Bill Nelson

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I am here to speak in support of the conference report for the Water Resources Reform and Development Act or WRRDA. I congratulate Senator Boxer and Senator Vitter for their combined leadership and their working together to send this bill to the President's desk. The last time Congress passed a WRDA bill was in 2007. Gridlock and controversy over earmarks have delayed action on the WRRDA bill. This inaction puts our ports, beaches, and massive environmental restoration projects, like the Everglades, in jeopardy. I support WRRDA because it moves forward with port construction, new flood protection, navigation, and environmental restoration projects, while instituting a number of reforms to the Army Corps of Engineers. Our ports provide good jobs and are critical the economy, facilitating trade and commerce. These projects have been vetted, studied, and recommended by the Army Corps. Now, it is time for Congress to do its part and pass the WRRDA bill. The WRRDA bill means good news for Florida's beaches, waterways, ports, and the Everglades. Not only does Florida have nine projects with a chief's report that are ready to go, but we also have several coastal communities anxiously waiting for the reauthorization of beach nourishment programs. The WRRDA bill extends the authorization for beach renourishment projects so that the Corps can continue repairing and restoring Florida's coastlines. The WRRDA bill authorizes a 3-year extension of coastal storm damage projects which are scheduled to expire in the next 5 years. This means that the Treasure Island project in Pinellas County will now be authorized through 2022. In addition, it creates a process by which projects can be extended by up to 15 years with the help of Federal funds. Strengthening the coastline by replenishing eroding sand will help defend against sea-level rise and storm surge. Congress made a promise 14 years ago to restore the Everglades, and WRRDA puts us on the path to finally fulfill the promise of Everglades restoration. The Everglades are a national treasure, and together, Congress and President Harry Truman recognized it when they dedicated Everglades National Park back in 1947. But it took another major act of Congress to fund Everglades restoration to repair and restore the natural sheet flow of water into the park and into Florida Bay. The original Everglades Restoration legislation, also known as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CERP, was the result of years of work and study, was authorized in 2000 and was written with the intent of frequent WRDA bills. However, only one WRDA bill has been enacted since--in 2007. The first era of Everglades restoration is underway. We have been able to fund construction and make significant progress on three major projects, build a bridge over the Tamiami Trail, create jobs, and provide fresh water for urban and agricultural water supply. As we restore the Everglades, we create jobs and improve the water quality for a critical habitat. In fact, a Mather Economics study found that restoring the Everglades will result in the creation of over 440,000 jobs in sectors like real estate, tourism, fishing, and agriculture--many of those permanent jobs. This study also concluded that there is a $4 return on investment for every dollar spent restoring the Everglades. This bill contains four new project authorizations that are part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. For example, the C-43 Reservoir near La Belle, FL, will help store water during the rainy season along the Caloosahatchee River and protect our coastal areas from too much freshwater, which can drastically disrupt the delicate salinity balance in the Caloosahatchee Estuary. In addition, the C-111 Spreader Canal will redirect water into Everglades National Park that will eventually make its way down to benefit Florida Bay. The first era of Everglades restoration projects, including the Indian River Lagoon and the Picayune Strand, increase water quality and preserve the natural areas to reverse the draining and bulldozing that happened decades ago. This is one of the last areas of the State where the Florida panther has the land it needs to roam and hunt. In addition, Picayune Strand restores habitat and ecological connections that will directly affect the Florida Panthers National Wildlife Refuge, the Belle Meade State Conservation and Recreation Lands Project Area, and the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. All of this works toward the goal of moving water through the historic River of Grass. But progress has been delayed because the second era of projects has been waiting for the WRDA bill for several years. I know Florida is not alone with this type of complaint. The lack of project authorizations has caused delays and significant cost overruns for too long. For this very reason, I have introduced a bill called the Everglades for the Next Generation Act. This legislation provides a programmatic authorization for 5 years for all projects associated with the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. It authorizes projects that the Army Corps has completed the planning, engineering, and design work for and allows the Corps to expedite the process on other projects that would provide greater ecosystem or water supply benefits when done sooner. The WRRDA bill updates our ports and makes them more economically competitive. WRRDA authorizes a number of projects for ports in Florida and other States. These authorizations are a crucial step forward for the improvements our ports need to attract more ships and cargo and take full advantage of the Panama Canal expansion. For example, WRRDA authorizes $600.9 million for a project to deepen Jacksonville Harbor. This will economically transform Jacksonville into a major port that can receive big ships from Asia through an expanded Panama Canal. Projects for Port Canaveral and the Port of Palm Beach that will create new jobs were also included in WRRDA. Overall, I am very pleased that the WRRDA bill accomplishes so much for ports in Florida. Improving and updating our ports will be an economic boon for the country that will create new jobs and opportunities for people across the country. Mr. President, it is clear that without the WRRDA bill, Florida is in trouble. It is important not just to Florida but for this entire Nation. I urge my colleagues to support the bill.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, May is Older Americans Month, and I am pleased to submit a resolution recognizing the importance of our seniors with my colleagues, Senators Collins and Sanders. As of 2012, there were more than 43 million Americans aged 65 and older. By 2060, Americans in this age group are projected to be as many as 92 million, or over 1 in 5 U.S. residents. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy recognized the first Older Americans Month. By continuing to observe the month of May as Older Americans Month, we remind ourselves not only of our duty to provide for the needs of this population, but also of their ongoing contributions to our communities and to our country. As chairman of the Senate Aging Committee and the senior Senator from Florida, the State with the largest 65-and-older population in the Nation, I have heard many stories of the enduring contributions made by the aging population. For example, during an Aging Committee hearing earlier this year, we learned that the fastest growth of new entrepreneurs is among Americans ages 55 to 64. For example, Conchy Bretos, from my home State of Florida, leveraged a lifetime of work experience to begin a second career by starting a new business. Not only does her business contribute to the economy and provide a valuable service to seniors in public housing, but it also provides a cost- savings to taxpayers. As one witness during this hearing noted, we should think about the baby boom generation not as a ``silver tsunami'' but our society's ``silver lining that will be yielding golden dividends.'' Our obligation to them is to ensure their ability to live independently and continue to make these significant impressions on and contributions to our Nation. Our aging Americans can teach younger generations valuable lessons. In honor of Ms. Bretos and all older Americans, I am pleased to recognize May as Older Americans Month and celebrate the influences and achievements of seniors nationwide.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the following bills to award Congressional Gold Medals en bloc, which were received from the House and are at the desk: H.R. 2939, H.R. 1209, H.R. 3658, and H.R. 685.

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the bills be read three times and passed en bloc, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table en bloc, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. I now ask for its second reading and object to my own request.

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I understand that S. 2363, introduced earlier today by Senator Hagan, is at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 452 which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I wish to call to the attention of the Senate the fact that there is a three-dimensional film I had the pleasure of seeing at the Air and Space Museum theater about one of the largest and obviously most successful military invasions in the history of the planet, and that was 70 years ago on June 6, 1944, what is known as D-day. The film is narrated by Tom Brokaw. He is a natural because he is well known for having written the book ``The Greatest Generation'' about the people who fought in World War II. The timeliness of this documentary film is fitting in that as we go from one generation to the next, the stories told by grandfathers and great-grandfathers to their children are not necessarily being told to the next and younger generation. This film captivates in 3-D the plans, the operation, the logistics, and the enormity of the task of taking back continental Europe from Hitler's armies and how we drove that by going onto the beaches at Normandy with our partners, the Canadians, the Brits, the French, and how it was done painfully, with a lot of loss of life, particularly on Omaha Beach--there was a lot less resistance on Utah Beach--and how the participants with us from those other nations met similar and withering fire, as they stormed on the beaches as well the night before the paratroopers dropped. I remember when I was a young Congressman sitting at the knee of Congressman Sam Gibbons of Tampa, FL, and he would tell us about the little clickers called crickets as the paratroopers dropped in, many of them because of a mistaken landing where they landed and drowned in areas that had been flooded by the Germans. But those who survived and then tried to regroup in the dark of night, you would determine when you ran into somebody in the dark if they were friend or foe by this little clicker. We call them crickets. You click it and it sounds like a cricket. If they clicked two times and the response was back, they knew they were friends; otherwise, they had to protect their life. Those are the stories that are not made up. They are real. These are the stories of the British pilots in gliders. How in the world, in the dark of night, could they bring those gliders in, landing them safely, getting out with those troops to go and secure the Pegasus Bridge which was a critical crossing point that had to be taken from the Germans? Story after story, how next to Omaha Beach where the fires were, bloody, how to the south of it was this cliff rising straight out with these enormous German guns on top of it, and how the U.S. Army Rangers scaled those rock cliffs straight up and then took on and silenced the German guns. These are the stories we do not want to lose from one generation to another. So this film in 3-D, narrated by Tom Brokaw, I want to commend to the Senate family. It will be shown around the country now that it has opened on the west coast and here. It is a wonderful educational lesson of American history, of how we turned back an invader that was trying to change the world. Therefore, we were able to keep America free, as well as our allies. I commend it to the Senate. I yield the floor and I 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, there will be one vote at 12:15 p.m. on the confirmation of the Fischer nomination. Following that vote, the Senate will recess until 2 p.m. to allow for the Republican caucus meeting. There will be up to five rollcall votes related to nominations at 2:10 p.m. The first vote in the series will be a rollcall vote, and we expect the remaining votes to be voice votes.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Dr. Andrea Buck, who is one of our detailees from the Department of HHS, the Office of Inspector General, be granted the privilege of the floor during the pendency of this session of Congress.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I am joined today by my colleague Senator Collins to introduce legislation aimed at strengthening the government's hand in stopping Medicare fraud. Senator Collins and I have tried to offer some decent leadership to the Senate Special Committee on Aging and in the process we have heard a lot about Medicare and Medicaid fraud. I want to thank Senators Carper, Grassley, and Casey for partnering with us to sponsor this legislation we are introducing today. Earlier in the year Senator Collins and I convened a hearing of the aging committee to examine what government was doing to prevent Medicare fraud. The committee heard from law enforcement that despite the recent increase in prosecutions, Medicare fraud continues to run rampant. It is especially true in my State of Florida, where South Florida remains, unfortunately, ground zero for Medicare fraud. We also heard from the Medicare organization itself about what the program is doing to try to better detect and prevent con artists from defrauding the system. Then we heard from victims such as Patricia Gresko, a former schoolteacher from Michigan. She testified about this unbelievable scam where her doctor talked her into spending thousands of dollars for treatments for an illness she later discovered she didn't have. These treatments caused her to have chest pains and forced her to endure intravenous infusions that took hours. Her doctor was arrested for bilking $225 million from Medicare. This is what he did: falsely telling patients they had cancer--if you can believe that, that they had cancer--so he could bill for expensive chemotherapy treatments. Ms. Gresko did not have cancer, but she had to endure all of that. Today we are losing about $60 billion to $90 billion a year in Medicare fraud. Just last week, Federal agents arrested 90 people--50 of them, you guessed it, from Miami--on charges they had stolen $260 million from the Medicare Program. Fortunately, when we passed the Affordable Care Act, we put in provisions--some, I might say, at my insistence, because of ground zero being in my State--such as background checks, site visits for prospective Medicare providers and suppliers, and another one being stronger criminal and civil penalties, with the authority to withhold payment in law where there is a credible allegation of fraud. Those are just a few of the weapons in law as a result of the ACA. This recent set of arrests of 90 people on charges of Medicare fraud tells us something else: We have to stop playing the game of Whac-A- Mole with Medicare criminals in trying to stamp out the fraud one bad actor at a time. You know what Whac-A-Mole is. You whack this creature on a table, and once you have whacked it, it pops right back up. So naturally, we talked to Sylvia Burwell, the President's nominee for Secretary of HHS. She echoed that last week at her confirmation hearing in the Finance Committee. She stated that we need to move away from the pay-and-chase model--which is what has happened. You have to chase them down. If you catch them, they pop back up again. So we need a better strategy. While we are making strides by more aggressively pursuing this kind of fraud, obviously more needs to be done. That is why today Senator Collins and I are introducing the Stop SCAMS Act. It will require Medicare to verify that those wishing to bill Medicare have not owned a company that previously defrauded the government. It is going to also allow private insurers and Medicare to share information about the potential fraudulent operators in the system. The bill also anticipates problems CMS may face in the future. It doesn't delay the rollout of the 10 new medical codes in any way--or shall I say what they refer to as the ICD-10 medical codes; there are a lot more of those medical codes--but it takes some lessons learned from the costly delays that have occurred with these codes and uses them to make the process better in the future. The legislation also requires, for the new medical coding systems after the ICD-10, that the agency assess the impact on fraud-prevention systems and do appropriate testing. Combating this fraud will continue to be one of the core missions of our Committee on Aging. We have taken a look at many types of fraud scams--Jamaican phone scams, identity theft, Social Security fraud, payday lending--and now we are continuing to focus on Medicare fraud and will continue to examine additional issues. Every day, Senator Collins and I hear from seniors about scams, and they let us know on our committee's hotline. I remind everybody: This hotline is there for you to report these scams--1-855-303-9470--and we are going to keep this committee going after these scams. In the meantime, Senator Collins and I hope our colleagues will join us in support of this legislation to try to further clamp down on Medicare fraud. I am so happy to have the partner I have in helping lead the Committee on Aging, Senator Collins. In closing, I would say that we really have a broad array of folks supporting us on this legislation: the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, America's Health Insurance Plans, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the National Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, the National Insurance Crime Bureau, and Humana Insurance Company. They are all supporters of this legislation. Mr. President, I await the comments of my colleague.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, as in executive session, I ask unanimous consent that the injunction of secrecy be removed from the following treaty transmitted to the Senate on May 20, 2014, by the President of the United States: Convention on Taxes with the Republic of Poland, Treaty Document No. 113-5. I further ask that the treaty be considered as having been read for the first time; that it be referred, with accompanying papers, to the Committee on Foreign Relations and ordered to be printed; and that the President's message be printed in the Record.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, May 21, 2014; that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; that following any leader remarks, the Senate be in a period of morning business until 12:15 p.m., with the time equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees; and that at 12:15 p.m. the Senate proceed to executive session, as provided for under the previous order.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. I thank the Chair. (The remarks of Mr. Nelson and Ms. Collins pertaining to the introduction of (S. 2361) are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I am joined today by my colleague Senator Collins to introduce legislation aimed at strengthening the government's hand in stopping Medicare fraud. Senator Collins and I have tried to offer some decent leadership to the Senate Special Committee on Aging and in the process we have heard a lot about Medicare and Medicaid fraud. I want to thank Senators Carper, Grassley, and Casey for partnering with us to sponsor this legislation we are introducing today. Earlier in the year Senator Collins and I convened a hearing of the aging committee to examine what government was doing to prevent Medicare fraud. The committee heard from law enforcement that despite the recent increase in prosecutions, Medicare fraud continues to run rampant. It is especially true in my State of Florida, where South Florida remains, unfortunately, ground zero for Medicare fraud. We also heard from the Medicare organization itself about what the program is doing to try to better detect and prevent con artists from defrauding the system. Then we heard from victims such as Patricia Gresko, a former schoolteacher from Michigan. She testified about this unbelievable scam where her doctor talked her into spending thousands of dollars for treatments for an illness she later discovered she didn't have. These treatments caused her to have chest pains and forced her to endure intravenous infusions that took hours. Her doctor was arrested for bilking $225 million from Medicare. This is what he did: falsely telling patients they had cancer--if you can believe that, that they had cancer--so he could bill for expensive chemotherapy treatments. Ms. Gresko did not have cancer, but she had to endure all of that. Today we are losing about $60 billion to $90 billion a year in Medicare fraud. Just last week, Federal agents arrested 90 people--50 of them, you guessed it, from Miami--on charges they had stolen $260 million from the Medicare Program. Fortunately, when we passed the Affordable Care Act, we put in provisions--some, I might say, at my insistence, because of ground zero being in my State--such as background checks, site visits for prospective Medicare providers and suppliers, and another one being stronger criminal and civil penalties, with the authority to withhold payment in law where there is a credible allegation of fraud. Those are just a few of the weapons in law as a result of the ACA. This recent set of arrests of 90 people on charges of Medicare fraud tells us something else: We have to stop playing the game of Whac-A- Mole with Medicare criminals in trying to stamp out the fraud one bad actor at a time. You know what Whac-A-Mole is. You whack this creature on a table, and once you have whacked it, it pops right back up. So naturally, we talked to Sylvia Burwell, the President's nominee for Secretary of HHS. She echoed that last week at her confirmation hearing in the Finance Committee. She stated that we need to move away from the pay-and-chase model--which is what has happened. You have to chase them down. If you catch them, they pop back up again. So we need a better strategy. While we are making strides by more aggressively pursuing this kind of fraud, obviously more needs to be done. That is why today Senator Collins and I are introducing the Stop SCAMS Act. It will require Medicare to verify that those wishing to bill Medicare have not owned a company that previously defrauded the government. It is going to also allow private insurers and Medicare to share information about the potential fraudulent operators in the system. The bill also anticipates problems CMS may face in the future. It doesn't delay the rollout of the 10 new medical codes in any way--or shall I say what they refer to as the ICD-10 medical codes; there are a lot more of those medical codes--but it takes some lessons learned from the costly delays that have occurred with these codes and uses them to make the process better in the future. The legislation also requires, for the new medical coding systems after the ICD-10, that the agency assess the impact on fraud-prevention systems and do appropriate testing. Combating this fraud will continue to be one of the core missions of our Committee on Aging. We have taken a look at many types of fraud scams--Jamaican phone scams, identity theft, Social Security fraud, payday lending--and now we are continuing to focus on Medicare fraud and will continue to examine additional issues. Every day, Senator Collins and I hear from seniors about scams, and they let us know on our committee's hotline. I remind everybody: This hotline is there for you to report these scams--1-855-303-9470--and we are going to keep this committee going after these scams. In the meantime, Senator Collins and I hope our colleagues will join us in support of this legislation to try to further clamp down on Medicare fraud. I am so happy to have the partner I have in helping lead the Committee on Aging, Senator Collins. In closing, I would say that we really have a broad array of folks supporting us on this legislation: the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, America's Health Insurance Plans, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the National Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, the National Insurance Crime Bureau, and Humana Insurance Company. They are all supporters of this legislation. Mr. President, I await the comments of my colleague.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, a number of people have asked me to comment about the situation since President Putin has moved aggressively with regard to Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, which has therefore brought about some retaliation of sanctions by the United States against Russia. We are now hearing comments--a number of troubling statements--coming out of Russia by the Deputy Prime Minister, who has the responsibility for defense and aerospace, regarding the U.S. development of rockets that can again take Americans, on American rockets, to and from the International Space Station. He has made a sarcastic comment, something to the effect of, well, how do the Americans think they are going to get to the space station--on a trampoline? And then most recently a statement having been issued in his name that the Russian rocket company will not sell the very efficient and very energetic Russian rocket engine, the RD-180, to the United States for military purposes. This is a very complex issue. It affects not only our military access to space, it affects our civilian access to space. I will see if I can dissect this in about 4 minutes, as a number of people have asked me about this. This will be an issue, for example, next week in the markup in the Senate Armed Services Committee of the Armed Services Defense authorization bill. First, let's go back and see the history. How do we have this relationship with Russia and what is it? In the midst of the Cold War, when there were the two super powers, the Soviet Union and the United States decided to cooperate in space in the civilian program. In the midst of the Cold War, a Russian Soyuz and an American Apollo spacecraft--Apollo-Soyuz as it is known-- rendezvoused and docked, and the crews lived together in space for 9 days in 1975. By the way, those two crews led by General Alexsei Leonov of the Soviet Union and Gen. Tom Stafford, U.S. Air Force, NASA astronaut, Apollo 10 that went to the Moon--they are close personal friends and have seen each other over the course of the years many times. In 1985 I had the privilege as a young Congressman to take a delegation to the Soviet Union on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Apollo-Soyuz, with our Apollo astronauts joining in Moscow with the Soviet cosmonauts. So there is a long history. But now fast forward to, I believe, the year 1991 and the complete destruction of the old Soviet Union. All the satellite states went elsewhere. By the way, this was in August and September of 1991, interestingly, after a delegation of American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts in April of 1991 all joined together out at Star City where they train their cosmonauts, and then we all went in a Soviet military plane out to Kazakhstan to the launch site on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the launch of the first human into space--a Russian, Yuri Gargarin. A few months later, the Soviet Union disintegrated. So the United States had a choice to make: All of those very bright, very effective Russian scientists in their defense program and in their space program--and often their civilian space program was directly linked to their Soviet military program--where were all those scientists going to go? We didn't want them to go to Iran, North Korea, and China. So I believe Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat, and Senator Dick Lugar, a Republican, led the effort to put together the Nunn-Lugar bill, which started sending American assistance to try to stop the scientists from fleeing into other hands and especially to corral all of the nuclear weapons the Soviet Union had, and that was done very effectively. Then when Russia opened its former Soviet closed doors, we found out Russian scientists and engineers had manufactured this exceptionally efficient and powerful engine, kerosene and LOx--liquid oxygen--called the RD-180. As a result, we worked out a deal between American aerospace companies and the Russian company Energomash, where instead of these engines going all across the world, we were going to use them together. So the United States through its rocket manufacturers--I believe Pratt & Whitney--got the license to this and the plans to the engine, but they also had an agreement that they would buy these from the Russian rocket manufacturer. Today that engine is a staple and necessary engine in our stable of horses to get into space, both military and civilian, because it is the main engines on what we use today, the Atlas V rocket. This is a proven rocket. It has had an unblemished record, and that unblemished record has been something close to, if not over, 100 straight flights without a flaw. It is being planned in the future by Boeing to put a Boeing spacecraft on top of that rocket for humans to go to and from the space station. Another company called Sierra Nevada has created a smaller winged spacecraft also for humans--not unlike the space shuttle but much smaller--that will go on top of the Atlas V. They, along with a third competitor, SpaceX, which has built its own rocket called the Falcon 9, with its spacecraft the Dragon capsule--those three will compete to see if one or all three will deliver humans--American and Russian--to the International Space Station in the future instead of us having to rely, after we shut down the space shuttle, on the only manned, human-tested rocket to get us to and from the space station now, which is the Soyuz, the Russian rocket that launches from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. If this isn't confusing enough, the Deputy Prime Minister--provoked because the United States has responded to President Putin's aggression--says he is going to stop selling the Energomash rocket to the United States for military purposes. The question is, Is he going to continue to sell that rocket engine for civilian purposes--which I just outlined in this competition that is coming up--and if this is accurate and it holds, what to do for the United States? We have several options. First of all, we have a 2-year supply of these engines on the shelf. If in 2 years we think the Russians are not going to continue to sell this--and, by the way, this is a real jobmaker for Russians and a moneymaker for them. The aerospace industry in Russia wants to continue to sell this engine, but if the politics get in the way and they cut it off, then what is the United States to do? We have to figure that out. Right now there is a study going on in the Department of Defense as to how we would handle it. We have a 2-year supply. One of the options they will look at is stretching that out over time, putting some of those payloads on other rockets. Some of those payloads can go on the very successful Falcon 9, but there are heavier payloads that cannot go on the Falcon 9 that could go on the Atlas V. But if the Atlas V is not flying, they will have to go on a more expensive and heavier lift, Delta IV Heavy. So we see how complicated this gets. Then the question is, If they are not going to sell these engines for military purposes, can we bank on it that they would sell these engines for NASA civilian purposes? That is a big question mark. So one of the issues in this DOD study is going to be can we manufacture since we have the plans. We don't know the answer at this point. It is an extremely complicated metallurgy process which they have perfected in all of those years in the old Soviet Union. We would have to start flat-footed, even though we have the plans, and figure out how to do all the design equipment, all the processing equipment, and then try to get the engines ready--and at some point what would a follow-on engine look like? That is about the best I can summarize the situation, and we are going to have some major decisions to make, depending on what we see in the DOD study. First of all, we are going to have to know how we have assured access to space for defense purposes for the national security of this country. Secondly, we are going to have to have assured access to space for the civilian program so this incredible International Space Station that we have built with 15 nations, including the Russians, who have been a major part--how we are going to keep that operating and get Americans to and from it because the Russians cannot operate the space station by themselves. In the first place, a lot of the Russian commands to their own modules actually are commands that go through the Johnson Space Center in Texas. Secondly, the Russians depend on all the electricity that is generated on the International Space Station from the American electrical systems. So we are going to have to continue to operate it together. The Deputy Prime Minister implied that; that he would continue to do that through year 2020, but the space station is going to have a life--and should have--well into the decade of the 2030s. These are the questions we are going to have to answer and they are going to have to be answered in the near future. In part, some of them are going to have to be answered next week as we start to mark up the Defense authorization bill. I wanted to give the Senate, and all of those in the press who have been asking me, the best of what I could conclude at this point and then we will see what develops. There was the new development, as I mentioned yesterday, where the Deputy Prime Minister said they will not sell the RD-180 to America for military purposes. If that holds, then we have to swing into action pretty quickly. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I thank my dear personal friend the Senator from Rhode Island for his kind comments, but I especially thank him for his passion and his leadership on this issue. There are parts of America where it is time to wake up, and especially one part of that is the State of Florida. Because of the nature of our State being a peninsula that sticks down into water surrounding it on most sides, you would not be surprised that we have by far the longest coastline of any State, save for Alaska. When it comes to beaches, the State of Florida by far has more beaches than any other State, but because we have so much exposure to the oceans--the Atlantic on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west--we are particularly subject to climate change and the fact that the Earth is heating up. Why is the Earth heating up? Well, there is the effect known as the greenhouse effect. If you put certain gasses into the atmosphere that are a result of manmade efforts--when we burn things such as oil and coal and we don't scrub out a lot of the stuff, it goes into the atmosphere. Well, one of the things that goes into the atmosphere is carbon dioxide. What carbon dioxide does is go into the upper atmosphere and it forms this greenhouse effect by creating an invisible shield, and when the Sun's rays come and strike the Earth at daylight, those rays then reflect off the Earth's surface. Under normal circumstances, those rays bounce back out and radiate back into space but not if you have a lot of gasses up at the very beginning of space, at the top of the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide. When the Earth's surface radiates the Sun's heat, it goes back up as if it wants to go out into space, and it is trapped. What happens is the entire atmosphere of the Earth then contains that heat, and slowly over time it builds up the temperature. When you look at a globe, what do you mostly see? You don't see land; you see water. So what happens is that most of that heating of the Earth's atmosphere is absorbed into the temperature of the ocean. Because of the rise of the ocean temperature and the temperature of the air, what starts to happen? What is happening up toward the northern climes as well as the southern climes? Have you heard the report that came out a couple of days ago about how big chunks of Antarctica are now falling off? Have you heard about how all of the glaciers on top of Greenland, which used to be nothing but one big glacier, are now falling off into the sea, thus causing the sea rise? I will flip it back to the Senator from Rhode Island with this comment: In the hearing we had of the commerce subcommittee in Miami Beach--why did I choose Miami Beach? Because it is ground zero. At high tide they are already having flooding in the streets of Miami Beach. At a seasonally high tide that they expect coming up in October of this year, they expect constant flooding. As a result, we had the mayor of Miami Beach tell us about the effort of them trying to redo the infrastructure to get rid of the water when the high tides come in. We also had a scientist at NASA testify. He is a fellow who is a four-time space flier. He left the astronaut office, and now he is back at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He is a scientist. What he testified to us was not a forecast, not a projection; he testified as to the measurements of sea level rise over the last 50 years. And for Florida, the sea level rise, as measured by NASA--these are indisputable measurements--is 5 to 8 inches. In another 20 to 30 years, he projects that the sea level rise will be a foot, 12 inches more, and by the end of the decade, it will rise 2 to 3 feet. I hasten to add that 75 percent of Florida's population of 20 million people lives on the coast. Can you imagine what a 2- to 3-foot sea level rise on Florida would be? It would inundate unbelievable amounts of the urban community of our State of Florida. So the question is, Are we going to do something about it? I will flip it back to the Senator from Rhode Island.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, one would naturally ask the question, could we solve this problem in the United States the way the Dutch have solved a lot of the coastal areas of the Netherlands by building dikes? A lot of their land is actually below sea level. You can't do that in a place such as Florida because the substrate underneath the surface soil is a porous limestone, much like Swiss cheese. So that if you try to put up a dike, it is not going to hold any water back because the pressure of the water as it rises is merely going to go underneath the dike into the porous limestone, which is the source under the surface of a lot of Florida's drinking water because that water in that honeycomb limestone is fresh. What happens as a result of the sea level rise? More water and higher water will create more pressure. The pressure then starts to push underneath the surface as well as over the surface of the land, and that causes the intrusion of saltwater into the fresh drinking water. Because Florida is so low--believe it or not, our highest point is right near the Alabama-Florida line, which is actually 356 feet high. But when you get into portions of South Florida, it is very low. Obviously, sea level rise is going to cover a lot of land, but another consequence is that a lot of flood control is now regulated by gravity. You go from a higher position of flood and you flow by gravity through canals to a lower position of the sea level. When the sea level rises, the water during floods--hurricane, rainstorm, whatever--can't flow. The only way to correct that is to install very expensive pumping equipment. Finally, in this segment of the exchange with the Senator from Rhode Island, I ask what is another consequence of the temperature of the ocean's rising? Remember the greenhouse effect? Most of that heat is absorbed in the oceans. What is the fuel for a hurricane in the Northern Hemisphere? What is the fuel for it? It is the temperature of the water. Hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere go counterclockwise. Hurricanes in the Southern Hemisphere go clockwise. What happens to the intensity of the hurricane? It goes up as the waters get hotter. That is why usually, as the hurricanes are forming into these massive storms over the South Atlantic and the Caribbean, they start going north. They start to dissipate because the waters are cooler. It doesn't provide the fuel for the ferocity of the hurricane. Likewise, higher water temperatures, more frequency of hurricanes. In our State, we live on a peninsula that sticks down into the middle of ``Hurricane Highway.'' It is a way of life. We understand that, and we have handled it pretty well, especially after the disaster of 1992, the monster hurricane, Hurricane Andrew. Our building codes are up and so forth, but we can't withstand a lot of Hurricane Andrews. Part of that hurricane was considered to be a category 5--something in excess of 160 mile-per-hour winds. We know what 160 mile-an-hour tornadoes do within a small, confined, tight-knit cyclone-type activity. Imagine what those wind speeds do in a massive hurricane covering hundreds of miles. We start to see then the effects. The insurance industry cannot withstand insuring structures that are going to sustain that kind of damage. What is going to happen to the cost of insurance? It is going to go through the roof. What is going to happen to the cost of flood insurance? In the Senate, we agonized over the Federal Flood Insurance Program--what is going to happen to the actual structures and the people who not only are subject to being flooded because of the rise of sea level but of having their whole dwellings and city torn up, as Hurricane Andrew did to downtown Homestead, a relatively small population of Florida and it absolutely tore it up. That is what we are facing unless we do something about climate change. The first thing we have to do is we have to stop this denial that this is not real. The scientists are telling us it is real. The NASA astronaut scientists say it is measurements. They have flooding in Miami Beach. The local governments have banded together in southeastern Florida to try to get ahead of it. Why can't we get some of the Senators here, who because it is not politically correct in their politics, to recognize what the truth is so we can start planning for this--not as a protection but to plan for the protection of planet Earth, and see if we can stop some of the causes of the climate change. Then, once we do it in the Nation that stands as the role model to the rest of the countries, we are going to have to get them to do it too; otherwise, we are going to see what has just happened over the last couple of days: Large chunks of Antarctica are beyond saving, and the consequences are grave. I appreciate the leadership of my friend from Rhode Island and Senator Boxer of California. They have been the ones who have been at the point of the spear. I thank them very much.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, the Senator from Rhode Island has stated in one of the more eloquent fashions details about my State of Florida because he was so passionate about the subject and so unselfish that he wanted to start in other States--North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia--and several places on the east coast of Florida. It is extraordinary. I will leave you with this thought: Every time I hear a Senator such as Senator Whitehouse speak about this subject, and every time I look at a picture of the planet as he has on the poster that says ``Time To Wake Up,'' my mind's eye goes back 28 years ago to the window of our spacecraft on the 24th flight of the space shuttle 203 nautical miles above the Earth, circumnavigating the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, with a complete revolution of the Earth in 90 minutes. You look back at our planet--which is so beautiful, so colorful, so alive, so creative--and yet when you look at the rim of the Earth, as it falls off into the deep blackness of space, there is a thin, little blue band, and upon closer examination out the window, you can actually see the thin film of what sustains all of our life, the atmosphere. Then, with the naked eye, you can see points on the Earth where we are messing it up. You can see the color contrast of the destruction of the trees in the Amazon, upriver in the Amazon. You can see the result of cutting down all the trees on an island nation such as Madagascar, which fortunately has started planting trees in the last quarter century. Therefore, the result of that tree cutting, in this hemisphere as well, in the island nation of Haiti, is that when the rains come, there are no trees to hold the topsoil and it all flows down the rivers and out the mouths of the rivers and you can see it from space in the discoloration of the water. That is for miles and miles out into the brilliant blues of the ocean. If we do not do what people like Senators Boxer and Whitehouse are saying and wake up to the reality of climate change and try to get ahead of it by changing policies that will stop the greenhouse effect or at least slow it down, then what we are going to have for future space fliers is that they are going to look back at the planet and the coastline of those States Senator Whitehouse visited--all being in the Southeastern United States--that coastline is not going to look the same. It is not going to be as distinct a coastline, with a white beach along it that outlines it from the blue waters of the Atlantic. It is going to be much different and to the great detriment of the people who live there and call that home. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON

Mr. NELSON. Madam President, shortly we are going to have votes on a number of judges, and I want to call to the attention of the Senate Federal district judge Robin Rosenbaum. She has been nominated by the President to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Judicial Circuit. The two Senators from Florida, Senator Rubio and I, have a proud tradition in Florida of bipartisan support for our judicial nominees, and Judge Rosenbaum's selection is just another example in that 20- some-year experience in Florida of selecting our judges through a judicial nominating commission. In fact, this is the second time Florida's two Senators come together to support Robin Rosenbaum's nomination--this time for the circuit court--since we, a couple years ago, had recommended her to the President, the President chose her, and she has been a Federal district judge in the Southern District of Florida for the last couple of years. The vacancy was created by Judge Rosemary Barkett, who recently retired from the Eleventh Circuit. Judge Barkett was also a very distinguished judge from the State of Florida. We are concerned about the alarming vacancy rate in our judiciary. The Eleventh Circuit is one of the busiest in the country. It has multiple vacancies. Judge Rosenbaum is clearly not controversial. The two Senators are supporting her nomination. She received the ABA's highest rating-- unanimously ``well qualified''--and she has been approved, obviously, by the Senate Judiciary Committee. She is going to make a fine addition to the Eleventh Circuit, and at 5:30 p.m. this afternoon she will be the first judge up for confirmation. I urge my colleagues to confirm her nomination. I thank the Presiding Officer. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON

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