Bill Nelson

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, today, I wish to bring awareness to the growing problem of falls amongst our seniors, the fastest-growing population in the United States. Each year, one out of every three older Americans over age 65 falls, resulting in more than 2,400,000 older hospital emergency department visits and more than 22,900 deaths resulting from injuries sustained in unintentional falls. The costs associated with these falls are equally alarming: in 2010, the direct medical cost of fall-related injuries for older adults was $30,000,000,000. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that if the rate of falls does not decrease, the annual cost of injuries resulting from falls will reach an estimated $67,700,000,000 by 2020. These staggering numbers are alarming, and we must work to reduce the incidence of falls among older adults by utilizing cost-effective strategies to improve balance and strength through exercise programs, improve comprehensive clinical assessments, and reduce hazards in seniors' homes. That is why today I have put forth this Resolution to designate September 23, 2014, as National Falls Prevention Awareness Day. I thank my colleagues, Senator Collins, my partner on the Senate Special Committee on Aging, and Senators Mikulski and Sanders for joining with me in support of National Falls Prevention Awareness Day. National Falls Prevention Awareness Day seeks to raise awareness and encourage the prevention of falls among older adults. The 72 member organizations of the Falls Free Coalition and the falls prevention coalitions in 42 States and the District of Columbia have worked tirelessly to increase education and awareness about preventing falls among older Americans. We will continue to foster and encourage these coalitions and ensure the safety and independence of our older adults as they age in their homes.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, today I announce my support of the Social Security Garnishment Modernization Act. I once again want to thank and commend Senator Collins, my co-sponsor on this legislation and co- leader on the Senate Special Committee on Aging. This is the fifth bill I have cosponsored with Senator Collins as a direct result of a hearing we have held in the Aging Committee. Earlier this month, our Committee examined the growing problem of seniors facing student loan debt in retirement. A senior with student loan debt who reaches the age of 65 has a one in four chance of being in default on that loan. If a senior still has student loan debt by the time he reaches 75, there's a better chance than not that the senior is in default on those loans. The consequences for being in default on those loans in retirement can be devastating. The Department of Education can direct the Treasury Department to garnish a substantial portion of a senior's monthly Social Security payment. Seniors can be left with just $750 a month, well below the official monthly poverty threshold of $931. This figure has not been updated since the late 1990s. This bill would update the amount of money protected from garnishment and index it for inflation going forward so that a senior today would get to keep $1,072 a month even if he was in default on his student loans. This bill could help people like 72-year-old Janet Lee Dupree of Citra, FL, whose Social Security check was garnished for a $3,000 loan she took out in the early 1970s. With interest and fees, that loan ballooned to $15,000, which means that she will likely be in debt the rest of her life. If this bill passed, she would get to keep more of her hard-earned Social Security benefits that she needs to get by and pay for health care costs associated with two chronic and debilitating diseases. We need to fix this problem soon because the next wave of retirees is coming, and a substantial number of them are still carrying student loan debt. Nearly 18 million people ages 50 to 64 owe on their student loans, and one in five of those people are already in default, meaning they could face garnishment once they start taking Social Security benefits. We need to protect today's retirees and tomorrow's retirees so that they have enough money to live with dignity.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I don't think we should adjourn and go home with matters of war and peace in front of us. This Senator certainly intends to support the appropriations bill, the continuing resolution necessary to keep the government functioning. But one of the issues in this continuing resolution is the authorization in order to start training the Free Syrian Army in Saudi Arabia, and this Senator certainly supports that. But the issues beyond just that training are very much in front of us, which involves the United States protecting our national security by going after ISIS--or ISIL or whatever you want to call them. It is the group that has already declared war on us. Day by day we see their efforts, and then we hear their statements that they want to fly the black flag of ISIS over the White House. What more do we need to know about the national security being threatened? Today in a joint session we heard a very inspiring and emotional speech by the President of Ukraine. He so poignantly pointed out how Russia has invaded eastern Ukraine, and it is the Russian Army against the Ukrainian Army. We certainly should be helping them as well, as we are, but it needs to be more. So, too, the national security of the United States is definitely threatened by ISIS. As I have said over and over, I believe the President has the constitutional authority to strike ISIS in Syria, as he already has in northern Iraq, and that is under his constitutional duty as Commander in Chief. But this is not going to be a strike for a few days; this is going to be a long effort to degrade and defeat--to use the President's words--this threat to America. So here the Congress of the United States is going to adjourn in the middle of September; and, as I calculate, starting tomorrow it is 55 days until we would return. We need to be talking about war and peace. We need to be talking about the Congress exercising its constitutional authority to give the authority to the President for this long-term effort. The Senate has heard our colleague Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia speak very passionately about this. He believes it very firmly. I only disagree with Senator Kaine to the point that I believe the President has the authority to strike now to protect the interests of the United States--and I expect President Obama will do that. I am talking about in Syria. It is clear the President has already appropriately started the attacks, and has done it very well and successfully in the Kurdish region and other regions of northern Iraq, and that will continue as the President feels he has the authority, and I happen to agree. But when it comes to Syria--and that is where the head of the ISIS snake is; and if you are going to kill the snake, you have to go to where the head is and chop it off--I think it is a mistake for us to go home. I think it sends a very bad message not only to our countrymen, but it sends a very bad message to our allies and to our enemies. The opposite message would be sent if we would discuss these matters and come together with a resolution of an authorization for the use of military force and to have that clearly stating that the United States is unified to go after this insidious, evil, brutal, uncivil kind of force. It would send a message of unity not only to our allies, to this country of ours, but to our enemies. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, today I announce my support of the Social Security Garnishment Modernization Act. I once again want to thank and commend Senator Collins, my co-sponsor on this legislation and co- leader on the Senate Special Committee on Aging. This is the fifth bill I have cosponsored with Senator Collins as a direct result of a hearing we have held in the Aging Committee. Earlier this month, our Committee examined the growing problem of seniors facing student loan debt in retirement. A senior with student loan debt who reaches the age of 65 has a one in four chance of being in default on that loan. If a senior still has student loan debt by the time he reaches 75, there's a better chance than not that the senior is in default on those loans. The consequences for being in default on those loans in retirement can be devastating. The Department of Education can direct the Treasury Department to garnish a substantial portion of a senior's monthly Social Security payment. Seniors can be left with just $750 a month, well below the official monthly poverty threshold of $931. This figure has not been updated since the late 1990s. This bill would update the amount of money protected from garnishment and index it for inflation going forward so that a senior today would get to keep $1,072 a month even if he was in default on his student loans. This bill could help people like 72-year-old Janet Lee Dupree of Citra, FL, whose Social Security check was garnished for a $3,000 loan she took out in the early 1970s. With interest and fees, that loan ballooned to $15,000, which means that she will likely be in debt the rest of her life. If this bill passed, she would get to keep more of her hard-earned Social Security benefits that she needs to get by and pay for health care costs associated with two chronic and debilitating diseases. We need to fix this problem soon because the next wave of retirees is coming, and a substantial number of them are still carrying student loan debt. Nearly 18 million people ages 50 to 64 owe on their student loans, and one in five of those people are already in default, meaning they could face garnishment once they start taking Social Security benefits. We need to protect today's retirees and tomorrow's retirees so that they have enough money to live with dignity.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, first of all, I thank the Senate for confirming the nominee for Chief Financial Officer of NASA, David Radzanowski. Now the team is fairly complete over there, and we can move to the next phase. As we move to the next phase, as we are getting ready to test the capsule called Orion that will ultimately be part of the vehicle that will take us to Mars in the decade of the 2030s, the rocket itself is being readied and its final design will be tested on a test stand in Mississippi at the Stennis Center in the next couple of years. So we are well on the way for NASA being able to get out and explore the cosmos beyond low Earth orbit. As you know, we have an International Space Station that is 120 yards long. Think of a football field from one goalpost to the other, that is how big it is. There are six humans up there. We rotate the crews out with the Russians and with the Europeans and in some cases we have had Japanese astronauts, so it is an International Space Station with an international crew. I thank the Senate for the confirmation today.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I have introduced today a Senate joint resolution. This is a resolution that will express the authorization for the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. It is a resolution that has been necessitated by legal scholars. Since the President has used his existing authorization for the use of military force in Iraq, most recently against ISIS--ISIL/ISIS; it is the same thing. The Levant is that area broadly from about Baghdad all the way to the Mediterranean. That is ISIL. ISIS, I-S-I-S, is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Of course, we know that this organization that is calling itself an Islamic caliphate knows no jurisdictional boundaries. It has taken large swaths of territory in Syria as well as Iraq. When the President successfully employed the use of air power, both manned and unmanned, against ISIS targets as they were marching toward Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan, and then likewise as they were marching toward the Mosul dam, the President used his authority in Iraq and also his authority as Commander in Chief to protect Americans. There are Americans in Erbil. There are Americans in Baghdad. There are Americans in other places in Iraq. The protection of the dam in Mosul was to protect those Americans downriver, because if the dam were blown, that would have flooded all downriver and it would have flooded Baghdad. Legal scholars disagree with me that the President has the authority under the Constitution as Commander in Chief to go after ISIS in Syria. I describe ISIS as a snake. If the head of the snake is in Syria, which it is--a lot of their organization, a lot of their leadership is there--then we ought to go after the snake where the head is and decapitate the snake. In doing that, we are going to have to go into Syria. I believe the President has the authority to do this under the Constitution anyway, but there are some who disagree. So rather than quibble about legalities, I have introduced this legislation. There is no pride of authorship. The Senate is obviously going to debate this. I believe if you are seeing the polls from today, where 90 percent of the people of this country are concerned about ISIS, and some huge number want us to go on and attack ISIS in other places than where we are attacking now, then I think it is obvious the United States is going to have to continue this attack on ISIS. I want to compliment the President. Often, as I have talked about this issue, people have come--or members of the press--and said: Well, the President has dillydallied and so forth. I do not think he has at all. I think the President indeed has employed a very successful strategy of going after ISIS in Iraq--in fact, stopped their march on Erbil, in fact, stopped their march on the Mosul dam, and is going after them in other locations in coordination with the Peshmerga of the Kurds, as well as the Iraqi Army. Indeed, the President started on August 25 the surveillance flights over Syria so that we can collect the intelligence that is necessary to prepare to go after them in Syria. But the President has done something more. He has started to put together a coalition, realizing that the American people have no appetite for American boots on the ground in Syria--to put together a coalition so that maybe the Free Syrian Army, maybe other members of the Arab League, maybe some other members of NATO would participate. But the way we drew this resolution, it talks about there would not be a recurring military presence and the employing of an American army on the ground. It leaves the flexibility that clearly there will be American boots on the ground, just as there already have been when we sent our special operations forces in there to try to rescue the two American journalists who subsequently met such a brutal and uncivil end in their beheading. So American boots have been there. We might need special operations kinds of missions in the future. We might need forward air observers actually on the ground to direct air strikes. So there is flexibility in this resolution. I want to say if there is anybody with any doubt about the intent of ISIS, they have made it so clear, not only taking the lives of these journalists, the second one of which was from my State of Florida, but in their statements of what they intend to do, setting up an Islamic caliphate. The leader, al-Baghdadi, even calls himself the caliph or religious leader. But they have also said they will not stop until the black flag of ISIS is hanging and flying over the White House. Their intent is pretty clear. We are going to have to deal with them, not only in Iraq as we are now, but elsewhere. It is going to be sooner or later. It is not going to be a 1-day or 2-day operation. As the President has already indicated, this is going to be a long-term kind of operation. The fact is, the United States is the one that has to lead the coalition. To get this right out front and center of what we need to do, I have introduced, and it is printed as a part of the Record, this resolution to give the legal authorization from the Congress for the President to strike ISIS in Syria and to do as the President has said, to bring to a successful conclusion, to stop this horrendous uncivil, extraordinary kind of inhumane behavior that is being illustrated by these folks.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I have introduced today a Senate joint resolution. This is a resolution that will express the authorization for the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. It is a resolution that has been necessitated by legal scholars. Since the President has used his existing authorization for the use of military force in Iraq, most recently against ISIS--ISIL/ISIS; it is the same thing. The Levant is that area broadly from about Baghdad all the way to the Mediterranean. That is ISIL. ISIS, I-S-I-S, is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Of course, we know that this organization that is calling itself an Islamic caliphate knows no jurisdictional boundaries. It has taken large swaths of territory in Syria as well as Iraq. When the President successfully employed the use of air power, both manned and unmanned, against ISIS targets as they were marching toward Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan, and then likewise as they were marching toward the Mosul dam, the President used his authority in Iraq and also his authority as Commander in Chief to protect Americans. There are Americans in Erbil. There are Americans in Baghdad. There are Americans in other places in Iraq. The protection of the dam in Mosul was to protect those Americans downriver, because if the dam were blown, that would have flooded all downriver and it would have flooded Baghdad. Legal scholars disagree with me that the President has the authority under the Constitution as Commander in Chief to go after ISIS in Syria. I describe ISIS as a snake. If the head of the snake is in Syria, which it is--a lot of their organization, a lot of their leadership is there--then we ought to go after the snake where the head is and decapitate the snake. In doing that, we are going to have to go into Syria. I believe the President has the authority to do this under the Constitution anyway, but there are some who disagree. So rather than quibble about legalities, I have introduced this legislation. There is no pride of authorship. The Senate is obviously going to debate this. I believe if you are seeing the polls from today, where 90 percent of the people of this country are concerned about ISIS, and some huge number want us to go on and attack ISIS in other places than where we are attacking now, then I think it is obvious the United States is going to have to continue this attack on ISIS. I want to compliment the President. Often, as I have talked about this issue, people have come--or members of the press--and said: Well, the President has dillydallied and so forth. I do not think he has at all. I think the President indeed has employed a very successful strategy of going after ISIS in Iraq--in fact, stopped their march on Erbil, in fact, stopped their march on the Mosul dam, and is going after them in other locations in coordination with the Peshmerga of the Kurds, as well as the Iraqi Army. Indeed, the President started on August 25 the surveillance flights over Syria so that we can collect the intelligence that is necessary to prepare to go after them in Syria. But the President has done something more. He has started to put together a coalition, realizing that the American people have no appetite for American boots on the ground in Syria--to put together a coalition so that maybe the Free Syrian Army, maybe other members of the Arab League, maybe some other members of NATO would participate. But the way we drew this resolution, it talks about there would not be a recurring military presence and the employing of an American army on the ground. It leaves the flexibility that clearly there will be American boots on the ground, just as there already have been when we sent our special operations forces in there to try to rescue the two American journalists who subsequently met such a brutal and uncivil end in their beheading. So American boots have been there. We might need special operations kinds of missions in the future. We might need forward air observers actually on the ground to direct air strikes. So there is flexibility in this resolution. I want to say if there is anybody with any doubt about the intent of ISIS, they have made it so clear, not only taking the lives of these journalists, the second one of which was from my State of Florida, but in their statements of what they intend to do, setting up an Islamic caliphate. The leader, al-Baghdadi, even calls himself the caliph or religious leader. But they have also said they will not stop until the black flag of ISIS is hanging and flying over the White House. Their intent is pretty clear. We are going to have to deal with them, not only in Iraq as we are now, but elsewhere. It is going to be sooner or later. It is not going to be a 1-day or 2-day operation. As the President has already indicated, this is going to be a long-term kind of operation. The fact is, the United States is the one that has to lead the coalition. To get this right out front and center of what we need to do, I have introduced, and it is printed as a part of the Record, this resolution to give the legal authorization from the Congress for the President to strike ISIS in Syria and to do as the President has said, to bring to a successful conclusion, to stop this horrendous uncivil, extraordinary kind of inhumane behavior that is being illustrated by these folks.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Amanda Figueroa, a Defense fellow serving on our office staff, and Bale Dalton, also a Defense assistant, be granted privileges of the floor for the remainder of the 113th Congress.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I wish to speak about health insurance. We notice that nationally and back in our States, the angst over the Affordable Care Act--often derisively referred to as ObamaCare--has subsided. In part, that has occurred because more people are being covered. As a matter of fact, in the first tranche of signups of people who did not have insurance, over 8 million people--which exceeded the goal of 7 million--by the time the cutoff came for signing earlier this year, over 8 million people had signed up. And that was just a narrow population of those who wanted insurance but could not afford it. Then they had it available through the State exchanges or the Federal exchange in the States. Another part of the population that did not have health care was people who were actually in a low-income situation; therefore, there was no chance they could afford it. That is why we expanded Medicaid in the Affordable Care Act to up to 138 percent of poverty, which is a very low level of income. I believe, if I remember correctly, for a family of four, it is somewhere around $32,499 of annual income. Well, we can imagine that with a family of four, people can't even think about having the money to provide health insurance with that kind of limited income, and that brings them up to 138 percent of poverty. The only part of the Affordable Care Act, since it was declared by the Supreme Court as constitutional--the only part that was struck down as unconstitutional was the part of the law that was mandating upon the States to expand Medicaid, which is funded by a State and Federal joint program, up to 138 percent. So it made it voluntary. Well, half of the States have expanded it and about half of the States have refused, such as my State of Florida. The Republican Governor and the Republican legislature, not wanting to have anything to do with what they were condemning as ObamaCare, refused to expand Medicaid in Florida and thereby refused to give health care to a population, if my colleagues can believe this, of 1.2 million people in Florida--people who would have had health care but do not get it because the State legislature and the Governor refused to raise the level. By the way, that was taking Floridians' Federal taxpayer dollars of 51 billion over the next several years that were allocated for that purpose and refusing to accept them for the health care of poor Floridians, over 1 million people. That seems unconscionable. This stuff is so complicated. People don't realize that in large part that is, in fact, what happened over the course of the last two legislative sessions--that they could have expanded health care in Florida, and it is Floridians' tax dollars they are giving away instead of letting that apply to health care for Floridians. Nationwide, if I recall correctly, it was somewhere around another 6.7 million people were brought on with the expansion of Medicaid even though States such as Florida were refusing to expand it, and that is in addition to getting health care to those who could afford it with subsidies or because of better rates could afford it in the first place. That was a group of another 8 million. We can see we are starting to chip away at that group of people in the country who had no health care because they had no health insurance. Yet, when they got sick, where did they end up? They ended up in the emergency room. They couldn't pay. Of course, now it was an emergency because they had no preventive health care. And since they couldn't pay, who do my colleagues think pays? All the rest of us pay in our insurance premiums. It is estimated that in a State such as Florida, for the average family health insurance policy, people are paying upwards of $800 to $1,000 of their premiums per year just to take care of the group who ended up in the emergency room because they didn't have any health care. That is part of what the Affordable Care Act was intended to do. Another part of the Affordable Care Act was to save Medicare from going into bankruptcy. Back in the early part of the last decade, we passed a nice-sounding law called the prescription drug bill. As its name suggests, it was to provide prescription drugs for senior citizens. Omitted in the explanation of it was that not only were people paying premium prices that the government had always gotten as a discount, but now the government was paying a premium price with no discount for all the drugs under Medicare. But a part of that was setting up Medicare being delivered by an insurance company with a fancy name called Medicare Advantage. Always before, if we were going to deliver Medicare through a health maintenance organization--an HMO, which is an insurance company--one would expect it would bring the costs down per person. That is how it started out--about 95 percent of the per-person cost in Medicare, regular Medicare fee-for-service. But, no, in the prescription drug bill, this was turned upside down. Now they were going to offer Medicare through an HMO, but the reimbursement from Medicare was going to be 14 percent above Medicare fee-for-service per person, reimbursed to the insurance company at 114 percent of Medicare fee-for-service. As a result of that, Medicare was going broke. That was another reason for the ACA--to stop Medicare from going broke by winnowing down that 14 percent and giving incentives to the insurance companies to do what ought to be the goal, which was quality of care instead of just paying a dollar percentage value per patient. Thus, we have the re-created Medicare Advantage, and it is being rated on its quality so that seniors can vote with their feet by going to the better rated insurance plans in Medicare Advantage. Why am I retracing all of this? To get to this point: For this next round of Medicare Advantage, we are just getting to the point of having the insurance companies announce their rates. Some of them are going to go up. Some of them are going to go down. But I want the people of Florida to know that 2 years ago in their State legislature they took away the legal power of the insurance commissioner of Florida to approve the rate hikes. They took that away. I happen to understand something about this. Before I came to the Senate, I was the elected insurance commissioner of Florida, and I jealously guarded the ability to approve rate increases and decreases in order to protect the insurance consumer. The Florida Legislature stripped that ability of the insurance commissioner--now appointed, not elected--in Florida. Therefore, if they see rate hikes for Medicare Advantage in this next round just about to be announced--they took the ability of the State regulator to limit the rate hikes. That sounds unconscionable. It certainly does. Every year insurance companies are going to try to raise their rates. It is the job of a State regulator to regulate what happens to those rates. So the Florida Legislature last year passed senate bill 1842, and one of the things it did is it stripped the Office of Insurance Regulation of one of its chief responsibilities--regulating health insurance rates. That is after Florida had had some of the strongest laws governing insurance, and that was the case when I was insurance commissioner 15 years ago, where I could not only approve rates but I could reject rate increases. Well, we saw this at the time a year ago. I contacted the Governor and urged him to veto the bill, but, sadly, it is the law of Florida. Therefore, that is why I come to the floor today, because I am disappointed in the news reports that are starting to say that these rate increases in Florida are being blamed on the Affordable Care Act. They are being blamed on ObamaCare. Well, the insurance commissioner used to have an opportunity to look at those rates and say they were not right and to stop those rate increases or to give a rate increase that was actuarially sound. Not any more. There were a lot of other things that had been done in our State of Florida to stop the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. First of all, our State refused to accept a planning grant in order to get ready for the Affordable Care Act before it was ever starting to be implemented. I have already told you about refusing to expand Medicaid to cover more than an additional million people in Florida who otherwise would not get health care. What was the purpose of the ACA other than trying to save Medicare-- which it has done--financially from disaster? It was to help make insurance coverage available and affordable. There were provisions in there, technical terms like ``medical loss ratio,'' that said that an insurance company had to give 80 percent of the premium dollar back in health care instead of giving it off to CEOs' salaries and executive perks; and if they did not, what the insurance company had to do--if they did not get 80 percent of the premium dollar back in health care to the patient--they had to return that part in refunds. I can tell you that, happily, that law is working. One million Floridians last year received over $41 million in refunds. It was an average of $65 per family. Why? Because some insurance companies did not spend enough on medical care for their policyholders. Another part that we had talked about was making private insurance-- remember how they said this was going to be government health care-- private insurance companies selling insurance. People could afford it because there were subsidies for families with income up to the level of 400 percent of poverty. Well, of the 1 million Floridians who enrolled--and remember, I gave you the figure that 8 million nationally enrolled. Of that 8 million, 1 million people needed and wanted insurance so much in our State alone that they enrolled, and 91 percent of them were able to receive a subsidy under the graduated subsidy level in order that they could purchase that private insurance. The folks who bought a plan using subsidies reduced their premiums through the subsidies by an average of 80 percent. So what we had in health insurance before the Affordable Care Act was not--it was like the Wild West. Plans could deny you coverage. An insurance plan, if you had coverage and you were suddenly getting treatment, could cancel your coverage. They could also deny you coverage by saying you had a previous existing condition, and it could have been something as simple as a rash. You could not get health insurance. Now all of those things they cannot use as an excuse. So what I see is the last throes of this resistance to the Affordable Care Act, and you are going to hear it again as insurance plans come out on Medicare Advantage and show that they are hiking their rates. Yet I want the people of Florida to know it was the State legislature that took away the ability of the Insurance Commissioner of Florida to regulate those rates. Madam President, I would like to clarify my previous remarks. I was referring to the removal of the authority to regulate private insurance rates by the state insurance commissioner in SB 1842, not Medicare Advantage. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, this week Medicare is turning 49 years old. Since July 1965, Medicare has provided critical access to health care benefits for older Americans and people with disabilities. Florida alone is home to over 3.5 million Medicare beneficiaries. Medicare has become a landmark program based on its popularity among beneficiaries and the comprehensive benefits offered. In 1959, almost 4 out of 10 Americans over age 65 were living below the poverty line, as compared with about 1 in 10 seniors living in poverty in 2000. Prior to Medicare, seniors paid almost half of the cost of their health; in 1997, seniors paid only 18 percent of their health care costs. Medicare pulled millions of Americans out of poverty by not only providing them with important health benefits, but also by enabling seniors to use their hard-earned retirement savings for needs other than their health care. As chairman of the Senate Aging Committee, I understand that Medicare is essential to the Nation, particularly as the baby boom generation enters retirement. Those served by Medicare often have modest incomes and complex health conditions that depend on these lifesaving benefits. As a committee, we have looked at Medicare's prescription drug benefit, researched ways to eradicate fraud and waste in the program, and ensured that seniors have access to quality, affordable care. In fact, just yesterday, the committee convened a hearing about how to improve Medicare beneficiaries' access to skilled nursing care. The Affordable Care Act has helped to reduce costs, increase benefits, and improve health care delivery for Medicare beneficiaries. Earlier this year, Derrick in Tampa wrote to me about how much the ACA has meant to his family in providing care for his mother. His mother was the victim of gun violence and will need extensive medical care for the rest of her life. So Derrick wrote that when Congress passed the ACA, ``I was excited for my mother and the many others'' who will benefit from the improvements in providing health care to America's seniors. For example, thanks to a provision I fought for in the ACA, Floridians have saved more than $756 million on their prescription drugs. While we can still make improvements, the Medicare trustees report, released earlier this week, reported that the Medicare hospital insurance trust fund solvency has been extended by 4 additional years from last year's estimate and 13 years longer than it was prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Today, Medicare is more solvent than it was in 1965. It is our job, in Congress, to ensure that Medicare is available for all Americans when they need it and, as was the case for Derrick's mother, when they are impacted by ``circumstances not of their own doing.'' Though the new projections are encouraging, we must continue to work to preserve Medicare for generations to come.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. If the Senator will yield, to underscore his point, we can look at the extraordinary success of Plan Colombia. Outside of Central America--if you go a little further south, you are on the continent of South America. And lo and behold, 15, 20 years ago, a large part of Colombia was controlled by elements that were controlled by the drug lords. With the assistance of the United States and extraordinary heroism on the part of the Government of Colombia, we have seen the Government of Colombia take back control of most of its country. Even though cocaine is still grown there and the FARC is still operating, their criminal element is a diminished insurrection of what it used to be. If you visited a place like Bogota, the capital city, it was not safe to go out alone and walk on the streets. Now you can easily walk on the streets. The situation there has changed. We are seeing the same replicated now in Central America where the drug lords have basically taken over by buying off people with considerable money, and therefore it makes it very difficult to have the rule of law in those struggling governments, as it is for the President of Honduras, who is trying so hard to bring back his country.

Mr. NELSON. The Senator is correct. Whereas General Kelly--and I am just using him as the symbol since he is a four-star general. It is the Joint Interagency Task Force in Key West that is actually headed by a Coast Guard admiral. They can interdict, and do interdict, about 25 percent of those big shipments coming from South America. They go through the Caribbean on the east and also through the Pacific on the west. And because they have been effective at 25 percent of the shipments, what we are seeing is a shifting of those shipments. They are now actually sending more of them to the east--not only to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, but now to Puerto Rico, which is a U.S. territory. When they get those drugs into Puerto Rico--and that is American territory--they can ship them by mail from there to the rest of the United States and avoid detection.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, the Senator from New Mexico has put his finger on exactly the root cause of the problem. It is the substantial loads of cocaine that are coming into these three Central American countries; that because of the violence, because of the killing, the parents have three choices when their child gets on up toward their teenage years. Their first choice is to let their kid join the gang. These gangs are criminal gangs, and they are tied in with the drug lords. The drug lords have taken over the country because of all the money that is being made from these big shipments that come in. The parents have three choices: No. 1, let their kid join the gang; No. 2, go to their child's funeral; or No. 3, they become subject to the subtle and direct plea by the coyotes: Oh, for $1,500, $5,000, we can get your kid to the border and your child will be safe in America. Why those three countries? Why are the children who have been showing up in the last several months at the border not coming from Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama? They are coming from three countries--El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras--because that is where the big shipments of drugs are coming from--from South America into those areas in a boat with 1 to 3 tons of cocaine. Once they get on land, they break them down into small packages, and they go through a very efficient distribution system that is drugs and criminal elements--they can distribute just about anything they want, including trafficking in humans. And they are going north. So if Honduras is the murder capital of the world and if El Salvador and Guatemala are not far behind, how do you get at that immediately to stop the flow of children going north? You more effectively interdict the drug shipments. That is why the United States has been so successful. General Kelly, the commanding general of Southern Command, tells us that sadly he has to sit there with his Joint Interagency Task Force-- all the agencies of the U.S. Government arrayed together and headquartered in Key West--and they have to watch 74 percent of primarily these boats--not so much the flights; primarily boats because they can carry big loads of cocaine--get through. If it gets to the point of voting for the supplemental, I would certainly vote for it, but it doesn't get to the root cause of the problem. What we have done--and I have shared this with as many people as I can, consulting with General Kelly. They boiled this down to $122 million out of the President's request of $3.7 billion, and the Senate Appropriations Committee has pared that down to $2.7 billion. This Senator is asking for $122 million, and it will cover such things as $31 million for U.S. Government interagency task force maritime patrol craft; $40 million for maritime patrol requirements to deploy U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement detachments; $15 million for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance by putting up contractor- owned Predators 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. That contract is being drawn up. If we did this, General Kelly could execute that contract immediately, and then you would start to see some results.

Mr. NELSON. That is correct.

Mr. NELSON. The Senator is correct. As a matter of fact, the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee, with whom I have consulted, is very familiar with the great operation of the Joint Interagency Task Force to go after these drugs. As the Senator from New Mexico said, you can imagine their frustration when they know about the boat shipment, and sometimes they can watch it from their overhead assets, and they can't do anything about it. As a result, look at what has happened over the last several months. We are trying to solve the problem on the border. We have all of these children showing up at the border. We ought to solve that problem. We need to go back to the very beginning and stop what is causing this problem.

Mr. NELSON. The Senator is correct on how all of these things are interlocked. You can imagine how a sufficient quantity of drugs, which is worth so much, is a corrupting influence on any kind of law and order. As a result, the systems of governments--and Senator Kaine and I both met with the President of Honduras. He is trying as hard as he can. He has a bounty on his head by these drug lords because he is opposing them. The judicial system is corrupted. The local police are corrupted. When that happens, then you can imagine when other criminal activities occur, in addition to other drug activities, such as human trafficking, and terrorists potentially being utilized in these efficient delivery networks, then it is all the more a threat to the national security interests of the United States. I think the U.S. Congress and the U.S. administration better wake up to the fact of what is happening right under our nose and get at this, in addition to solving the problems that we see that are a symptom, ultimately, of the root cause--the creation of a whole criminal network that is, in large part, fueled by the drug trade.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for his leadership, and I wish to ask my colleague if he is aware of the testimony the commanding general of U.S. Southern Command, General Kelly--a marine four-star general--gave to the Armed Services Committee and to the Foreign Relations Committee recently, in the last couple of weeks?

Mr. NELSON. What this Senator knows is that before the sequester started hitting the defense budget--even though we were conducting a war in two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq--with all of the multiplicity of threats that are around in the region, including what we see now with ISIS between Syria and northern and western Iraq, the Department of Defense had to make some hard choices. They had to cut back because of this mindless budgetary meat ax called the sequester, and as a result they had to set their priorities. When they came down to it, they had to support the troops out in the field and had to cut back on other commands. The U.S. Southern Command is one of those commands that was cut back. But now we are seeing the lack of wisdom to these budgetary policies--sequester--and the scarcity when you cannot allocate the defense resources to other agencies. Remember, this is a Joint Interagency Task Force. We are now seeing the effects of that in what has been on the front pages of the newspapers which is reporting all of the children coming to the border. By the way, the children are just a diminutive percentage of the total people still coming to the border. I can't remember if it is 20 percent or 40 percent, but it is something well less than half of all of the people who are still coming to the border. But, of course, the children, because of the humanitarian crisis for them, are the ones who have received the attention. If we know there is a problem, how do we fix the problem? Well, we need to go back to the root cause, and that is the case I have been making on that side of the aisle and on this side of the aisle. Yet we are at this point of impasse, and needless to say, it is very frustrating to this Senator.

Mr. NELSON

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

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, a part of the appropriations supplemental bill we will consider tomorrow is approximately $245 million--I think I have that figure right--for the additional assistance to the Israeli Government for the Iron Dome system. The United States has been assisting Israel in order to be able to buy this system. To the credit of the scientists and the military planners in Israel, they developed this system, and it is a very sophisticated system. As a matter of fact, when you watch the rockets go off, you will see an incoming round coming, in this case from Gaza, often without any precision guidance. That is an interesting thing, that they are shooting at urbanized areas where the general civilian population is, and they have incoming rounds that no one knows where they are going; thus, the need for a sophisticated radar that can track it and distinguish first if it is going to fall in an area where there is nobody, where there is nothing in the way of equipment that would be harmed and, therefore, save the ordnance that otherwise would be shot. But the radar is so sophisticated that within seconds and fractions of seconds it can determine that, and then shoot off the round that will intercept the incoming round. It is a sight to behold to see this Iron Dome rocket go upward and then change its trajectory, almost at a 90-degree angle, to home in on the incoming warhead, and they have a 90-percent success rate. When this system was first produced, it was so successful that the Israeli people, who had been bombed from outside their territory and had been accustomed to running to bunkers, to shelters, to places where they could be safe, with the institution of Iron Dome, often would come outside and see this aerial fireworks display because it had such a tremendous success rate. Now things have changed because in the latest conflict with Hamas-- and this is just in the course of the last 3 or so weeks--over 2,300 rockets have been fired into Israel. Hamas continues to fire more rockets. Each night, if you turn on your television news shows, you see another display of all of this going on over on that side of the planet. Thus the need to supply more of the Iron Dome system and the ordnance that goes with it. And thus there will be this item that will be part of the supplemental appropriations request. I commend it to our colleagues to vote for it. It is a system that consistently the U.S. has helped to fund. It has saved a lot of lives. Remember, the ordnance that is being shot into Israel is usually not a guided system. That is part of the terror that is being aimed at Israel, because it is to inflict casualties upon a civilian population. Yet, with this sophisticated system, 90-percent effective, it is saving a lot of lives. That is what I wanted to share with the Senate. I yield the floor, and I ask unanimous consent that the time during quorum calls be charged against both sides.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I am here to talk about some complex litigation on Chinese drywall. But before I do, this week seems to be the week if we are going to get anything done to assist the administration with regard to all of these children showing up at the border. It has diminished over the last few weeks. Nevertheless, there has still been an influx that we have all read about. Senator Mikulski, the chairman of Appropriations, has roughly a $2.7 million supplemental appropriations bill. It would be this Senator's intention--and I think I can speak for several other Senators who feel very strongly--that we have not addressed the very root cause of the problem, which is that the drugs in huge shipments on boats coming from South America into those three Central American countries with boatloads of cocaine, carrying 1 to 3 tons of cocaine apiece, have not been interdicted. It was riveting testimony that our four-star Marine commander General Kelly of the U.S. Southern Command pointed out that he, his staff, and the Joint Interagency Task Force that is headquartered in Key West have to watch 75 percent of those boats coming in from the Caribbean in the east into Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador and the Pacific on the west--they have to watch 75 percent of them get through. They cannot do anything about it because they don't have the Navy ships or the Coast Guard cutters with the helicopters that can interdict them. If we did that we would diminish a lot of the flow of those drugs. And you wonder why are all the children showing up. A number of us have made several speeches about this and I will not go back into all of that. Suffice it to say that the drug lords basically control the countries because they are in cahoots with the criminal networks that have taken over and violence has erupted. Remember, Honduras is the No. 1 murder capital of the world. What is a parent going to do? Their child has to join the drug gang or they are going to go to their child's funeral because they will kill him if he doesn't. No. 3, they are seduced by these coyotes who have this network to get immigrants to the north into Texas, and they are telling them they can get in--just send your child. You pay me $1,500, $5,000 a child; we will get them in. Now that is going back to the root cause of the problem. If we stop all the drugs going in, maybe governments such as that of President Hernandez of Honduras will have a chance of stopping some of the corruption that is so rife in that government and the local governments and the local police forces. We have gone over and over this before, and I just want to say that this Senator and others--particularly Senator Kaine who knows this issue well. He was a missionary when he was in law school. He took a year off from law school. Senator Kaine of Virginia lived in Honduras. He speaks fluent Spanish. He knows this problem as well. If we could have a greater percentage of those drugs interdicted, then we would seriously start to diminish all of this migration to the north through the rest of Central America and through Mexico to the Texas border. In closing, why are the children not coming from the other three countries right there--Belize, Nicaragua, Panama; Costa Rica, a fourth country--in Central America? The children are not coming from those areas. They are coming from the three where all the drugs are and where the drug lords have taken over. I hope the Senate will react with some rationality, and as difficult as it is going to be to pass a supplemental appropriations bill down at the other end of this hall in the House of Representatives, putting money in there to activate Coast Guard cutters--there are a number of them out in San Diego that are inactive--activate them and give the U.S. Navy the ability to reposition ships--it might actually help us pass this supplemental appropriations bill down there at the other end of the hallway in the House of Representatives. We have just a few days to pass this. I am hoping we are going to be able to do so. Chinese Drywall I came to the floor to tell you about Chinese drywall. You cannot see it. This is a normal piece of drywall. It is cut off here. It is very faint on this picture I have in the chamber where you can see the marking that this is from China. This photograph doesn't tell us much, but let me tell you what Chinese drywall has done to the people of this country, making them unable to live in their houses because there is some kind of sulfuric content in this Chinese drywall that emits a gas and the occupants of a house such as this get sick. I can tell you what it smells like. It smells like rotten eggs. I have such sensitive air passages that when I walked in, all of a sudden my eyes were watering, my nose was stopping up, and I was starting to cough. That was just a few minutes in a house with Chinese drywall. If you can imagine, what if somebody cannot sell the house because the mortgage company will not cooperate. They are stuck. They cannot sell their house because who is going to buy a house with defective Chinese drywall. They cannot get a loan for their house. What would have happened if back at the severe time in the 2004-2005 timeframe-- and then they got hit with a big recession coming in 2007, 2008--what would have happened if they didn't have a job and were stuck with the house and everybody was getting sick in the house? The Chinese Government has had continued and repeated failure to participate in the legal process of this country to help the homeowners who were severely impacted by this problem with Chinese drywall. Here is how it started. We had a few hurricanes in 2004 and 2005. The big one everybody remembers is Katrina in 2005, but there was one year before Katrina when four hurricanes hit the Florida Peninsula all within the span of a month and a half. Therefore, there was a lot of cleanup and a lot of rebuilding because of the damage the hurricanes had done. Normal drywall manufacturers and distributors and suppliers ran out, so they asked for extra drywall coming from China. It was coming from a Chinese company, but it was basically owned by the Chinese Government. So we had a housing boom to recover from the hurricanes, and as a result we had in the gulf coast area these rebuilding efforts to recover. A number of builders and contractors imported this defective and sickly drywall. It started causing problems the minute people walked into the repaired home. They reported that it smelled like sulfur, rotten eggs. They would have metal corrosion. Let me show you a picture of an air-conditioner. This photograph doesn't do it justice, but these are all the coils on the air-conditioner, and on close inspection we can see that every one of these coils--these metal parts--are corroded. I went into a home that had their silverware--the silverware--totally corroded. Any metal parts in the house were totally corroded. People started reporting the health effects, and following all these reports several Federal agencies, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, started looking into the problem. I must say there were a number of Senators who had to start kicking down the door to get them to pay attention. This Senator from a State that was severely affected was one of them, and the Senator from Louisiana who sits right here. After she had all the problems of Hurricane Katrina, the Senator from Louisiana, Ms. Landrieu, started raising Cain, and they found that this sulfur emission from this defective drywall was causing the corrosion and the property damage as well as the health effects. But these agencies, once they did that--and I must say we had to urge and urge and urge the agencies, but they weren't able to offer any kind of financial assistance. As I laid out in my opening comments, what was a homeowner to do. They couldn't get the bank to go along. They couldn't get the insurance company to go along. By the way, the insurance company said: We are not covering this as a defect in the house. So the homeowners didn't have any other recourse than to join a lawsuit against the responsible Chinese parties. Much of this litigation was consolidated in Federal district court in New Orleans in a multidistrict litigation. After an extensive period of discovery, the judge ordered it was determined that two Chinese manufacturers and their affiliates were responsible for most of the problem drywall: Knauf Plasterboard Tainjin and its associated affiliates, Knauf Industries. Knauf was a German company that imported and distributed this drywall. The other one was Taishan Gypsum Company and its affiliates. The Knauf entities agreed to appear in court on this litigation. Knauf reached a global settlement that allowed many of the homeowners with Knauf drywall to remediate their homes, get the plasterboard torn out. They often had to redo anything that was metal, such as pipes, air-conditioners, and so forth, and be able to get on with their lives. Taishan has refused to participate in the multidistrict litigation, despite the fact that several of the plaintiffs in this litigation served Taishan officials in China. This Senator went to China and talked to their equivalent of our Consumer Product Safety Commission. Early on I talked to them, and in essence they blew me off. They were served legal process in the lawsuit under an international agreement called the Hague Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil and Commercial Matters. It is the Hague Convention, of which the United States and China are both signatories. Taishan thumbed its nose at everybody and failed to appear in court in cases where they had been properly served under the Hague Convention. The judge in this litigation then entered default judgments against Taishan for damages resulting from the defective drywall. Listen to this. Rather than pay these claims under court order, Taishan then retained counsel. They refused to do anything up to that point. When they were docked by the judge, they retained counsel in the United States for the sole purpose of contesting the district court's jurisdiction and they appealed the case to the court of appeals. In January of this year a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit unanimously upheld that the U.S. courts had proper jurisdiction over Taishan and could enforce the default judgment. In addition, Taishan let the time limit to file an appeal with the Supreme Court expire. You would have thought this would have spurred this Chinese company and its affiliates to do the right thing and finally reach a settlement, but, unfortunately, they thumbed their noses again. Instead, Taishan told the district court's Federal judge that it was walking away and would no longer make any appearances in the court. Well, there is a judge down in New Orleans named Judge Fallon, and needless to say that didn't go over too well with him. In July--earlier this month--Judge Fallon issued an order holding Taishan in both civil and criminal contempt. He enjoined Taishan and any of its affiliates from conducting business in the United States until it participates in the judicial process. He also took the unusual step--because he wanted everybody in the U.S. Government to understand the gravity of his order--to send the contempt order to the U.S. Attorney General, the Secretary of State, and Members of Congress to express his frustration on how Taishan--and therefore the Chinese Government--was flouting international and U.S. law. I am very grateful to Judge Fallon. He has taken this action to ensure that this rogue company and its rogue government are prohibited from conducting any business in the United States until they participate in this judicial process and take responsibility for their actions. We can't issue that against the Chinese Government. It is against this company and its affiliates. But make no mistake. This company is owned by the Chinese Government. What does this say about our policy of letting Chinese manufacturers import pretty much any kind of consumer product they want into this country without mandating any legal recourse if something goes wrong? We thought that was covered under the Hague Convention. What does this say about Chinese companies that routinely ignore service of process under ratified international conventions? The reason for this speech is to call on Taishan and the Chinese Government to do the right thing: Stop hiding and finally help the homeowners who have had their lives turned upside down at great financial and personal health loss by your defective product. If they don't, then I think it is time for the Senate to take action to make sure the Chinese and other foreign manufacturers are held financially accountable for defective products. As I close I wish to reiterate why this case is so important. My constituents are certainly aggrieved, as are Senator Landrieu's constituents and a number of constituents in the Commonwealth of Virginia, by this defective drywall. Why is this case so important? Its implications are far broader than the issues presented in this litigation. It poses a defining moment for the Chinese Government and its companies, which raises grave questions as to the risk of doing business with the Chinese. Will the Chinese Government and its companies honor their moral and legal obligations under this or any other commercial contract? Will the Chinese Government and its companies which have profited from the sale of defective products to consumers here in the United States continue to flee court jurisdiction when sued or will they honor moral and legal obligations to appear in court, defend themselves, and satisfy an adverse judgment? If the Chinese Government and its companies will flee jurisdiction in this case, when they fear or are faced with an adverse judgment, can any company or any individual or any party afford the risk of doing business with the Chinese Government or its companies? If China will run from the law here in the United States, will it not run from the law everywhere else? I rest my case, and I yield the floor.

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

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I say to my colleagues that this is a very substantive discussion. This Senator is enormously impressed with the quality of the commentary from the two who have preceded me and those who will follow. We are addressing the treatment of this issue in a comprehensive way. I was so glad the Senator from Virginia mentioned the initial legislation from years ago protecting children once they reached the border is named after William Wilberforce, a Parliamentarian in England in the late 1700s and early 1800s whose sole mission--it took him 20 years as a politician and a member of Parliament--changed the course of history because he singlehandedly, through his legislative efforts, abolished the English slave trade, and it changed the course of the history of the world. When we think of that kind of quality of parliamentary endeavor, it is time for the Senate to rise to this occasion in what is considered a humanitarian crisis but is so complicated as to the reason it is causing hundreds and thousands of children to appear at our border. Right off the bat this law says we are going to treat these children in a humanitarian way. They are going to get medical treatment and a safe place to stay. When Senator Heinrich showed the picture of the little boy named Alejandro--doesn't your heart go out to him? Taking care of a little boy like that is at the heart of America. We don't want all of these children coming to our border, begging for entrance. Listen to these Senators as they dissect the problem of what we should do to eliminate the problem in the first place. I want to take one snippet of what Senator Kaine said. Why is Honduras the murder capital of the world? Why are the other two Central American countries--El Salvador and Guatemala--ranked so high as murder capitals of the world? Why is it that next door in Nicaragua and Belize their children are not coming to our border in great numbers? The same thing is true with Costa Rica and Panama. Why those three countries? Because the drug lords producing the drugs in South America are sending huge shipments by boat--2 and 3 tons of cocaine per boat--through the Caribbean to the East or the Pacific to the West. Where are they going? They are going to those three countries. Basically, most of those drug shipments are getting through. Once they get to those Central American countries--since the economic power is among the drug dealers and the drug lords--they can buy off everybody else. If you don't do what they say, you are dead. When a young man gets close to becoming a teenager, his parents are confronted with a situation of either joining one of these criminal gangs, which is interrelated with the drug lords, or they have to accept the fact that they are going to be attending their child's funeral because he will be killed if he doesn't join them. The third choice they have comes from what they hear from these coyotes when they say: You are going to have free entrance into the United States. What do you think a parent is going to do? Because the big shipments of drugs--primarily by boat to the east and the west--has corrupted the whole system in those three Central American countries, what should the United States be doing? We have had very successful drug interdiction programs in the past. We have been very successful at it. We now have a four-star Marine general--General Kelly, who is the head of the United States Southern Command--who has a task force in Key West, the Joint Interagency Task Force South, watching their radar and aerial surveillance but doesn't have the assets to go after 75 percent of those drug shipments. If we would give General Kelly and the joint task force the additional Navy assets--that is Navy boats with helicopters or Coast Guard cutters with helicopters--to interdict those shipments instead of letting 75 percent of them go, we would get to the root cause of the whole problem of why the children are showing up on our border. The big shipments of drugs have completely corrupted the societies of those three countries, leading to all of the ramifications of the children and others going north. Once those big shipments of 2 or 3 tons of cocaine in a boat land in one of those Central American countries, they break them up into small packages. It is then transported by individuals, and it is very hard to interdict those drug shipments as they go north through the rest of Central America, Mexico, and to the border. The place to get them is when they are the large shipments. There are many more of these shipments coming by boat than on airplanes. As a result, what we see is this crisis. I will close by saying my wife Grace and I have been involved through a Christian charity in trying to help some of the poor villagers have hope, particularly in Honduras in this case. I am not going to say the name of the village because I don't want to alert the bad guys that this is a little village where they are getting attention, an education, nourishment, and some health care. More than that, they are getting the love of Americans. So it is a painful personal picture for us to see what has happened to that little country. Finally, the President's request of over $3 billion does not include, as we learned in an all-Senators meeting last week with three or four cabinet secretaries and other agencies represented, funds for additional Coast Guard cutters or Navy ships or the movement of those Coast Guard cutters or Navy ships with their helicopters from other places. I hope, by the effort Senator Heinrich has exerted today, with many of us coming here and speaking about this, that we are going to start to get this message through as to what needs to be done to address this crisis. Mr. President, it is a privilege for me to share my heart, and I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. This is Judge Robin Rosenberg who comes through this nonpartisan judicial nominating process Senator Rubio and I have set up. Senator Rubio and I certainly commend her for our Members' favorable consideration.