselves, sustaining the situation when we are charging extravagant fees to generate extravagant profits and lock them in for 10 years, is that a good idea? There are a couple of proposals that would make this a much better program. One is to say, no, we are not going to have this big spread with a high cap of 8.25 percent on undergraduate loans and 9.5 percent on graduate loans and 10.5 on parent loans. But we are going to cap it at 6.8 percent. That makes a lot of sense. I applaud my colleague from Rhode Island who has come to the floor to speak for that proposal, and certainly I will be supporting that proposal. Senator Sanders has said: You know what. This is a pretty good solution for a 2-year period, so let's sunset this after 2 years so we can have this debate again. Because if we lock this in for 10 years and if we maintain the pay-for rules of the Senate in which if you eliminate the profit margin in one area you have to increase the profit margin in another, we might never be able to unlock this and we will continue treating college loans as a profit center for the U.S. Government, so let's terminate this after 2 years. Let's sunset this and rethink this. That is a pretty good idea too. I encourage my colleagues to consider doing that. I certainly will be supporting that. Nick writes to me from Oregon. He says: After receiving paperwork the other day from DoE servicer ``Direct Loans,'' I dove into my student loan [application] to see what I was filling out an application for. I took out $5,500 my Freshman year of college, $6,500 my second year, $7,500 in my third, and $7,500 to finish my senior year. So in total I borrowed $27,000. In January I deferred payment on my loan because I had not found full time employment. With a stroke of luck, in February I landed two part-time jobs making a whopping $12 per hour doing manual labor to supplement my $10 per hour part time gig in the health care field. Since March I've been full-time with the healthcare company, and earned a $1 raise. I've gained a lot of experience on the job, but from a monetary perspective, I wish I could be earning more so I could pay off my loans. My loans are currently at 6.8 percent with a total owed as of today: $32,266. That is up from the $27,000 he had owed before. He continues, saying: At 6.8 percent my loans are accruing over $1,800 in interest each year. That's about $150 per month. That is just the interest. Then when he is able to stop deferring and start making payments and include the capital being paid off it will be much more, and on a near minimum wage job that is extraordinarily difficult. Here is a letter from a mother in Oregon, Melissa. I graduated with a Master's degree in 1993. My loans have been paid off for over 10 years. My husband enrolled in college when he was 36, 3 year ago. He will graduate next year with over $60,000 in debt for a Bachelor's degree. At this rate of increase in what it costs to get a college degree, I don't see how it is possible for our son, who is now 2, to ever have a college experience. Please do the right thing and help make education accessible to everyone. That is the plea of Melissa, to do the right thing. The right thing would be to cap the interest in this program so it doesn't go over 6.8 percent. The right thing to do would be to sunset this program after 2 years. Both of those amendments will be available to all of us here on the floor. I encourage my colleagues to support those amendments. Our students already face $1 trillion in debt. It is weighing them down. It means they are postponing getting married, they are postponing having children, they are perhaps postponing moving out on their own because they cannot afford an apartment with this debt. It is hurting the economy and it is hurting our future because children are discouraged about the possibility of going to college. That is not the vision we want to have for America, where our children do not believe there is a path to the American dream for them. Today, if these amendments fail, it will be a very difficult choice, a very difficult choice between a couple of years of interest that is better than the status quo but a program that locks in a profit center for college loans, and we will have a very uncertain prospect about whether we can unlock that program a couple of years from now. I hope we pass those amendments. I am not sure, frankly, which side I will come out on if we fail in that effort. But I will tell you this. If this deal becomes law we must return to this floor time and time again because adding $185 billion in fees so we can have a profit off working-class students trying to find a pathway to the middle class is wrong and deeply damaging to the American dream. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, in approximately 8 minutes from now we are going to have a moment of silence for Officer Jacob Chestnut and Detective John Gibson in recognition of the sacrifice they made in defending the Capitol against an armed intruder. I want to say how much we appreciate the forces deployed to protect us in our ability to share our thoughts on a host of issues that we speak to on the floor. If somewhere across America someone violently disagrees with us, if they decide they want to not engage in democracy but engage in violence, they might come to the Capitol, and our wonderful force protects us and gives us the ability to speak our hearts and minds on this floor on behalf of our constituents every single day. So not only are we paying respect today to the officer and detective, but we are also paying respect to the entire delegation of security forces who work at the Capitol. I am going to be brief in order to pause appropriately for that moment of silence and tell you that the conversation we are having today is part of a broader conversation about how to build the middle class in America. There are some core pathways to the middle class, and one of those is fair mortgages. Indeed, when we were having a debate on Dodd-Frank in 2009 and 2010, we decided to put an end to payments in which mortgage originators were steering people from fair loans into predatory loans and getting big bonuses for doing so. Today, the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that they are bringing a case against a company that was doing exactly this, paying $6,000 to $8,000 per mortgage to an originator so they would betray their customer and not put them in the best mortgage they qualified for but into a much higher interest mortgage. I am delighted that in this Chamber we decided to end such practices. I am delighted we proceeded to confirm the first Senate-confirmed Director just last week so that this agency can do its job. Its announcement today shows it is hard at work in this critical area of fair home mortgages. Another key pathway to the middle class is living-wage jobs. We are going to have a lot of debate about what creates and destroys those jobs in America because there is no program that substitutes in terms of a foundation for a family more than a living-wage job. Another key pathway is education. Now, this is very personal to me. I grew up in a working-class community. My dad was a mechanic. I still live in that same community today, and I am surrounded by families that are struggling with near minimum wage jobs with often no benefits, hoping and praying that their children will be able to get the education necessary to have one of those remaining living-wage jobs. They are hoping we will do our job in Congress to help steer the economics of this Nation so there will be more of those living-wage jobs. But the viewpoint from the street is it doesn't look as though there are going to be a lot of jobs for those folks graduating from college. They are also concerned if they send their child to college and their son or daughter ends up with a school loan the size of a mortgage, that is going to hang like a millstone around their neck and haunt them the rest of their life. My colleague from California has just spoken eloquently to this issue. She has just been sharing stories of people on the ground and what they are facing in the context of how these big massive loans for school are weighting down the opportunities for our children. In addition, it is discouraging our children from believing that they can even get that education. If they don't believe that, then they don't put in the work in high school to prepare themselves to get that higher education to fulfill their potential. I grew up from a small child with President Kennedy speaking of a vision in which we could aspire to great things, of fulfilling the maximum opportunity for ourselves and for our families and for our Nation. But right now, on the ground there is an undercurrent of deep discouragement, almost desperation, not seeing a broad boulevard into the middle class but seeing a cooked, broken path complete with tricks and traps. That is what this conversation is about: How do we create that broad path into the middle class? I am going to stop here, and I will come back later and talk specifically about the loan program. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Moment of Silence

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, today I wish to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the city of Tualatin, OR. Since its founding, the city of Tualatin has exhibited continued growth and increasing prosperity. The city began as the small town of Galbreath in 1853, comprising just 23 families. With the construction of the first bridge across the Tualatin River in 1856 and the arrival of the Portland and Willamette Railway Company in 1866, which attracted business from Portland and throughout the Willamette Valley, the town's population and economic importance increased. Over the 100 years since its incorporation on August 18, 1913, the city of Tualatin grew from a rural suburb to a vibrant urban city that supports 27,000 residents and 20,000 jobs. Located only 12 miles south of Portland and bisected by two major railways, Tualatin hosts new high-tech industries and upscale shopping centers such as Bridgeport Village. The city's economic success is complemented by city officials' impressive leadership on environmentally aware urban development initiatives, enhancing residents' quality of life and providing an example to other Oregon cities of responsible urban planning. The Tualatin Commons, a public/private partnership featuring a three-acre manmade lake, a wide public promenade and plaza, and an interactive fountain provides recreational and entertainment opportunities. With over 200 acres of parks, trails, and natural areas, Tualatin also preserves green spaces for the public to enjoy. The citizens of Tualatin are engaged and motivated, fostering a close-knit and thriving community. Each year area organizations organize the Crawfish Festival, which attracts an estimated 12,000 people and features local food, crafts, and music. The locally developed Citizen Involvement Organization program encourages residents to further improve life within Tualatin by funding community projects. Throughout the last 100 years, the leaders and citizens of Tualatin have made invaluable contributions to the Portland metropolitan region and to the State of Oregon as a whole. I offer my sincerest congratulations during this celebration and look forward to many more years of prosperity for Tualatin.

Mr. MERKLEY

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

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I thought I would make a couple of comments regarding the activities of this Chamber a few minutes ago. We had 71 votes in favor of closing debate on the nomination of Richard Cordray to be Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB. The CFPB is vested with the responsibility of protecting consumers from predatory financial practices. We all discovered in the runup to the great recession just how important this protection is. We had many crazy predatory practices. On credit cards we had fees that came out of nowhere and shifting time periods from month to month in terms of when the payments were due, even shifting destinations of where the credit card payments got mailed to, and also fees that could be wracked up on unsuspecting consumers. We certainly found out on mortgages how important financial protection is because we had, starting from 2003 forward, a booming industry in predatory teaser rate mortgages, where the mortgages might be 4 percent for 2 years but then were changed after 2 years to 9 percent. One would think most would-be homeowners would look at that deal and say: That is not a good deal. But here is what happened. They went to a mortgage broker, and the mortgage broker said: I am your financial adviser. Mortgages have gotten very complex, they are very thick, and there is a lot of fine print, so you are paying me to sort through and find the best deal for you. So first-time home buyers trusted their mortgage brokers. Unbeknownst to the new homeowners, those brokers were being paid kickbacks called steering payments. They were being paid special bonuses outside the framework of the deal in order to steer the unsuspecting first-time home buyer--the customer--into a predatory loan when the first-time customer actually qualified for a prime fixed-rate mortgage. Well, those predatory mortgages proceeded to be put into securities, and those securities were bought up by financial institutions across America and beyond because the folks who were buying the securities understood that in a couple of years the interest rate would go way up and they would make a lot of money off those securities. So this was a system rigged against the first-time home buyer, against the home buyer who wanted to start their journey to owning their piece of the American dream. Those predatory practices should never have been allowed. Some here will remember the responsibility for consumer protection was vested in the Federal Reserve. But what happened in the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve carried on with its responsibility on monetary policy, but it put its responsibility for consumer protection down in the basement of its building. They locked the doors, they threw away the key, and they said let the market be the market. They abandoned our consumers across this country. That is why we need a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It doesn't have a conflict in its mission. It is not obsessed with a different mission such as monetary policy. We need a bureau that says: New predatory techniques will crop up and we will try to end them, try to end practices in predatory payday loans that can charge 350 to 550- percent interest on unsuspecting citizens. We need a bureau that will look out and say we need to stop the practice on which online payday lenders get your bank account number and, without your permission, do a remotely generated check and reach in and grab the funds out of your account. The list of predatory practices is endless because the human mind is endlessly inventive. So we have an important bureau--but an important bureau that cannot do its job unless there is a director to run it. Two years ago Richard Cordray was nominated to head the Bureau. He has been waiting to get cloture on his nomination and a subsequent vote for 2 years. He has been an interim appointee during that period of time and, by all accounts, from everything I have heard from folks in this Chamber, doing a very good job, working very hard with the great technical details of the financial world to find a fair and solid way forward. The fact is his nomination, so long delayed, is not a reflection on him personally. In fact, many Senators who have opposed allowing the vote to take place have come forward and said it is not about him personally; it is about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Forty-three Senators in this Chamber wrote a letter to say they would oppose any nominee for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It was a bold attempt to change back to a situation where there was no one to fight for consumer protection for our citizens in this Nation. Today we end that drama in favor of fairness for American citizens, in favor of taking strong action against predatory mortgages and the predatory practices of the future. In 8 hours we will be voting up or down on his nomination, as we should have long ago. But let me shift gears here and say the vote we took today is symbolic of much more than the important function of establishing an effective Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The vote we took a short while ago is central to ending the paralysis that has generally haunted this Chamber. That paralysis is something new. In the time from Eisenhower's Presidency through Ford's Presidency, there was not one filibuster of an executive nominee. In President Obama's 4\1/2\ years, there have been 16 such filibusters. So if we talk about the norm and tradition of the Senate, the norm and tradition of the Senate is a reasonable and timely up-or-down vote. That is the tradition, and it is a tradition that fits with the Constitution. The Constitution calls for a supermajority for treaties to be confirmed, but it only embeds a simple majority requirement for nominations. There is reasoning behind that: because our Founders envisioned three coequal branches of government. They could never have envisioned it would be OK for the minority of one branch to be able to deeply disable another branch, be it the executive branch or be it the judiciary. So the vote we took today is part of a larger conversation about ending the paralysis and focusing on the challenge of executive nominations getting timely up-or-down votes.

Mr. MERKLEY. Absolutely.

Mr. MERKLEY. I would say to my colleague from Illinois that, indeed, these are key milestones where the journey is to restore the functionality of this Senate so it can take on the significant issues Americans expect us to take on. The path forward is not yet one without obstruction. We have these two important milestones--one of going forward on immigration, a second of going forward in terms of putting a functioning Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fully together. We have had some other recent moments that fit this pattern, including passing the farm bill out of this Chamber for the second time, passing a Water Resources Development Act that would fund enormous amounts of infrastructure across this country to help provide both water supply infrastructure and wastewater treatment infrastructure. These are good moments. But we also are reminded that the path is not completely clear. For example, at this moment we should be in the middle of a conference committee on the budget. The Senate passed a budget and the House has passed a budget, but the conference committee is being filibustered by this Chamber. That is evidence of the model we are trying to break that is unexplainable to the American people. Folks back home want to know why we can't get a bill on the floor of the Senate to address the sequester. Because fewer kids are getting into Head Start, fewer kids are getting their inoculations, title I schools are not getting their funding. And, of course, there is a lot of concern within the military world about our national security where programs are being compromised. But we couldn't get the bill to the floor of the Senate because it was filibustered. So we have important milestones to grab hold of that are presenting a vision of the restoration of this Senate as a deliberative body, but we are going to have to work together in this bipartisan fashion we speak of to continue on this road.

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I appreciate my colleague from Illinois emphasizing the important role of bipartisanship in making this Chamber work. His question gave me an opportunity to talk about what has just transpired as an important victory--an important victory for this Chamber and its deliberation, an important victory for people across America, families working to have their financial foundation solid rather than torn asunder by predatory practices. In this journey, this effort to achieve a Senate that can again function as a deliberative body, I want to take this moment to thank my colleague Tom Udall. Tom Udall and I came into the Senate together. Tom Udall immediately recognized that the Senate needed to address its internal functioning because we were becoming more and more paralyzed. He proposed before this body that we have a conscious debate every 2 years about how to adjust the rules and to make this Senate Chamber work much better, because we are not only being paralyzed on executive nominations but we have this terrible paralysis on legislation, with a few important exceptions that my colleague from Illinois and I spoke about. I want to thank Tom for his work to help motivate this body to take on these issues and to restore the functionality. I have been pleased to be a partner with him on this journey. I know it is a journey that is not yet done, but I do thank my colleagues--across the aisle and on this side of the aisle--for the very frank discussions last night in which for 3 hours we bared our hearts, if you will, about what is working and not working in this Chamber. That too is an important moment in this journey to make the Senate work. So I applaud the spirit that came into the Chamber today that resolved the 2-year standoff in regard to having a functioning chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to set the tone, hopefully, for changing dramatically the partnership to restore the functioning of the Senate going forward. I yield the floor.