Rob Portman

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I want to talk about some of the positive steps the U.S. Senate is about to take in pushing back against----

Mr. PORTMAN. There is no objection.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I thank my colleague, and I am going to talk about him in a second and the work we have done with regard to pushing back against the opioid epidemic that has hit our States. In this body, every single Member is affected by it, and our country is affected by it in very significant ways. Because of the dangerous hurricanes that are approaching our coast, it looks as though the vote we had expected tomorrow and the debate we had expected tomorrow on the opioid package may be postponed based on what I just heard from the majority leader. But in the next several days, the Senate is expected to take up comprehensive legislation that comes from four or five different committees in Congress to fight the addiction crisis, to help our communities combat some of the deadliest aspects of this crisis nationally. This help is urgently needed. Let's start with talking about how Congress got here. First, just a couple of years ago, we passed two bills in Congress that were historic and are making a difference. One is called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or CARA; the other is called the 21st Century Cures Act. CARA, which I coauthored with my colleague Sheldon Whitehouse, who is on the Senate floor with us--he spoke just a moment ago--provides resources directly to evidence-based prevention, treatment, and recovery programs. These are nonprofit programs. For the most part, they are able to apply to the Federal Government directly for grant money. They are doing things that are innovative and new to try to get at this problem, and in many respects, they are working and making a difference. This year alone, there will be about $608 million spent on these programs that offer innovative solutions to this stubborn problem that is affecting everyone in this Chamber. The Cures legislation, 21st Century Cures legislation, this year will be $500 million annually. That goes directly to the States, and the States then give grants to various programs in those States. In my home State of Ohio, for instance, $26 million has come each of the last 2 years. Sadly, Ohio is one of the hardest hit States in the country, so we have a larger grant allocation than some States that have not had as many overdoses and deaths and rates of addiction that are as high as we have had. I was a very strong supporter of the 21st Century Cures funding, and I applaud Senators Alexander and Murray, as well as Senator Blunt and other Appropriations Committee members on both sides of the aisle for their work on that. Of course, with regard to the CARA legislation, it is actually working out there. I have now had the opportunity to see how it is working. I have been to about a dozen CARA grant recipients in Ohio over the last year alone. I have seen new and powerful ways that the communities back in Ohio are helping to turn the tide of addiction. Last month, as an example, I visited the Whitehall fire station outside of Columbus, OH. They are doing something innovative for a fire station. They have opened their doors and partnered with another organization. They get CARA funding, and the other organization gets Cures funding to provide immediate help for those who are coming in and are seeking it or have overdosed; Narcan has been applied and has reversed the effects of these overdoses. Yet that gap that so often occurs in our communities doesn't occur there because it is seamless. People can go right into treatment. The program, again, was made possible by this CARA grant. It opens the doors of the fire station, and it is working. I was there at a time when, just coincidentally, an addict came in. His name was Blake. Blake was, as he described himself, a heroin addict, and he had heroin on his person. I had the opportunity to speak with Blake and offer him some words of encouragement. I had an opportunity to ask him why he was there and what had happened in the past. He said that he had been to three treatment programs. They hadn't worked. He had gone straight from a short-term treatment program right back to the streets. The gap had occurred. He also said that he was ready, and he appreciated the opportunity to go straight into a treatment program, which he had not had before. I had a chance to speak with him, and I told him to stay in touch with me, to let me know what is going on. Last week, he called, and Blake said that he is now in a 3-month treatment program in Portsmouth, OH. He is optimistic; he is confident. He believes that because of this approach, he has an opportunity now to get clean, to get back with his family and get back to work. This is what is often needed: a seamless transition from immediate medical attention--the application of Narcan to reverse the effects--to treatment, to longer term recovery in order for people to overcome their addiction. That is what CARA and Cures prioritize, and that is why these programs are so important. Once again, we will see in the funding this year that those programs have been held up. The good parts of the programs, in particular, are being used as an example for the entire country. Despite the legislative progress we have made, and despite what I see back home with communities beginning to make a difference, overall, the situation is not getting better; it is getting worse. You might ask: Why is that? Well, I believe it is for one simple reason, and that is the advent of new drugs, particularly less expensive and more powerful synthetic opioids that have come into our communities in the last few years. The new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, show that overdose deaths increased 9 percent from 2016 to 2017, the last year for which we have data. My home State of Ohio had a 9\1/2\ percent increase in overdose deaths. In total, CDC estimates that 72,000 Americans--72,000 Americans--died last year from overdoses, the No. 1 cause of death for Americans under the age of 50. Over 48,000 of those overdose deaths were caused by opioids, and about 30,000 of those were caused by synthetic forms, particularly fentanyl. That is more than 60 percent, so this is the big issue right now. Two-thirds of the overdose deaths in my home State of Ohio are being caused by synthetic opioids, fentanyl. Columbus, OH, unfortunately had a number of deaths over a short period of time, all due to fentanyl. There were about 20,000 fentanyl overdose deaths in 2016, meaning there has been a 50-percent increase in just 1 year. When you go from 2013 to 2017, there has been an 850-percent increase just during 5 years--an 850-percent increase in fentanyl overdose deaths in our country. The opioid crisis has continued to tighten its grip around communities across our country, and the emergence of fentanyl has presented a new challenge in turning the tide of this epidemic. Just as we were making progress, this more deadly, less expensive scourge has come into our families, our communities, our States. That is why we need to take action--and take action this week. I would like to thank the majority leader, Senator McConnell, and the Democratic leader, Senator Schumer, for agreeing to bring this legislation to the floor. I would also like to thank Chairman Lamar Alexander for his good work in bringing together all of the different proposals from these four or five committees I talked about and negotiating with all sides to come up with consensus legislation. This should be nonpartisan, not just bipartisan. This is something that is attacking our communities at their core. I would like to thank and commend the several committees that have held public hearings and contributed legislative ideas to this mix. That includes the Judiciary Committee, the HELP Committee, the Finance Committee, and others. This bipartisan consensus package puts politics aside and does what is right for our communities. It includes some additional legislative priorities I have been working on over the past couple of years that I believe are going to make a real difference in this fight. Earlier this year, again with Senator Whitehouse and others, we introduced CARA 2.0, the next version of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. A number of those provisions are included in this package. One is a national quality standard and best practices for recovery housing. It is critical for people, as they transition out of treatment and into longer term recovery, to have this housing. But it also needs to meet these higher standards because of many examples where it has not and has failed those individuals and families. The legislation also authorizes support for high school and college students to help children and young adults recover from substance abuse disorders. We have had amazing models in Ohio for this, like the Collegiate Recovery Community at Ohio State. Columbus is now opening its first recovery high school next year. Finally, CARA 2.0 contributed the opioid legislation that includes $60 million for a plan of safe care for babies born dependent on drugs. Their mothers are addicted, and they are born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. It is a very sad situation, but it is a reality in my State and in so many others. To further help these newborn babies, the legislation includes what is called the CRIB Act, which is bipartisan legislation I coauthored that helps newborns suffering from addiction get the best care possible in the best setting possible to get the love and support they need to be able to recover. It will also help ensure that babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome get the help they need in their early stages of development, so they can live up to their God-given purpose in life, which is not to live with this. The legislation before us also reauthorizes a number of important programs that have a proven record of success, like drug courts, like the drug-free communities prevention grants, like the high-intensity drug trafficking areas, where law enforcement can better coordinate at every level. These are all positive strides that will help improve what is working in combating this epidemic and provide more resources to help some of the most vulnerable groups affected. But, colleagues, I think the most important and immediate difference in turning the tide on this opioid epidemic will come from a bill that is called the STOP Act. It is a bipartisan bill that I coauthored with Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota. It will combat the scourge of fentanyl we talked about earlier. This issue of an 850-percent increase in this one kind of drug coming in, causing more and more overdoses--synthetic opioids--has to be addressed; 81 Americans are dying every single day. That is the best data we have from last year. This year, unfortunately, it is likely to be even higher. It is a new poison flooding our communities. The STOP Act will close a loophole that drug traffickers have been using to ship fentanyl into our country. Unbelievably, fentanyl is actually manufactured primarily in China, and it primarily comes into our communities through the U.S. mail system. You might think this comes overland from Mexico or somewhere else, but this is coming in through our mail system, primarily from China. We conducted an 18-month investigation into this in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, and we revealed just how easy it is to purchase fentanyl online and have it shipped to the United States. Based on our undercover investigation, these drugs can be found through a simple Google search, and overseas sellers we accessed essentially guaranteed delivery if the fentanyl was sent through the U.S. mail system. To be clear, they guaranteed delivery if it is sent through the U.S. mail system, not if it is sent through other carriers, like private carriers--FedEx, UPS, DHL, and others. It is easy to see why they prefer the Postal Service for shipping these deadly synthetic drugs. The Postal Service has a weaker screening standard than do the private carriers. After 9/11, Congress passed a law requiring carriers like UPS, FedEx, and DHL to get what is actually called electronic advance data on international packages entering the United States. This electronic advance data allows law enforcement to have a chance to stop this poison because they can find out where the package is from, what is in it, and where it is going. They can then use good data, use algorithms that they have come up with to determine which packages are suspect and pull them off the line. I have seen this. I have seen U.S. Customs and Border Protection do it at distribution centers for these private carriers. I have also seen, unfortunately, that the Postal Service is not doing what they should be doing. Without the information identifying packages, it is next to impossible; it is like identifying a needle in a haystack. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin, and it is relatively inexpensive. It is so deadly that as little as 2 milligrams, equal to a few specks of salt, is enough to be fatal. Drug users and dealers have moved to fentanyl as a more accessible, less expensive alternative. I am told that 1 gram of the deadly mixture of heroin and fentanyl can cost about half as much on the street as 1 gram of heroin alone. Drug users seeking a less expensive and stronger high are seeking it out, and drug dealers are mixing it into a number of other street drugs. No street drug is safe because the fentanyl is being mixed. It is being laced into all kinds of other drugs, often unknowingly to the person buying the drug. To give you an idea of how deadly this drug is, recently police in Columbus seized 2.2 pounds of fentanyl, which is equal to about 3\1/2\ cups--a small enough amount to fit in a plastic bag in your kitchen. That 2.2 pounds of fentanyl is enough to kill 500,000 people, roughly the population of the city of Cleveland. Because of its extreme potency, deadly doses can be shipped in small packages that are almost impossible to identify without having the necessary information and screening devices in the Postal Service. The U.S. Postal Service system isn't required to do it yet. As a result, they have chosen not to do so. Only recently, under congressional pressure, have they begun getting this data on some packages entering the United States. Even so, last year, based on their testimony, they say they have received data on 36 percent of the international packages. That is a step in the right direction. By the way, that still means that over 318 million packages are coming here with no screening at all. Even when they have identified drugs--packages that are likely containing drugs--only 80 percent are given to law enforcement. So 20 percent is still going into our communities. This needs to be changed. It is a glaring loophole. Everyone knows it. It undermines the safety and security of our country in fundamental ways. The STOP Act will significantly disrupt the flow of fentanyl into the United States by simply holding the U.S. Postal Service, a Federal agency, to the same standards as private carriers. It will require the Postal Service to collect advance electronic data immediately on 70 percent of packages entering the United States by the end of the year and 100 percent for China. Then, it will require 100 percent of international packages in the United States by the end of 2020. It is a commonsense solution to address the most urgent and deadliest aspects of the opioid epidemic we face. At the very least, it will increase the risk of sending these drugs into our country and raise the street price of fentanyl. That is why it has such broad bipartisan support. There is a growing momentum behind this legislation, and I look forward to the Senate's passing it in the next several days as part of the broader legislation we talked about earlier. It will not solve the crisis, but it will act as a tourniquet to stop the flow of fentanyl in this country and it will allow comprehensive programs, such as CARA and the Cures legislation, to be prioritized and to function and to allow Americans to live up to their full potential and to allow our communities to heal. I look forward to President Trump's signing this legislation into law--both the broader opioid legislation and the STOP Act--so it can begin making a difference in communities in my home State of Ohio and all around the country. I yield back.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I wish to speak about this issue of opioids and the crisis our country faces. Just in the last couple of weeks we have gotten reports from the Centers for Disease Control from last year's data on overdoses and deaths: 72,000 Americans lost their lives to overdoses last year from drugs. Most of those were from opioids. This is heroin, prescription drugs, and, now, these synthetic opioids--72,000 Americans. In the wake of that, it is encouraging to me to hear the Senate talking about the possibility of bringing a package of legislation to the floor that will help to push back against this crisis and begin to turn the tide. We have to do it--not just talk about it. We have to act because this crisis is upon us and is very real. These new efforts that we should move forward on would build on what this Senate has already done with regard to the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or the CARA legislation, which is now being implemented in my State of Ohio and around the country. There is also the Cures legislation, or the 21st Century Cures Act. It has some additional provisions that allow States to take funding and use it to fight this opioid addiction. That is smart. There are smart ways for us to fight this opioid epidemic. We know that, and we are beginning to do that. At the Federal level we can play a role in this, among other things, by taking better practices from around the country and ensuring they are being used back home in our States. I have seen this firsthand because I have been around the State of Ohio a lot since this legislation actually passed. I have actually visited more than a dozen grant recipients of CARA and Cures grants to see what they are doing and then spreading that around to other communities--maybe communities that haven't been able to get the grants but want to see something innovative to be able to push back. Last Friday I visited Hope Village Recovery Center in Portage County, OH. They received more than $500,000 in CARA funding to expand a badly needed medication-assisted treatment program. They decided to look at this in a very comprehensive way, and it is working. They are getting people who normally wouldn't step up for treatment to come for treatment, and their success rate for getting people through treatment and not relapsing is relatively high. That is so important right now, because if you don't get people into treatment with an addiction, which is a disease, you are not going to be able to solve this problem. The comprehensive approach includes treatment, counseling, outpatient treatment, aftercare services, peer support--and these are coaches who are in recovery themselves, and that is very effective--and transportation services to get people back and forth. This holistic approach is what we need to help people begin to heal, get over their addiction, get back to their families, back to work, and back to achieving their God-given purpose in life, which is not to be an addict using these drugs. Last week I also visited CommQuest Recovery Services in Stark County, OH, to see their new program, an innovative program called the ``mom and me program.'' These are moms who want to help to get over their addiction. They are struggling. This program allows them to come on board to this facility that I got to see, to be able to have some of the loving support and care from people around them, but also to have their kids come with them. This is very unusual. Very few treatment centers in the country allow children to come into the treatment program. We have found through evidence-based programs looking at this that, in fact, if you allow the kids in there and there is proper supervision, it helps. It helps the mothers heal. It helps the kids to be able to heal. So this is an innovative program that I think is going to end up with great results. They are just getting started on it, but it is going to foster the kind of success that we want to see. Programs like these are working. Yet the epidemic seems to be getting worse. Why is that? Well, because we need to do more of this evidence- based stuff. We need to be sure that every community has the opportunity to provide treatment because a lot of people still can't get treatment. We need to encourage people not to go down this funnel of addiction by much more effective and stronger prevention and education programs. There are things we have to do. CARA 2.0, or the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act 2.0, is how it was introduced. That legislation that I have introduced will ensure that those programs that are working get additional help so that the States can do even more by leveraging some of these Federal dollars to be able to do more with the private sector and with the States to be able to turn this tide of addiction. I talked about the 72,000 lives lost last year. That was a record number. Here is a map of the States. This is a map of the changes in overdose deaths from last year. If it is a purple or blue State, that means they are doing a little better. Look at this map. Almost every State, unfortunately, is not purple or blue. These States that are tan and brown, like my home State of Ohio, indicate an actual increase in opioid deaths last year. Why is this? I think one of the main reasons for this is because there is a new danger afoot. There is a new surge in drugs. It is very powerful. It is 50 times more powerful than heroin. It is very inexpensive. It is coming primarily from China and coming primarily through our U.S. Postal Service, if you can believe it. It is called synthetic opioids. Fentanyl is the name that most of it is called. Some of it is called Carfentanil and other derivatives, but this fentanyl-- this synthetic opioid--is now the biggest problem we have in our States. This is the growing crisis. Here is a chart that shows what has happened just since 2015 until now. It shows that, in fact, methamphetamines, other opioids, heroin, cocaine are all relatively flat. But look at this big increase. The big increase is with synthetic opioids. When you look at those 72,000 deaths from last year, the majority of them were from opioids. Again, increasingly, it is from these synthetic opioids. What I hear on the frontlines in Ohio--whether it was at this Hope Village Recovery Center that I talked about or the CommQuest facility-- is that unless we combat that influx of fentanyl, we are not going to be able to turn the tide, because despite some of the good programs and the good work that is being done with these programs, we are being overrun with fentanyl. Over the past week alone, in the Columbus, OH, area, the Franklin County coroner has handled 18 overdose deaths, and 5 were within 24 hours. There were 18 deaths, and 5 were within 24 hours. Imagine that. The cause, the coroner suspects, is fentanyl. If you look at some of these deaths that we talked about, the 72,000--or even deaths that occurred to people who thought they were taking cocaine or methamphetamine or something else--often it is because the fentanyl has been sprinkled into these drugs and the fentanyl is what is causing the overdoses and the deaths. It is 50 times more powerful, as I said, and that is the new scourge of the opioid epidemic. From 2013 to 2017, fentanyl overdose deaths have increased nationally by 850 percent. As coroners' reports for 2017 continue to come in throughout my home State of Ohio, fentanyl now appears to be involved in two-thirds of the deaths in Ohio. So those are record numbers, and two-thirds are from fentanyl. That is consistent with what I am hearing on the frontlines. Unbelievably, we know where it is coming from, and we are not doing enough to stop it. It is being made in laboratories in China, primarily, and in other countries and shipped into the United States through our own U.S. Postal Service, a government agency. We conducted an 18-month investigation into this issue in the subcommittee that I chair called the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. We did a thorough study. We had undercover people working with us. We went on the websites to find out what is happening. We found out how easy it is to purchase fentanyl online and have it shipped to the United States. Based on our undercover investigation, these drugs can be found through a simple Google search, and overseas sellers we accessed through an undercover investigator essentially told us they will guarantee the delivery if this poison is sent through the U.S. Postal Service. They will not guarantee it if it goes through a private carrier like UPS, FedEx, or DHL. Why is that? It is because the private carriers are required to provide law enforcement with big data, or electronic data, in advance as to what the packages are, where they are coming from, where they are going, and what is in them. Law enforcement can then use big data, use their algorithms, figure out which packages are suspect, and get them off the line. I have seen it. I have been in those facilities. I have seen big packages being taken off and, therefore, lives being saved. At a minimum, this will increase the cost on the street. What is the ultimate answer to this? It is prevention, education, a change in our hearts and in our families, better treatment so that people who have this disease can get the treatment just like another illness they might have, and dealing with this issue of longer term recovery, which leads to more success in treatment. Those are all essential, but right now we have to put a tourniquet on this, folks. We have to stop the fentanyl from flooding into our country. Look at what it is doing. There is an 850-percent increase. The information tells law enforcement what they need to be able to pull these packages off if it is provided. Yet, unbelievably, all of the private carriers are required to do it and have been since 9/11. The post office has been spared. The thought was that the post office should study the issue. Well, I am waiting for the report. Meanwhile, because of pressure from the Congress, the U.S. Postal Service is starting to look at some of these packages. Last year, they now testified before us in the subcommittee, they did receive data on about 36 percent of the international packages--not 100 percent as these other carriers have to do, but 36 percent. But that means that more than 318 million packages--318 million packages--are coming in with little or no screening at all and without this data. Even when the post office conducted a pilot program to screen for these drugs, by the way, 80 percent of the time, they testified, these packages that were targeted by Customs and Border Protection were able to be pulled off, but 20 percent of the time they did not get the information to law enforcement. Also, in many cases, the information provided was not useful to law enforcement. So we need to ensure it is 100 percent of these packages. We need to ensure that all of this information is getting to law enforcement, and we need to be sure that the information is useful and legible. The bipartisan STOP Act is actually an answer to this. The STOP Act is very simple. My coauthor of the STOP Act is Senator Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota. As we have both said, this is a simple, commonsense, and, quite frankly, long overdue reform. It simply says: Let's hold the post office to the same standard to which we hold these private carriers. Let's say they have to provide this data to law enforcement so that we can begin to address this issue and push back to keep this poison out of our communities. This bill has been approved for a floor vote on the Republican side. I think it is very close to being approved for a floor vote on the Democratic side. We are very close to a consent agreement to get this broader opioids package I talked about to the floor as well. I am very pleased that we are taking up that package this month. We need to ensure that whatever concerns people have, they are very frank about it. We have to get the politics out of this, folks. We have to be sure that we are moving forward, as we have been able to do on the CARA legislation and the CURES legislation, not just on a bipartisan basis but on a nonpartisan basis, because this scourge is affecting all of our constituents and it is one that we have to address here at the Federal level to help our States, to help our communities, and to help our families to be able to respond. The broader opioid package we talked about would include the STOP Act, but it also would include some other important legislation. It will include a number of provisions from CARA 2.0, such as national recovery housing standards and recovery support programs for high school and college students struggling with addiction, which have worked really well in Ohio. It will include $60 million for a plan of safe care for babies who are born dependent on substances. These babies are born with what is called neonatal abstinence syndrome. These are innocent, small babies who are often born premature. I have been in neonatal units around our hospitals in Ohio, and I have seen these babies. It is so sad. They have to be taken through withdrawal as tiny babies. We need to ensure that we do a better job of preventing this by working with the moms as they become pregnant and by ensuring that these kids get the help they need. It also includes the CRIB Act, bipartisan legislation that would help newborns suffering from addiction recover in the best care setting and provide support for their families. Again, this has been bipartisan. I have worked with Members on both sides of the aisle on the CRIB Act. It helps to ensure that these babies, when they are born with this neonatal abstinence syndrome, can get the care they need. It is working for these organizations that are doing it, but they need help--specifically, Medicaid reimbursement that they cannot get currently. The bill also reauthorizes a number of other important programs that have a proven record of success, like the Office of National Drug Control Policy, drug courts, drug-free communities prevention grants, and the high-intensity drug trafficking areas grants, where law enforcement is focusing on drug interdiction in some of the worst areas of our country for drug use and drug addiction. The STOP Act must be part of that Senate bill, as well, because, again, anything we offer to help deal with this issue of opioids has to include stopping the fentanyl from coming in. It is time for Congress to move. This should be noncontroversial. It is common sense. We know where these drugs are coming from, we know they are devastating our communities, and we know how we can stop this deadly trend. Let's pass the STOP Act. Let's pass this broader opioid package as soon as possible.

Mr. PORTMAN. Let's give Americans who are fighting addiction a chance to live up to their God-given potential.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, first, I would like to comment briefly on the last two speeches. The first was from Senator Leahy. He talked about the appropriations process. I commend him, as I did on the floor today in person, for the work he has done with Senator Shelby and others to actually move these appropriations bills, these spending bills, through the process. For the first time in a couple of decades, we have the opportunity to actually get our work done. It is incredibly important for all the right reasons, including having proper oversight of the Federal agencies and departments. He deserves credit for that. My colleague from Oregon just talked for a moment about the Kavanaugh hearings. He talked about the fact that he believes there is not enough information out about Brett Kavanaugh. Let me just say this. There has never been more information about any nominee to the Supreme Court, ever, in the history of our country. In fact, there are more pages of documents that have been provided on Brett Kavanaugh than for the past five Supreme Court confirmations combined--over 450,000 pages. Maybe my colleagues who raised these concerns decided a long time ago they were going to vote no and said they are and that is fine, but I don't think you can blame it on the fact that there isn't enough documentation. I know what they went, and I understand why they would want it. What they want is the documents that went through his office when he was Staff Secretary, which is a job at the White House where you are kind of like the traffic cop, where everything that goes into the Oval Office and everything that comes out is coordinated and disseminated properly. But those weren't his documents. Yes, it is not appropriate to see all of those documents. That would be, by the way, millions of additional pages--millions. But the 488,000 pages that have been provided--including all of the documents from his legal positions where he was a judge, where he was an associate counsel in the White House-- those have all been provided. That is good, and we should look at them and look at them carefully. It is not about the documents. It is about some fundamental differences about philosophy. I like his philosophy. He says that you shouldn't legislate from the bench and that you should be independent as a judge and be fair. He is totally qualified. The American Bar Association is sometimes criticized by Republicans as being too far to the left. It just said that he is ``eminently qualified.'' In fact, they gave him their highest rating, and they gave it unanimously. This just happened last Friday. Not everybody knows this. This person is not just qualified. I believe he is as qualified as anybody in the country to be on the U.S. Supreme Court. I am looking forward to having the opportunity to have this vote here on the floor. I hope it can be bipartisan, as it has been for the nominees that President Obama brought forward, including then-Solicitor General Kagan and Judge Sotomayor. They were big bipartisan votes. Let's get back to that when somebody is as qualified as this candidate clearly is.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I want to join my colleague from Minnesota and other Senators in talking about our colleague, an American icon, who played an outsized role in our Nation's great story. Navy captain, Congressman, and U.S. Senator, John McCain was first and foremost a patriot. Throughout his whole life, a very prolific life, he lived the motto of his 2008 Presidential campaign, which was simply ``Country First.'' I had the privilege of helping Senator McCain during that 2008 campaign. I was in the private sector then. I took time off to spend about 6 weeks with him, traveling around the country. I was on the campaign trail with a group of his loyal friends, including the first friend, Lindsey Graham. I had known John for many years, but you really get to know somebody in a different way during the intensity and the pressure of a national campaign. I played the role of his opponent, then-Senator Barack Obama, to prepare him for his debates, and I took that role very seriously-- maybe too seriously on occasion. It was my job to get under his skin and prepare him well for the debates, and I did it. Many of my colleagues will tell you he was a fighter and a tough competitor and did not mince words. I was on the other end of that. After some spirited debates, I was very glad that in the real world I was actually on his side. Needless to say, he wasn't happy with me during those debate sessions. I think Cindy McCain still hasn't forgiven me, by the way, for some of the things I said during the debate preparation, playing the role of then-Senator Obama. Even 2 years later, after I was first elected and joined him here in the U.S. Senate, he would introduce me to reporters here in the hall by saying: That's the jerk who played Obama. The John McCain I got to know through the intensity of that Presidential campaign was principled. He was patriotic, he was passionate, and his heart was in the right place. He also had a sense of humor that was intact. I remember when a bad poll would come out, he would gather us around and say: Don't worry. It's always darkest before it's pitch black. One of the memories I will never forget was during one of those debate preparations in a theater at the Morgan Library in New York City. At the start of the debate practice, I was backstage behind a curtain because I wanted it to be realistic; I would be coming out from behind the curtain and going to the podium, just as you would do in a Presidential debate. It was in late September 2008--I think it was September 24--just as the financial crisis was hitting and hitting hard. It is difficult to go back to that moment today, but the mindset at the time was that we were in a true crisis. The stock market had crashed, and the country was mired in financial turmoil. As I stood there behind the curtain, getting ready to come out, John McCain and two of his top campaign advisers were on the stage, getting into their own debate, and their debate was about whether to suspend the campaign, postpone the first debate that was scheduled to occur just a few days later, and fly back to Washington, DC, to try to work out some legislative solution to bolster the then really shaky financial system. I distinctly remember one of the advisers raising concerns that suspending the campaign would hurt them politically. They just couldn't do it. By the way, that was a point of view that was shared by pretty much every political pundit and probably would be today. I remember John McCain pushing back. He said: It is the right thing to do, to suspend this campaign. If we don't fix this, there won't be a country left to govern. It is the right thing to do. If we don't fix this, there won't be a country left to govern. He suspended his campaign and he returned to Washington to jump into the arena--like his hero, Teddy Roosevelt--and to try to fix things. John McCain was less worried about the political fallout than he was about what was at stake for our great country. Country first. He didn't win that campaign, but I think he taught all of us a lesson about how to lose. He gave a generous concession speech that put country first. He was someone a lot of us looked to for counsel and worked with on many issues, often national security issues, in my case. He was an expert. I worked on some issues like Ukraine, but also on other matters. Just in the last year, he played a key role in helping us enact reforms here in the U.S. Senate that are making a real difference right now in combating online sex trafficking. This was through legislation that I had introduced called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA. This SESTA legislation was something he was very involved with. Cindy McCain has a long history in this area. She is a real expert on it, and she was instrumental in the legislation and these reforms, as was the McCain Institute. John had a passion for it. He was the first Republican cosponsor of the bill and a passionate advocate. He believed in his heart that the sale of women and children online was just wrong, and it should never happen, certainly not in this country in this century. About 6 months ago, this legislation, the SESTA bill, was about to be voted on. After getting permission from my Democratic coauthor, Senator Richard Blumenthal, who agreed with me, I approached John McCain, and I asked him if we could name this anti-sex-trafficking legislation ``the McCain bill,'' after him and after Cindy and all the work he had done-- his passion for it. His response was immediate and classic McCain. He said: No, that wouldn't be right. I strongly support the legislation, but you all did the work. It isn't about me; it's about getting this done for those women and those children. Country first. For me, this Chamber is never going to be the same place without him. It is as simple as that, and Lindsey Graham said that well earlier. For me, this place, the Senate, and our country, for that matter, are better off because of him. He dedicated his life to those liberties that we enjoy as Americans, and he took it upon himself to defend and represent them and try to spread them around the globe. He joined the U.S. Navy to protect our country, spent more than 5 years as a prisoner of war, was stubbornly patriotic to his own detriment, and served in the House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate, representing not just his Arizona constituents, which he did well, but as he viewed it, the entire country. Country first. Now, as a gesture of our Nation's gratitude for the patriotic path he blazed, Senator McCain will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol, draped in the flag that he spent his life serving. John McCain was a hero in the flesh right here in this century, and I feel blessed for having known him. The last conversation I remember having with John was right out here in the anteroom off the Senate floor. It was during his very last days here. He was in a wheelchair. He had a brace on his leg, necessary because of the chemotherapy, and his voice was faltering. We sat and we talked, first about the SESTA legislation and Cindy's role. John always had a funny line. In this case he joked, saying: Passing that legislation will save my marriage. Then he started talking about his kids. He went into detail about what they were doing, especially his sons in the military and what they were accomplishing and his daughter Meghan and her work in the media world, how proud he was of them. His voice strengthened, and his eyes shown with pride as he talked about each of them. I muttered something about that being another part of his legacy, and he gave me that crooked smile. Family and country first. My wife Jane and I send our condolences to John's amazing wife Cindy, to his seven proud sons and daughters, and to the entire McCain family. Godspeed, John McCain.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I want to talk about a huge responsibility we have here in the Senate and a great opportunity that lies before us. The Senate is asked to confirm nominees both for executive branch appointments and for judicial branch appointments. We have heard a lot of great debate here on the Senate floor over the past 1\1/2\ years on some of these nominees. We were able to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, who I believe is doing a superb job. That was quite a debate here. In the meantime, we have been able to confirm a number of circuit court judges, some district court judges, and executive branch appointments. That is all important, but once again, we are asked to do something that is perhaps our most important task, and that is to fill yet another opening on the U.S. Supreme Court. There are only nine of these Justices, and this is a lifetime appointment. What the district court and circuit court do--it all comes up to this one Court. Our Founders created this Court in order to have a place where people could get a fair hearing and where we could have a dispassionate look at whether what we pass here fits within the Constitution and whether laws are being properly interpreted. These are hard and tough issues, and we want the right people there to do it. Once again, because of an opening that has occurred on the Supreme Court, we have the opportunity and responsibility to step up as a body and do that. In this case, we are asked to fill the seat of Justice Kennedy, who is viewed by many as being an important player in the Court because he was often the swing vote. He is a thoughtful guy. I think we are very fortunate in that one of Justice Kennedy's law clerks has been nominated by the President and has agreed to step forward for this confirmation process to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court and to fill that ninth spot. My hope is that this can be done in a way where we have honest and spirited but fact-driven debate on the floor of the Senate. I have to tell you that I am probably a little biased in this case because I know this nominee personally. I think a lot of him, not just as a judge, where he has an amazing record on the second highest court in the land, but also as a person. This is the third time I have come to the Senate floor to talk about him because I feel so strongly and I want to be sure that he gets a fair shake. I think that as the American people get to know him better, he will see a lot of support around the country for his confirmation because people will see that he is the kind of person they would want to have representing them, their family, and their children on the Supreme Court. I worked with him in the George W. Bush White House. He had a job there, which we will talk about in a second, called Staff Secretary, which is a job where you are responsible for being the traffic cop, basically, for the Oval Office. The documents that go into the Oval Office and go out of the Oval Office go through that office. It is not a substantive job in that sense, but it is an important job to the President to have somebody he trusts to decide what he looks at, what he doesn't look at, and how this material is then distributed out. He is someone who became close to President George W. Bush. President George W. Bush, as he has said many times publicly and to me and others privately, thinks the world of him. He got to know him very well. So I know Brett Kavanaugh more as a person, as a friend, as a father, and as a husband, but his legal background is incredibly impressive. I don't think anybody is better qualified to serve on the Supreme Court based on his legal background and his judicial philosophy. I know some of my colleagues have now met with him, as well. I am told that as of yesterday, 49 of the 51 Republicans who are here in the Senate have now met with Judge Kavanaugh. I am glad to hear that. By the way, the reactions have been very positive. I talked to most of my colleagues about their meetings with him, and a number of them have gone out of their way to speak publicly about how impressed they were with him, his demeanor, his background, and his character. I am also pleased to hear that several of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have now met with Judge Kavanaugh, as well. I think that is really important. I know that this is a partisan town these days, and it is tough to get things done, but in this case, I would hope that more of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle agree to sit down with him and talk to him. I think he needs to have the ability to talk one-on-one to some people who perhaps don't know him well, based on some of the comments I have seen about him. I think he could put some of their concerns to rest. For some, that may not be possible. They may have philosophical differences with his approach to the law. I get that, but I hope they will take the opportunity to sit down with him and talk to him. The Supreme Court is going to be faced with a lot of tough issues, and this needs to be a serious consideration. I am pleased that we are taking it seriously. Some have said that this is going too fast. I will tell you that the amount of time between when he was nominated and when his hearing will be--which is scheduled now for the week of September 4--is more time than elapsed during the previous few Supreme Court nominations--Justice Kagan, Justice Sotomayor, and Neil Gorsuch, about whom I talked a minute ago. There has been adequate time here relative to other confirmations. Second, some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are saying they want more documents to review his nomination. I would just make this point: More documents have been produced with regard to Judge Kavanaugh than any other Supreme Court nomination in history. That is what I am told by the Judiciary Committee. Some Democrats have suggested they need to review the literally millions of documents that passed through his office and passed through his desk when he held the job we talked about earlier as Staff Secretary for President George W. Bush. Again, this is a job that is sort of like the traffic cop. It is not to be substantively giving the President the documents from an agency, department, or other White House policy office, but rather to provide the documents to the President in a timely way to be sure the President is seeing the right documents and to be sure there is coordination. It is the flow of the documents. So I think seeing all those documents are not relevant, frankly, to the confirmation process because they don't relate to him. What they do relate to, obviously, are a lot of things that have to do with President George W. Bush, which I am sure were very personal documents where the President would write in the margin and so on. That would be interesting for people to look at. People could probably write a book about those things. That is not the purpose here. And that is why I think it is a fishing expedition to say: Let's see millions of documents that passed through this guy's desk, particularly in the context of a confirmation where more documents are being provided than any previous confirmation. I was told by the Judiciary Committee this morning that 430,000 pages of documents are being produced. I don't know how many of my colleagues are going to read through 430,000 pages of documents, but they are free to do so. By the way, this compares to 170,000 pages of documents that were produced with regard to former Solicitor General Elena Kagan's confirmation. Think about that: 430,000 versus 170,000. Elena Kagan also served as a senior aide in the White House. She worked for President Clinton. She had a senior position there--a substantive position, actually--in domestic policy. She also, of course, was the Solicitor General of the United States--yet 430,000 versus 170,000. I just hope people keep that in mind when they hear about the documents. What is really relevant to me is what he has done as a judge. He has spent 12 years on the DC Circuit Court, which is viewed by most as being the second highest court in the land. He has a lot of documents that are related to that. He has authored more than 300 published opinions. Clearly, these opinions are relevant. By the way, more than a dozen of his opinions on the Circuit Court have been endorsed by the Supreme Court, which is an unusually high number and a testament to his outstanding judicial record. In addition to the more than 10,000 pages of published opinions he authored or joined, out of the 430,000 pages of documents I mentioned, the Judiciary Committee tells me they have released more than 176,000 pages of appropriate documents from Judge Kavanaugh's time in the executive branch. So there are plenty of documents to look at. I encourage my colleagues to do so. As I said earlier, based on the traditions that we have here and on the amount of time spent between nomination and confirmation and based on the number of documents that have been produced, I think it has been an appropriate and transparent process. I am glad Chairman Grassley has made it so. My hope is that from his time on the bench and his time in the executive branch, both of these documents will be reviewed--the appropriate ones. Brett Kavanaugh is very well respected as a judge. He is the thought leader among his peers. I am sure you have heard a lot about that. There have been op-eds written about him from Democrats and Republicans alike saying: I know the guy. I clerked with the guy. I worked with the guy. I was one of his students. He is smart. He is thoughtful. He has said very clearly that he will be guided by the Constitution and the rule of law. He understands that the proper role of the Court is not to legislate from the bench. He has respect for precedent. He actually wrote the book, meaning he is one of the coeditors of this book looking at legal precedent and what they call stare decisis. He is someone who is very much in the mainstream of legal thought and very well regarded. His former colleagues, his current colleagues, his former students, and legal experts on both sides of the aisle have come out to say this about him. I think he has exactly the right qualifications, extensive experience, and a judicial philosophy that most Americans agree with and would want in a judge. Again, as important as that is to me, he is also a good person. He is compassionate. He is humble. He is someone who has a big heart. Maybe, most importantly, he has the humility to be able to listen, to hear people out. As I said earlier, there is no more important a quality in a Supreme Court Justice given the incredibly important issues they have before them. So, as his confirmation process continues, I hope my colleagues and the American people will get to know the Brett Kavanaugh that I know. I hope he is soon able to continue his lifetime of distinguished service as a member of the highest Court in the land. I am proud to strongly support his nomination for this important position. I yield back my time.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I have 8 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: Committee on Finance The Committee on Finance is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, August 22, 2018, at 9:30 a.m., to conduct a business meeting and hearing on the following nominations: Michael Faulkender, of Maryland, to be an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and Elizabeth Darling, of Texas, to be Commissioner on Children, Youth, and Families, Department of Health and Human Services. Committee on Foreign Relations The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, August 22, 2018, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Foreign Relations The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, August 22, 2018, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing on the following nominations: Michael A. Hammer, of Maryland, to be Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, John Cotton Richmond, of Virginia, to be Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking, with the rank of Ambassador at Large, Stephanie Sanders Sullivan, of Maryland, to be Ambassador to the Republic of Ghana, Donald R. Tapia, of Arizona, to be Ambassador to Jamaica, David Hale, of New Jersey, to be an Under Secretary (Political Affairs), Dereck J. Hogan, of Virginia, to be Ambassador to the Republic of Moldova, Philip S. Kosnett, of Virginia, to be Ambassador to the Republic of Kosovo, and Judy Rising Reinke, of Virginia, to be Ambassador to Montenegro, all of the Department of State, and a routine list in the Foreign Service; to be immediately followed by a hearing to examine the nominations of Kevin K. Sullivan, of Ohio, to be Ambassador to the Republic of Nicaragua, Francisco Luis Palmieri, of Connecticut, to be Ambassador to the Republic of Honduras, and Karen L. Williams, of Missouri, to be Ambassador to the Republic of Suriname, all of the Department of State. Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, August 22, 2018, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing on the following nominations: William Bryan, of Virginia, to be Under Secretary for Science and Technology, and Peter Gaynor, of Rhode Island, to be Deputy Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency, both of the Department of Homeland Security. Committee on Indian Affairs The Committee on Indian Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, June 27, 2018, at 2:15 p.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on the Judiciary The Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, August 22, 2018, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing on the following nominations: Jonathan A. Kobes, of South Dakota, to be United States Circuit Judge for the Eighth Circuit, Kenneth D. Bell, to be United States District Judge for the Western District of North Carolina, Carl J. Nichols, to be United States District Judge for the District of Columbia, and Martha Maria Pacold, Mary M. Rowland, and Steven C. Seeger, each to be a United States District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois. Committee on Rules and Administration The Committee on Rules and Administration is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, August 22, 2018, at 10:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Subcommittee on Public Lands, Forests, and Mining The Subcommittee on Public Lands, Forests, and Mining of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, August 22, 2018, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I would like to agree with my colleague from South Dakota, who has talked about the importance of the tax relief and regulatory reform and what that has meant for our economy. We are growing at rates that some have said were impossible. People said: Well, you just have to get used to the new normal. We are going to have the economy grow at 1 or 2 percent. It was 4.1 percent last quarter, and it looks as though we are going to continue to see strong growth. That is because of policies that were enacted here, and I think they are making a difference. I am going to talk about something today that actually is making it more difficult to find the workers to be able to get that economy moving forward the way all of us would like to see because as we have lower unemployment, as we have a growing workforce, we are seeing a number of Americans who are out of the workforce altogether. There is some new data from the Department of Labor and from the Brookings Institution, some studies that have shown that between the opioid epidemic--which is heroin, prescription drugs, now this new fentanyl--and other issues, there are people who are not showing up even to apply for jobs. They are not even showing up in the unemployment figures, and they are at historically high levels--8\1/2\ million men between the ages of 25 and 55, so able-bodied men between 25 and 55. This recent study from both the Department of Labor and from the Brookings Institution shows that almost one-half of those men acknowledge taking pain medication on a daily basis. In one of the studies, when pushed, two-thirds of those men said that they were taking prescription drug medication on a daily basis. Think about that. This is shocking: 8\1/2\ million men out of work between the ages of 25 and 55--about one-half of them are saying that they are taking pain medication on a daily basis; two-thirds are taking prescription drugs. That is not overreported. In my view, that is underreported because there are legal issues involved with the opioid epidemic. Also, there is a stigma attached to the addiction. So in order to fully take advantage of this growing economy--and my colleague is absolutely right about that--we have to deal with this opioid epidemic. I will tell you something that is even more tragic is that the Centers for Disease Control just came out with a new report last week talking about what is happening around the country, and it was another year of tragic results for American families, for communities represented by Members all across the country here in the U.S. Senate. This was the Centers for Disease Control. The new report shows that last year--they just got the final numbers for it--the number of people who overdosed and died from the opioid crisis that we have was greater than the year before, not just at record levels but at levels that really create this epidemic level. Seventy-two thousand Americans died of overdoses last year. This is the map that shows where it is, and it is all over our country. There were a couple of States that made some progress. Those are the States in purple here. But in all of these other States, you actually see an increase--overall a 9-percent increase in overdose deaths in our country from 2016 to 2017. The problem is not getting better; it is getting worse. My own State of Ohio increased 9.5 percent from 2016 to 2017. Sadly, that puts Ohio third in the country for total drug overdoses and fourth nationally for the number of overdose deaths per capita, per 100,000 residents. Seventy-two thousand Americans dying of overdoses--that is more than the deadliest year for car accidents or gun deaths ever. Now, 72,000 Americans died last year by overdose. That is more than the total number of American casualties in the Vietnam war. Remember that this is just 1 year--just last year. Overdoses are now the top cause of accidental death in the United States and the No. 1 cause of all deaths for all Americans under the age of 50. The most recent CDC report illustrates something a lot of us already knew. This is a national crisis, and it is gripping every single State represented in this Chamber. By the way, this is despite a lot of good work that has been done by this body, by the House, and by the administration. Over the last couple of years, Congress has taken on this issue. We passed legislation that is helping. One of the pieces of legislation is called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or CARA legislation, which I coauthored with a colleague on the other side, Sheldon Whitehouse. The other one is called the Cures Act, which is funding going directly to the States. By the way, Ohio just got another $26 million this year from the Cures Act, and we are putting it to work. In the appropriations bill that is before this body now in the Labor-HHS bill, we again provide funding for the CARA legislation, which does funding directly to groups that are doing a good job on prevention, education, treatment and recovery. It also helps our firefighters and other first responders with the miracle drug Narcan that they need to reverse the effects of an overdose. It is all good, and it is working. I was recently back home and had a chance to visit, as I do regularly, some of the institutions and some of the entities that are using this funding. Just to give an example, I went to a town called Whitehall, outside of Columbus, OH. We had a roundtable at a fire station, and I got to see what is going on. They are taking this grant money and training their EMS personnel--the firefighters and paramedics--to be able to handle people coming in who are addicted and get them into treatment. This firehouse has opened up its doors, no questions asked. If you come in there, they will get you treatment. While I was there, coincidentally, a young man showed up. He had been through treatment three times, and it hadn't worked for him. He said he was ready--ready to go. He was shaking and he was nervous, but I watched the firefighter deal with him. They spoke to him, and I spoke to him. I saw him get into the ambulance and go to another entity that is called the Addiction Stabilization Center in downtown Columbus, which is also doing innovative work and is also funded by these programs, in this case with the Cures Act funding. It is an old hospital they converted into a 50-bed treatment center with an emergency center. So people can come in from the street, and they have a place to go into treatment immediately. It takes away the excuse. They have about an 80-percent rate of people getting into treatment. That is incredibly high. One of the big problems with the current crisis is that people who are addicted and who overdose and are saved by this miracle drug Narcan, which reverses the effects of the overdose, typically then go right back into the same environment. How do you get them into treatment? How do you get them back on track? How do you keep them in treatment? How do you ensure that treatment is successful? That is what the CARA and Cures legislation is helping to do. I will say that despite the positive stories back home, despite the additional effort we have put in, still there is this data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that last year was worse than the year before. Why is that so despite the efforts in Congress and at every level of government? In all of our communities something is being done. People are starting to step forward. The private sector is starting to get more engaged. That is all good. I think the primary reason for this is because of the rise of a particular drug--the new scourge. It is the synthetic form of opioids. Just as we were making progress in reducing some of these overdoses and deaths and dealing with the terrible consequences of the opioid epidemic, what happened? We saw a steep increase in a new drug coming into the market. It is more deadly--50 times more deadly than heroin-- and it is relatively inexpensive. That is a fatal combination for thousands of our constituents who are dying every year now from the fastest growing and deadliest drug in this epidemic--fentanyl. This breaks down the types of drugs and the type of drug and the increase or decrease. The one trend that stands out, as you see here, is the growth in synthetic opioids. In fact, with regard to other drugs, including heroin, you can see a slight decrease--basically, a flattening. For other opioids, there is an increase and, then, a slight flattening. With regard to synthetic opioids, there is a steep increase, and there is a steep increase recently. Last year there were 30,000 overdose deaths from synthetic drugs like fentanyl. That is up from approximately 20,000 overdose deaths from fentanyl the year earlier. So there are 10,000 more deaths from fentanyl between 2016 and 2017. To give you an idea of how rapidly this drug is infiltrating our country, in 2013 there were about 3,000 fentanyl overdose deaths nationally. This means that from 2013 to 2017, there has been an 850- percent increase in overdose deaths due to fentanyl. Last year, fentanyl was involved in more than 60 percent of the 48,600 overdose deaths that the CDC says were from opioids. In my State of Ohio, we think that is consistent. We think it is over 60 percent, or closer to two-thirds. Looking at the new data coming in this year from Ohio from the various health departments around the State and from our coroners, it looks like it is an even higher percentage in 2018. When I am home I hear about this a lot. People come up to me and tell me stories that will break your heart about family members. I have had two tele-townhall meetings in the last month, and both of these involved thousands of Ohioans. People aren't selected for anything other than that they get a phone call and they are asked if they want to talk to their Senator. We pick up the phone and we have 15,000 to 20,000 people on the call, and in both of these last two tele-townhall meetings, somebody called in with a very similar story--a tragic story about the pain and suffering they experienced from a loved one passing away from a fentanyl overdose. Pauline from Zanesville called in, and she told me her brother had recently passed away. She wondered what we were doing about it. Sam from Shelby County called at the next townhall meeting and told me that his son had tragically overdosed from fentanyl and died. By the way, in both of those cases, they didn't mention that up front. They called and had a discussion with me about some policy issues, and it just kind of came out. Their voices cracked. You could tell when they are overcome with emotion at the end of our conversation. They said: Well, my son-- in this guy's case--just died from an overdose of fentanyl. By the way, in both cases, the brother and the son did not know they had taken fentanyl. They didn't know they had used fentanyl. In one case, with regard to the brother, he thought it was only cocaine that he was using. Instead, it was laced with fentanyl. In the other case, it was heroin, and the person had shot up heroin before and been successful in not dying of an overdose, at least, but in this case fentanyl was laced in the heroin. Now I tell you this because this new deadly drug is not just about pure fentanyl. It is about evil dealers and drug traffickers actually mixing the fentanyl with other drugs as well. When the coroners' reports come in, often they are finding out it is fentanyl, not the drug the person thought he or she was taking. I had first responders telling me that somebody wakes up and says: Thank you for saving my life on this Narcan. I am OK now. Unfortunately, that is not what you hope would happen. You hope they will say: I want to go into treatment. But they wake up, after having been saved by Narcan, and they say: I don't know why I overdosed, because I wasn't taking a strong drug. They are told: Well, this tested for fentanyl. They say: Well, I wasn't taking fentanyl. That is because now any street drug--any street drug--that is taken has the risk of containing fentanyl, which can be deadly. I hope people who are listening today tell everyone they can think of--at work, in their family, people in the community--just to be sure that this message is getting out. This is a new and deadly threat out on our streets, and it can be in any drug. We want to turn the tide in this drug epidemic that is depriving the people I represent and the people represented by this Chamber of their God-given purpose in life, whatever it is. It certainly isn't to overdose and die from opioids. We have to confront much more aggressively this rise of fentanyl. This is the reality. None of us wish it were, but it is. Shockingly, when you do research on this, you will find out that these synthetic drugs come into our country from other countries directly through the U.S. mail system. That is what law enforcement folks have told us--shocking. It is not mostly coming from any place except foreign countries sending it through the U.S. mail system. That is where the majority of this is coming from. We looked into this issue on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. I chair that subcommittee. We spent 18 months studying this. We found out how easy it was to purchase fentanyl online and have it shipped to the United States of America. We learned through this 18- month undercover investigation that these drugs can be found through a simple Google search and that overseas sellers essentially guaranteed delivery if the fentanyl was sent through a Federal agency--the U.S. Postal Service. We found out from talking to law enforcement and our own research that this drug is primarily coming from China--one country--where there are scientists and chemical companies that are putting together this deadly mixture and are sending it to our shores. Why do the traffickers prefer the U.S. Postal Service? Because it has lower screening standards than the other private carriers. International packages that enter the United States are subject to screening. Every private entity--such as FedEx, UPS, DHL, or others-- has to provide law enforcement with advanced electronic data as to where the package is from, what is in the package, and where it is going. With that data, they can use big data from around the country and around the world, including from intelligence sources, and they can help to identify suspicious packages. Otherwise it is like finding a needle in a haystack. The post office, by the way, brings about 900 million packages a year into the country. It is like finding a needle in a haystack, unless you have that information in advance and electronically. It allows Customs and Border Protection, which are doing the best job they can, to identify those suspicious packages, to stop them in transit, to keep these synthetic drugs out of our communities, and to stop the poison. I have seen them in action. I have visited the Customs and Border Protection port of entry and have seen how they can get packages. They have to take these packages into a sealed room that has adequate ventilation, and they have to wear protective gear to be able to even open these packages because this stuff is so deadly. I have been to Columbus, OH, and I have seen there, in one of these distribution centers for one of the private carriers--not Customs and Border Protection--people putting their lives on the line for us and finding deadly packages and taking them offline to avoid this poison coming into our community. Law enforcement, as you can imagine, is desperate to stop these deadly drugs from reaching our shores in the first place. That is the best way to stop it. They need this critical information in advance to be able to do that. Why doesn't the post office do it? Because we haven't required them to. By law, after 9/11, we have required all private carriers to provide this information. Frankly, we were more focused on explosives than we were on contraband such as drugs. But we didn't require the U.S. Postal Service. Instead, we said: Study this issue and get back to us. That was 16 years ago. For the last several years, some of us have been pushing the U.S. Postal Service hard on this, and unfortunately, some still continue to oppose this effort to provide 100 percent electronic data. Because of congressional pressure, they have recently been getting more data on some of these packages. Based on testimony before our subcommittee, last year the Postal Service received electronic data in advance on about 36 percent of the packages that came in, meaning that the United States received more than 318 million international packages with no or little screening. Even when the post office conducted these pilot programs to screen for the drugs to get to the 36 percent number, 80 percent of the time they presented the packages to Customs and Border Protection and 20 percent of the time they did not present the package. So only 30 percent of the time was screening being provided, and still in 20 percent of those cases, they didn't present the packages to Customs and Border Protection. Instead, they went into circulation in our community. We have a simple solution: 100 percent screening. This is a deadly epidemic. Can you imagine tens of thousands of people dying from something that comes in from overseas through our own U.S. Postal Service and we are not stepping up to say: Whoa, let's do everything we can to screen these packages. The best monitoring devices, the best information--that is what we are asking for. The legislation we have is called the STOP Act. It is a bipartisan bill that I authored with my colleague Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota. It closes the loophole from the U.S. Postal Service that drug traffickers are using and exploiting to ship these deadly drugs into our communities. By holding the Postal Service to the same standard as private carriers and requiring them to provide that advance electronic data for all international packages entering the United States of America, we can keep the fentanyl out of our communities. By the way, talk to your letter carrier about this issue. They will tell you they want to stop this. They don't want to be carrying this poison. The person who walks door-to-door in your community or delivers mail to your post office does not want to have fentanyl in their package. First, it is dangerous for them, but more important to them is that they know what it is doing to our communities. They don't want to be any part of it. The STOP Act passed the House of Representatives earlier this summer, and more than one-third of the Senators in this Chamber are now cosponsors of this legislation. In my view, it is long past time for the Senate to pass this legislation so that it can become law and begin to make a real difference in our communities. I would like to thank President Trump for his leadership on this issue. Some of you may have seen yesterday that he sent out a statement--a tweet--supporting moving ahead with the STOP Act because of the scourge of this fentanyl coming into our neighborhoods, coming into our communities, our homes. He recognized the importance of this issue, by the way, and talked about it during the 2016 campaign and has talked about it a lot since then. He appointed an opioid commission to look into this issue. That commission endorsed the STOP Act specifically. I want to thank Governor Christie for working with us on that. That was the final report in November of last year, and still we have not passed it. On Monday, when President Trump called on the Senate to pass this legislation without delay, I noticed there was more interest and reporters talking about this issue in the halls. I am glad about that. The President is waiting, pen in hand. He is ready to sign the STOP Act. Let's not make him wait any longer. Last year, an average of 81 Americans died every single day from synthetic opioids. From what I can tell back home, this year is no better and may, in fact, be worse. We can't wait around for this problem to get worse. We can't do nothing. We have to do something. The legislation we passed here to help with prevention, treatment, and recovery is good. It is beginning to work. But we also need to reduce the supply and at least increase the cost of this deadly drug, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin. We need to pass the STOP Act. We need to pass it now so we can make a meaningful difference in combating fentanyl, the new scourge of this opioid epidemic. I yield back my time.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I want to talk today about the opioid epidemic that has gripped my State of Ohio and so many other States represented by Members of the Chamber. This is now the No. 1 killer in Ohio. It has surpassed car accidents. It is the No. 1 cause of death for Americans under the age of 50. Unfortunately, although some are saying we have turned the corner, we haven't turned the corner in a lot of parts of my State. In fact, there are areas of my State where there have been more overdose deaths this year than there were last year. As tragic as last year was--and there was a big increase from the year before--I do believe that in this Chamber, we have made progress in passing legislation, which is beginning to make a difference. I will talk a little bit about that today. I also believe we have much more to do. In the last couple of years, Congress has gotten busy on this issue. In 2016, we passed legislation called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. It was the culmination of 4 years' worth of work-- conferences here in Washington; bringing together some of the best minds from around the country; looking at some of the best practices to say ``How do you actually focus on this issue of the opioid epidemic in a comprehensive way?'' because we know that is what has to be done. It was about evidence-based prevention, strategies, evidence-based treatment, and longer term recovery. It was actually the first time Congress had ever passed legislation dealing with longer term recovery, and that is because we heard so much testimony--I, back home in Ohio, and Members from around the country but also here in Washington--from experts about the fact that when you go into treatment, particularly for this opioid epidemic, the chances of success are increased dramatically if you have longer term recovery. Think of sober housing opportunities, for instance, after somebody comes out of treatment, to help get them on the right track. That bipartisan legislation I introduced with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is now working back home. It is now going out to programs that are evidence-based, proven programs, to try to give them a little boost, working with local government, State government, nonprofits, and others, leveraging some of the Federal money so that it ends up making a bigger difference in trying to turn the tide on this epidemic. Maybe most important, this legislation, which is called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, CARA--maybe the most important thing about CARA is that it recognizes addiction as a disease. In some respect, it was the first time we had done that as a Congress as well. Recognizing it as a disease changes the way you view treatment because it is something that is not a moral failing. In fact, it is often caused by an accident or an injury--somebody getting a prescription pill that changes something in their brain, and they become addicted. The point is, in order to solve it, in order to address it, treatment is the avenue that is going to be more successful. I think treating it like a disease is one of the essential aspects of it. Also, pulling away the stigma, getting some of the stigma out of the way, enables more people to come forward to get treatment for their family members, to seek treatment for a loved one, and enables doctors and others in the medical profession to treat people in a way that helps get them on the right path to recovery. That legislation passed. In fact, earlier this year, in the bipartisan budget agreement, there was additional funding put aside for CARA and for other opioid programs, including one I will talk about in second, and that was very important. That 2-year funding bill provided $6 billion over 2 years. That is unprecedented. We have never done anything like that around here. Are we making progress? Yes. Are we there yet? No. In my view, the CARA legislation was the right first step, but there is a second step now that is needed, which is called CARA 2.0, the Comprehensive Addiction Recovery Act 2.0. It learns from some of the things that we have found in the field as CARA has been implemented. It picks up some additional provisions. For instance, it talks about the need to deal even more substantially with overprescribing because most people who die in your State or mine from an opioid overdose started with prescription drugs. That was their first opioid. Earlier, I mentioned that people who might have had an accident or injury are given opioids. We need to stop that overprescribing in order to get at the core of so much of this problem. Probably 8 out of 10 people in Ohio who overdose on heroin or fentanyl started on prescription drugs--sometimes obtained legally and sometimes not. It breaks my heart to have a young person come to my office and say ``I had my wisdom tooth taken out''--this has happened to me fairly frequently because people know I am focused on this issue--``and this doctor gave me opioids, pills, for a wisdom tooth removal.'' In the cases recently in my office, it has been a young person saying ``I was too smart to take them.'' Thank goodness. Be careful. To the parents out there and the kids who are listening, be careful. Our CARA 2.0 legislation includes, by the way, a 3-day limit on prescription drugs for acute pain. Acute pain would be after a procedure like that, as an example. The dentists I know--including the new head of the American Dental Association, who has a passion for this issue because he is from Cincinnati, my hometown--understand the impact of this. A lot of people I talk to say you should not be using opioids at all in that case. When I had my wisdom teeth taken out, I wasn't given opioids, nor were many in my generation. Yet that seems to be normal today. This is an example in CARA 2.0 of going even further, but in the meantime, we have the CARA legislation out there. It is being funded. That is a good thing. The other legislation is called the Cures legislation. That funding goes directly to the State and then is delivered to various groups around the State, usually through the Alcohol, Drug Addiction, and Mental Health Boards, the ADAMHS Boards. Some of you know about those and probably have been involved in those. That was passed at the end of 2016. It was passed as part of the 21st Century Cures legislation, which was broader legislation, but we made sure that opioids were included there. I thank my colleagues for working with me on that. There were so many, but Lamar Alexander, the Senator from Tennessee, stands out as an appropriator and authorizer who knew we needed to get some more funding out to these States, particularly States like mine and his that are so hard hit. I thank Shelly Moore Capito from West Virginia, a State that probably is, unfortunately, No. 1 now in terms of overdose deaths. Ohio is right behind it. West Virginia is another State that has been hit hard. So many colleagues of mine fought to ensure that there was funding in that legislation. It is making a difference as well. Last year, my home State of Ohio received $26 million, for instance, in Cures funding and just recently, another $26 million, which is being distributed now. These two laws, CARA and Cures, are helping and encouraging innovative programs across Ohio. I have had an opportunity to visit a lot of these programs around the State. I have been to dozens of treatment centers and to roundtable discussions and communities to talk about how this funding can be used most effectively. Let me give a couple of examples. The week before last, I was in the Columbus area, in a town called Whitehall. I went to the fire station to have a roundtable discussion about this with community leaders and to see how their program, which is called SAFE, is working. It is called the SAFE Station Program, and it was made possible with a $400,000 grant through the CARA legislation. This funding has been used to train our firefighters, EMS personnel, so they understand how to deal with the opioid issues so that when there is an overdose, they can help somebody go into treatment. This is important for a couple of reasons. This seems very simple. Unfortunately, there is a big gap right now in most of our communities. I encourage you to plug in to your own community to find out whether it is happening in yours because it probably is; that is, someone who overdoses is now typically saved by this miracle drug called Narcan. Our legislation, CARA, provides more funding for Narcan. We need this. It is necessary, but it is not sufficient. So many people who overdose are saved by this miracle drug that reverses the effect of the overdose, but then what happens? In the vast majority of cases, these people go right back to the old environment--maybe to a dysfunctional family, maybe to a gang, maybe to the old neighborhood. If you talk to EMS personnel, firefighters, and police officers, who are the ones responsible for finding these people and treating them, they will tell you that they are not happy about giving someone Narcan again and again. They want to see that person get into treatment. It makes no sense for any of us and certainly not for the taxpayer. It also makes no sense for that addict and that addict's family and friends and employer, if there is one, because that person is not getting the help he or she needs. How do you close that gap? They are doing it at this firehouse in Whitehall, OH. They are doing it in two ways--one, opening up the doors to the firehouse and saying: Come on in. When I was there, just by chance, a young man, who described himself to me as a heroin addict--and he had heroin on his person--had arrived just before me at this firehouse. Just by chance, he had come in off the streets because he felt it was a safe place. He wasn't going to get arrested. No one was to going to ask him a lot of questions. But they were going to get him into treatment. He said he was ready. Of course I asked him, as I often do with addicts and recovering addicts, how many times he had been through treatment and what worked or didn't work. He had been through it three times already, and it hadn't worked. He said that the difference now is that he believes he is ready. You have to believe him. You have to get someone in treatment when they are ready. That is why having the doors open at the firehouse is very important. He was nervous, but he was transported right after I had a chance to visit with him. I got to see how these EMS personnel compassionately and professionally dealt with him as he was getting ready to be transported to what is called the Addiction Stabilization Center in downtown Columbus, run by Maryhaven. Interestingly, CARA funded the fire station and their program. Cures is what made possible the Addiction Stabilization Center--$1.2 million in Cures funding--in downtown Columbus, which is taking people from all over Franklin County and the Columbus area and making a tremendous difference in getting people not just through the Narcan and saving their lives but getting them into treatment and recovery. That is the key, closing that gap. It is tragic to me that the gap is so prevalent and is causing such a problem around our State and our country. The other thing they do, of course, at this fire station is that when they have someone who has overdosed and has been given Narcan, they bring them through this system and take them to the Maryhaven stabilization center and get them the help they need. It has worked remarkably well. Not everybody agrees to go, but the vast majority do. That is a huge difference from what normally happens in our country. It is an example of the kind of comprehensive program that is going to help close the gaps and catch those who are falling between the cracks. It is no surprise that the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Jerome Adams, said recently, when he visited this program in Columbus, that this is ``one of the best programs in the country for lowering stigma and enabling recovery.'' I appreciate the Surgeon General's involvement and his willingness to come to Ohio to help us and see how these programs we have passed in the Congress are working. I have seen similar successes made possible through Cures funding and CARA funding around the State. Recently, I was in Summit County, which is in Northeast Ohio--going from Columbus, Central Ohio, to Northeast Ohio--at Summa Barberton Hospital. They just received a grant from Cures. They are using that for a pilot program to employ a full-time addiction care coordinator during the overnight hours and to ensure that there is medication-assisted treatment available at the emergency room itself. It had not been available previously. What they are finding is that somebody comes into the emergency room, and typically that person walks right back out the door after being saved by this miracle drug, Narcan--also known as naloxone--never to be heard from again until there is another overdose. Sometimes, by the way, according to the nurses, that overdose might happen as soon as the next several hours in the parking lot at the hospital. That is no solution. So what they are doing instead is bringing people in, sending them to a counselor, and I got to meet the three women who are counselors there, incredibly empathetic women who are taking these people in, saying: No stigma here. No questions asked. How can we help you? Wouldn't you like to be back with your kids or back in a job or back in a place where you can respect yourself? They have had remarkable success by saying: We can provide you, right now, right here--in their case--Suboxone, which is a medication- assisted treatment program where you wean somebody off a drug like Suboxone in order for them to get off their addiction and not go through the horrible pain of withdrawal, at least not as difficult a withdrawal. So they have had great success with that program as well--again, closing that gap. I encourage you to look in your community for these kinds of programs and support them. They are also collaborating with United Way of Summit County and engaging the business community to help with this issue. That makes me really happy. Every time I meet with business groups now, I try to raise this issue. So we talked about the importance of tax reform and tax cuts and regulatory relief, and all of that is great. Our economy is picking up, but do you know what? It is incredible. The No. 1 problem we have in our economy right now is what? Lack of workers. Every employer--small, large, medium size--is telling me: We need workers. There is a skills gap, of course, and there are other issues, but I think the single biggest issue is this opioid epidemic. That is based on a couple of studies--one is from the Department of Labor, one from the Brookings Institution--which show that those who are out of work altogether, who aren't even applying for jobs--and, by the way, among men, that may be at historic levels. About 8\1/2\ million men are literally not trying to get a job--8\1/2\ million men between 25 and 55, prime working years, and you know what half of them say, 46 percent, based on one survey, 44 percent another survey--and that is not overreported. In my view, that has to be underreported because there is a stigma, there is a legal issue connected, but about half of them say they are taking pain medication on a daily basis. Two-thirds acknowledge it is prescription pain medication in one study. So this is a huge issue in the business community. It should be. If you want to have more workers out there who are ready to go to work, able to go to work, help on this addiction issue. Yes, provide funding for some of these programs that work but also dig into it in your community. Find out what is working, what is not working. If you have this gap--which I guarantee you do--between those who are overdosing, getting the Narcan, and those getting into treatment, address that. Find innovative ways to do it. If you are finding there is another gap between shorter term treatment, say, 6, 7, 8, 10 weeks and the longer term recovery, help address that. Encourage longer term recovery programs. It can be outpatient programs. It might be residential programs, but we know that works to really get people back on track. Find out what is going on in your local community in terms of prevention. Is anybody going to the middle schools and talking about what a ruinous mistake this can be for your life to go down this path and to be careful about prescription drugs? If we don't all get involved--and we all have a reason to get involved, every single one of us--to ensure that people can live out their God-given potential in life, then we will not have done everything we can to try to reverse this trend. Again, what I am seeing back home is that what we have done here so far is starting to work. I have to tell you, I believe we would already be seeing a reversal and seeing fewer overdoses across the board if not for one thing; that is, the influx, in the last few years particularly, of this new drug. It is a synthetic form of opioids. It is not heroin. It is not prescription drugs. It is usually called fentanyl, sometimes carfentanil, but what it is, is something a person made. Here is the shocking news. Fentanyl is 50 times more powerful than heroin--sometimes worse. It is very inexpensive. It is readily accessible. It is coming not across the Mexican border, and not, as far as we know, being made in this country. It is coming from overseas, mostly from China, and it is coming through our U.S. mail system. Now, let's be clear. This is the new crisis. Probably two-thirds of the deaths in my home State of Ohio from overdoses are now linked to fentanyl. We had a tele-townhall meeting earlier this month. The questions came in. People were making statements and so on. One guy called, and he wanted to talk about the drug issue. He was very professional and very specific about what he wanted to talk about. Then, toward the end of his comments and questions, I could hear his voice crack, and I just knew something was up. Sure enough, he said: By the way, my son died of a fentanyl overdose just a couple of weeks ago. He talked about how his son thought he was just taking heroin--not that heroin isn't incredibly dangerous in and of itself--but the tragic story that Sam, from Shelby County, OH, told me was that his son died of an overdose of fentanyl. Now his father was on the call trying to figure out how to get at this. He wanted to talk about the STOP Act, which is legislation we have introduced in this Chamber to try to at least stop some of the flow of this deadly poison into our community. Again, we know where it is being made, we know where it is coming from. Law enforcement is desperate for some better tools to be able to stop some of this poison from coming in. We spent about a year in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations studying this issue. It is a subcommittee I chair. We got some undercover folks involved with us to help us from the Department of Homeland Security. We were able to go online and find out how this tragic criminal network works, and we were able to access a couple hundred websites online that were happy to sell fentanyl freely online. By the way, we were able to trace the payment systems for people who had bought from these particular websites and, therefore, were able to track who was actually receiving these shipments. We were able to find six different instances where somebody had actually gotten fentanyl from one of these sites, and then, by looking at the local news, determined that person died of an overdose within a few days or a few weeks of receiving that shipment. We were able to do this just by going online and finding out these people who had bought these drugs from these people, that they themselves had died of overdoses of fentanyl. Think of all the thousands of others who have died who have received drugs through some of these criminal networks. Frankly, what we found as we looked into this deeper and deeper was exactly what you would expect, which is these traffickers are smart. There is a lot of money in this. They know how to send these drugs into our neighborhoods, and they want to do it through the U.S. Postal Service. Why? Because the other carriers--think FedEx or DHL or UPS and private carriers--are required by law, passed in the U.S. Congress, to tell law enforcement what packages are coming in, from where they are coming, what is in it, where it is going through advanced electronic data before the package comes to this country. We required that after 9/11--frankly, not because of fentanyl but because of the concern about people having other contraband, including explosives in packages--all the private carriers say to law enforcement: Here is what is coming in. Here is where it is from. Here is what is in it. Here is where it is going. With that information, law enforcement can then find suspicious packages, and I have seen them do it. I have gone to distribution centers in my State and have been able to see some of these brave personnel from Customs and Border Protection. They are brave because some of this stuff is really dangerous. By the way, when they take a package in to inspect it, they have to put on a protective suit. They have to be in a room that is well ventilated so they don't overdose and die from some of this fentanyl that is coming in. By knowing where it is from, where it is going, what is in it, and by having access to Big Data all around the world--not just the country but the world--to know where the hot spots are, where maybe some Chinese company that has some evil chemists who are engaged in this, maybe they are shipping it through another country, they find that out, if they see it coming from another country, they can find those packages as well. They are remarkably successful at finding some of this stuff and getting it offline rather than having it go into our community, but the Postal Service was not required to do this after 9/ 11. Instead, the Postal Service was told: You ought to study the issue because it is important and get back to us. We are still waiting for that study. That was over 15 years ago. So when you go online, what we found out is, these websites are happy to send it to you through the Postal Service. In fact, they virtually guarantee delivery if you use the Postal Service. If you use one of these other carriers, they don't. That is sad. A U.S. Government agency is being used as a conduit to ship poison into our communities. It is the No. 1 killer in my home State. So our legislation is very simple. It simply requires the Postal Service to provide 100 percent advanced electronic data to our law enforcement so they can do the job they want to do. Law enforcement is desperate for these tools. You can imagine. They want to stop this poison. By the way, the letter carriers I know--you ask your letter carrier-- they don't want to carry this stuff, and they certainly don't want to have this poison going into the communities they serve. We have about one-third of the U.S. Senate now as cosponsors of this legislation. Will it solve the entire problem? No. We talked earlier about the need for more prevention, education, treatment, the longer term recovery, but at least--at least--let's keep some of this poison from coming in. At a minimum, it is going to raise the price, which is one of our huge problems with fentanyl today. It is not only 50 times more powerful than heroin and people chase that high, but it is very inexpensive relative to other forms of opioids. So my hope is, we will have this legislation on the floor in the next few weeks; that we will, in a bipartisan way, deal with this issue and tell someone like Sam from Shelby County, whom I talked about earlier who called into the tele-townhall that we are doing something, so the next dad is not going to have this kind of tragedy befall his son. By the way, 2 weeks earlier, at another tele-townhall meeting, a woman called in--same thing. At the end of it, she talked about her brother who had died of an overdose of fentanyl that had been put in another drug. So it is being spread in not just heroin, not just cocaine, not just crystal meth but other drugs as well, and that is one of the great challenges law enforcement has today. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about some of the positive things this Congress has done, the CURES Act, the CARA Act, how I have seen it back home making a difference in the lives of the people I represent, but also there is a need for us to do more. Certainly fund those programs, continue to provide the funding at these historic levels because it is necessary, because the epidemic absolutely deserves that kind of attention, and it is necessary. Second, let's take these other steps. Let's stop this overprescribing. Let's pass the STOP Act to ensure that we can deal with this fentanyl crisis. Let's ensure that we can turn the corner, turn the tide, begin to save lives. I think we can if we continue to make progress and continue to focus on these issues that make such a difference to our constituents. I yield back. Recognition of the Majority Leader

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I want to talk about an issue that has gotten a lot of attention recently, and that is our U.S. trade policy. It is an important topic that affects every one of us. It affects our economy, it affects jobs, and it certainly affects our foreign policy. I have followed it pretty closely over the years. I was a trade lawyer when I first started practicing law. I was U.S. Trade Representative, or USTR, under the George W. Bush administration, and now I am a member of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over these trade issues. Most importantly, of course, I am a Senator from Ohio, which is a State that has a big manufacturing sector, a big agriculture sector, and a State where a lot of jobs depend on having a good trade policy. In fact, in Ohio, about 25 percent of our State's factory workers are export workers. In other words, they make products that get exported. Today in Ohio, about one of every three acres that are planted gets exported--soybeans, corn, and wheat. These are good jobs too. Trade jobs, on average, pay about 16 percent more than other jobs and provide better benefits. So it is very important to our economy in Ohio to have these export jobs. In America, we are about 5 percent of the world's population. Yet we have about 25 percent of the world's economy. So it is very important for us to have access to the 95 percent of consumers who live outside of our borders. We want to sell them more. We want to open up markets for our farmers, our workers, and our service providers. While promoting exports, we also need to ensure that we protect American jobs from unfair trade, from imports that would unfairly undercut our farmers, our workers, and our service providers. Simply put, what we want is a level playing field where it is fair and where we have reciprocal treatment between countries. If we have a level playing field, by the way, I believe American workers will be just fine. Our workers and businesses can compete and can win if we have a truly level playing field. We want a balanced approach. We want to open up new markets for U.S. products, while being tougher on trade enforcement, so we can compete. With my colleagues over the past couple of years, I coauthored a number of laws in this area. One is actually called the Level the Playing Field Act. It does just that. The other is called the ENFORCE Act. These are bipartisan laws that are helping to crack down on unfair trade that hurts U.S. jobs. The Level the Playing Field Act helps on the front-end by making it easier for workers and businesses to win cases when foreign companies send us products that are unfairly traded because they are sold below their cost or dumped or because they are subsidized illegally. This makes it easier to put anti-dumping or countervailing duties, also known as tariffs, on those unfairly traded products. That is a good idea. By the way, it is sanctioned by the international trade enforcer called the World Trade Organization. This law has worked over the last couple of years to raise tariffs on those unfair imports. The second law, which is called the ENFORCE Act, helps on the back- end by ensuring that once workers win trade enforcement cases, the new duties on foreign imports are actually enforced. It is designed to keep countries from circumventing new tariffs by selling the product to a third country, a third party that then sells it to the United States to get around our tariffs. We don't want people to evade our tariffs, and that is the purpose of the ENFORCE Act. It needs a little work, honestly, on its implementation. We need to strengthen it. Together, the Level the Playing Field Act and the ENFORCE Act are working. Since I came to the Senate in 2011, I have been involved in nearly 40 trade cases where American workers and producers were seeking relief from unfair foreign competition. I am proud to have received the American Iron and Steel Institute's Congressional Steel Champion Award in 2015 for my ongoing work to allow steelworkers to compete on a level playing field. In 2016, the Level the Playing Field Act was used to secure three big wins against China and several more against other countries in the sector of steel, particularly rolled steel--hot-rolled steel, cold- rolled steel, and corrosion-resistant steel. This is the kind of steel that is used to make cars and trucks and other things. Those products from China--rolled steel--now face tariffs of up to 265 percent thanks to our legislation and thanks to bringing these cases and winning them. This is how trade enforcement should work. It shouldn't just be about saying that we are going to raise tariffs just because we can because then other countries will do the same thing to us--raising tariffs, which are like taxes, and risking a trade war with escalating tariffs that would make everyone worse off. Enforcement actions should be focused on those countries that are engaging in unfair trade practices and violating our trade laws or the commitments that are required under the World Trade Organization. We want a level playing field and reciprocity so we can open up more markets for our workers, and we want other countries to send us products that are fairly traded. It is pretty simple. We need to be careful about taking action that increases barriers to trade. If we impose higher tariffs without justification, we invite retaliation and higher tariffs on our exports. My concern is that we are beginning to do just that, and it threatens the impressive economic gains we have seen this year. Since the tax cuts and tax reform were enacted and since important new regulatory relief has been implemented by the Trump administration, we have seen the economy grow. After a couple of decades of stagnant growth and flat wages, our economy is actually increasing, wages are starting to increase, and American workers and businesses are benefiting. Just last week, the Commerce Department released the economic numbers for the past 3 months, and our economy grew by 4.1 percent in the second quarter of this year. Pro-growth Federal policies have resulted in this kind of a strong and growing economy that is creating more jobs and higher wages. We want to continue building on that momentum that we already started this year with these good fiscal policies. I am concerned that some of our decisions on trade policy provide a real headwind to that growing economy. That is why, when I see the Commerce Department putting tariffs on automobiles and auto parts, I become concerned. According to one estimate, a 25-percent tariff on autos and auto parts could cost 624,000 American jobs. Right now, the administration is doing a lot on the trade front. They have a lot of balls in the air. As far as our trade policy is concerned, I think it is causing a lot of uncertainty out there in the economy. First, the administration is still renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, with Mexico and Canada, which are, by the way, our biggest trading partners in Ohio--Canada is No. 1, and Mexico is No. 2. I support updating NAFTA. I think that is a good idea. I support what USTR Robert Lighthizer is trying to do. But after 15 months of talks and uncertainty, I am concerned. We need to see some light at the end of the tunnel. I hope we will soon, particularly as it relates to Mexico. Second, the United States is raising tariffs on Chinese imports using section 301 of our trade law after conducting a thorough investigation demonstrating the number of anti-competitive ways--from administrative approval processes, to joint venture requirements, to outright cyber theft--that China uses to effectively steal American intellectual property. Third, the administration is using a national security waiver to our trade rules--called section 232--to raise tariffs as a matter of national security on steel and aluminum imports from all but four countries. That means those tariffs are being imposed on a number of our strong allies. Because of that and the retaliation it has invited, this section 232 has been the focus of a lot of attention recently. I agree with President Trump that we need to crack down on countries that cheat on trade--like China--and we need to make sure we do it in a smart and targeted way. China does steal our intellectual property, and they have been doing that for years. China tilts the playing field against American firms, innovators, and workers and gets the technology they need to leapfrog the competition. I support action against this kind of unfair Chinese trade and investment practice, and I was glad to hear that serious talks with China might start soon. As we go into these talks, we need to be clear about our objectives and clear about what we are looking for as Americans. Is it just trying to address the trade deficit and have them try to buy more of our exports, like soybeans or LNG--liquefied natural gas--or is it asking China to make some changes structurally so that we can have a more fair trading relationship as two mature trading partners? We also need to be sure, as we make clear our objectives, that we don't continue to raise tariffs without having these negotiations and direct talks. My biggest concern is the administration's broad use of a powerful national security tool known as section 232. Section 232 comes from a trade act that was passed back in 1962 that was intended to be used purely for national security purposes. Thus, it has been invoked only rarely, only a few times, the last being in 1986, 32 years ago. Section 232 is really an exception to our trade laws because you neither have to show injury to a domestic industry nor any surge or unfair trade with regard to the targeted imports, as you would under these other trade laws. In other words, under the other laws, you have to show that there is material injury to a domestic company or that there is a surge coming in of imports or often that there actually is unfair trade, like the dumping we talked about earlier--selling below cost or subsidizing illegally. You don't have to show that under section 232. One reason it has hardly ever been used is precisely because it doesn't require any negative impact or unfair influence or unfair trade. This means that when we use this tool, if it is not used for national security reasons, other countries are likely to respond in kind, simply putting tariffs on our exports for no reason. That is exactly what is happening. Using section 232, we put a 25-percent tariff on steel and 10 percent on aluminum imports from nearly every country in the world across the board, most of which are our allies. The only exemptions are Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and South Korea. We negotiated quotas with them. For all the other countries in the world, we have these tariffs in place, including our close ally Canada, for example. They are a stalwart ally. They have had troops in Iraq with us. They had troops in Afghanistan with us. They are a good neighbor. They are Ohio's biggest trading partner and No. 1 export destination for the workers and farmers I represent. As a country, we actually send more steel to them than they send to us. Remember, this is about steel and aluminum national security tariffs. We actually export more steel to them than they send to us, but they are targeted by this section 232 as a national security threat for steel. They have responded, as you would expect, with tariffs of their own on our exports--all kinds of exports across the board. According to one publication, Business Insider, Ohio is their No. 1 targeted State. That is the State I represent. They slapped tariffs on Ohio workers and farmers of more than $1.7 billion. Now let's back up for a second and talk about steel and aluminum. Is there an issue with unfair imports? Yes, there is, I think, particularly with regard to steel. We have a global glut of steel, and China is the reason. About 15 years ago, China had about 15 percent of the global production of steel. Today, they have about 50 percent of the global production of steel, and they don't need it, so they are subsidizing it, and they are sending it out below its cost, which, again, is called dumping. That is why we have been using our other trade laws to go after these unfair exports, and we need to do more of that to stop the transshipments, where they send the product to another country and then process it and then send it to us. For certain countries and certain products, I believe there is a national security issue with steel. An example of that is electrical steel--something that is critical to our electric grid. Electrical steel is something we absolutely need. Yet there is only one U.S. manufacturer left of electrical steel. Imports have increased in the last year alone by about 100 percent. This is an example of how I believe section 232 could be used in a very targeted way that relates directly to our national security. Again, we have other trade enforcement tools at our disposal, including the Level the Playing Field Act we talked about and the ENFORCE Act. We went after countries that subsidize or dump their products. These are more precise tools to hold our trading partners accountable that should be strengthened and used before section 232, where appropriate. Misusing the 232 statute and its national security rationale not only leads to other countries increasing tariffs on all our exports to them, but it also risks the World Trade Organization stepping in and our actually losing what I think is an important national security tool. In other words, by misusing this, my fear is that we will be taken to the WTO by other countries. It has already happened. They have filed cases again us. The WTO could indeed rule--which they never have before--that we cannot use 232 in the way we have and take away that tool. That would be a big problem because I think it is a tool we should have in our toolbox. I believe we run an even greater risk of losing this tool when the administration suggests that imports of cars threaten our national security. That is the most recent case that is now working through the system. I want to see more cars made in America, but tariffs like the Commerce Department is suggesting would make it even more expensive to make a car here. We are told by the auto industry--and the big 3 automakers oppose this 232 on automobiles--we are told it would increase the cost of a car by about $2,000. That is why I believe we have to reform the section 232 statute and ensure that any 232 actions are based on a legitimate national security justification and that Congress has a larger role to play in its oversight. A few hours ago, my colleagues, Senators Doug Jones and Joni Ernst, and I introduced bipartisan legislation that would help do just that. Our bipartisan bill, called the Trade Security Act, will reform section 232 to better align the statute with its original intent. First, it ensures that proper experts in government determine at the outset whether there is a national security threat. Our bill requires the Department of Defense, not the Secretary of Commerce, to assess the potential threat posed by imports of certain products to justify the national security basis for new tariffs under section 232. If the Department of Defense says a threat is found, the Department of Defense would send its report to the President. The President would then direct the Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with Congress, the Secretary of Defense, and USTR, to develop recommendations for how to respond to the threat. After receiving the remedy recommendations from the Secretary of Commerce, the President would then decide whether to take action. So it creates a two-step process. The first step is determining whether there is a national security threat, done by the appropriate office and the appropriate experts in the Federal Government, and then the second step would be the Commerce Department coming up with the remedy, as opposed to now, where the Commerce Department makes that national security recommendation. The bill will also expand the role of Congress by giving Congress the opportunity to disapprove of 232 action by passing a joint resolution. Currently, Congress can disapprove of section 232 actions through a joint resolution but only when it results in something covering oil or petroleum products. So it is interesting--under the current 232 statute, the disapproval process works but only as to oil or other petroleum products. Our bill, the Trade Security Act, which we introduced today, would expand that process to include all products. By the way, the oil and petroleum production exception is a vestige from the last time section 232 was used, about 40 years ago, because it was used with regard to oil from Libya and from Iran. Misusing our trade tools not only hurts our exporters, workers, and farmers, but also our consumers. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation to increase congressional oversight on one of our most important national security tools. When he signed the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 into law, which included section 232, President Kennedy said: This act recognizes, fully and completely, that we cannot protect our economy by stagnating behind tariff walls, but that the best protection possible is a mutual lowering of tariff barriers among friendly nations so that all may benefit from a free flow of goods. Increased economic activity resulting from increased trade will provide more job opportunities for our workers. So that was the context within which section 232 was passed--in other words, saying we don't want to put up more barriers. We want trade to be fair and reciprocal. Neither the President nor the Congress intended that section 232 would be used to put up more barriers. The Senate Finance Committee chairman in the Congress who passed this legislation said that in order for section 232 to apply, ``the products must be involved in our national security.'' Whether it is the President or whether it is the Congress, the intent was clearly to tie this closely to national security. Let's restore this powerful and important tool to Congress' original intentions when it crafted the law and ensure that section 232 is used appropriately for national security purposes. This legislation will help to guide our trade policy and ensure that we keep national security and trade issues separate. The strength of America's economy comes from hard-working and innovative Americans in our shops, plants, and farms across this country that send products around the globe. We want more of that. They deserve a level playing field and the chance to compete. Let's be sure our trade policy gives them that and not escalating tariffs for their exports and higher costs for their families. Let's find that right balance, including restoring an important national security tool by not misusing it. I urge my colleagues to join us in support of the Trade Security Act to help do just that. I yield back my time. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, there are a few things I wish to talk about today, but I would like to start by recognizing the service and bravery of our Capitol Police officers. This week is the 20th anniversary of a shooting which occurred in the U.S. Capitol that claimed the lives of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Jacob Chestnut and Detective John Gibson when a gunman forced his way into this Capitol Building. They laid down their lives in defense of others and made the ultimate sacrifice defending the U.S. Capitol, this pillar of American democracy. At the time, then-President Clinton said: ``The shooting at the United States Capitol yesterday was a moment of savagery at the front door of American civilization.'' He was right. I was working in the Capitol that day, 20 years ago. I remember where I was, as I am sure everybody does who was here. I remember hearing the gunshots. I was on the telephone from my office in the House of Representatives with a member of the leadership staff, and I heard the chaos through the phone lines for the first time. We are forever grateful for the sacrifice of those two police officers and their families and for the continued service and commitment of the U.S. Capitol Police every single day in the Capitol. They are the ones who protect us every single day. This week, we are reminded to thank everyone who puts on a uniform and steps into harm's way to protect fellow Americans. Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act Mr. President, I also wish to discuss important legislation the Senate passed earlier this week and the House passed today to improve skills training in our country at a time when it is so badly needed. I am the cofounder and cochair of the Senate Career and Technical Education Caucus. I have to tell you, I am excited about this bipartisan legislation. It reauthorizes what is called the Perkins Career and Technical Education, or CTE, Act. It is a Federal law designed to help Americans get the education, training, and skills they need to fill in-demand jobs. The President supports the legislation. I know he is excited about signing it into law and helping those who need the skills to fill those jobs that are out there. CTE--at one time called vocational education--is just a great opportunity for the students but also for our economy and for employers. The bill that passed includes what is called the Educating Tomorrow's Workforce Act, legislation my colleague Senator Tim Kaine and I authored a few years ago to allow States and localities to use Perkins grant funding for a number of purposes. No. 1, we allow them to use it for CTE-focused academies. We also encourage schools to incorporate key elements of high-quality CTE programs from around the country and promote partnerships between local businesses, regional industries, and other community stakeholders to create work-based learning opportunities for students, like apprenticeships and internships. We know they work. Getting that work experience really helps to be able to land a job, so we are excited about this legislation. It also includes important accountability information for our most vulnerable students to track how well CTE programs are performing so we can ensure high-quality skills training. When I travel around Ohio talking to employers of all sizes, they all stress one thing to me, which is, yes, the economy is doing better, tax reform has worked well for me, the regulatory relief is happening--that is great--but we are having trouble finding workers. In Ohio today, on our website OhioMeansJobs, you will probably see 145,000 jobs being advertised, and yet we have 200,000 people out of work. A lot of that is the skills gap. I often hear the biggest challenge employers have is they can't find enough skilled workers for the positions they already have. We want to give these students the chance to acquire that training needed for today's jobs. Again, this legislation helps to ensure it regardless of someone's economic standing. It provides a route to good-paying jobs and a successful career for students who might not have been interested in a typical formal STEM education or maybe they can't easily spend the time and money involved in going through a traditional college education. It is not just about the students. It also helps those who are further on in life who are trying to rebuild or start a new career. This bill will also help those incumbent workers. Recently, I visited Flying HIGH, a welding school in Youngstown, OH. It is a very impressive program. It focuses on teaching people in recovery and people who have recently been released from prison to learn a skill--in this case, welding--which lets them transition back into the workplace. I am really impressed by it. Their placement rate is about 100 percent. They have taken people and helped provide them with the skills they need, and then, in turn, their lives have been turned around. This legislation will help enable places like this school to be more successful. There are so many opportunities out there. Whether it is welding, whether it is coding, whether it is machining, whether it is healthcare skills, or whether it is in commercial driving, where we need drivers right away who have the CDL commercial license, we should encourage more of that. I wish to thank my colleague and cochair of the Senate CTE Caucus, Tim Kaine, as well as Senator Lamar Alexander, who chairs the Senate HELP Committee that passed the bill this last month, Mike Enzi, and all my colleagues on the CTE Caucus, for their work on this issue over the years. Once signed into law, this legislation will help students get the career and technical education they need, regardless of economic standing, and help them have the opportunity they need to be able to pursue whatever their American dream is DATA Act Implementation Mr. President, the last thing I want to talk about today is some bad news we received this week. This is about our Federal Government and the lack of information from Federal agencies as to how they are spending our hard-earned tax dollars. As many people know, our Federal Government has grown a lot in the last half century or so. In 1961, President Kennedy entered office with 7 Cabinet positions and 451 career management positions. When President Trump took office, we had gone about seven times higher in terms of the number of people. The number of Cabinet posts have been doubled from 7 to 15. The increased size of our Federal Government is intended, of course, to provide a better structure to carry out important duties the government has and help more Americans, but one result we have to be cautious of is the increase in Federal spending that comes with it. As the size of our government grows, transparency in how taxpayer money is spent becomes increasingly important. Most of the increase in funding we have seen over the last 20 years, of course, is in programs that Congress does not appropriate every year. This includes important entitlement programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. We need to address this unsustainable growth in the so-called nondiscretionary spending. We need to save these entitlement programs for the current and future generations of Americans who rely on them, but we also need to ensure we rein in the waste, fraud, and abuse in our departments and agencies, the so-called discretionary spending that Congress spends every year on departments and programs. That is why this legislation is so important--to be able to require transparency and accountability with how Federal agencies spend their taxpayer dollars. While the White House and Congress tracks spending through the budget and appropriations process, each Federal agency tracks its own spending internally. They have their own metrics and measurement systems. As you can imagine, it has made it hard to truly know where all of the funds are going to various departments and agencies because each has their own measurement. We recognized a need to address this. In 2006, when I was Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act became law. I personally endorsed that legislation by then-Senator Tom Coburn--who some will remember was a key sponsor of that--when I was at OMB because I knew we needed it badly. We went about putting all grants and contracts online. That was a good thing. The goal of that law was to standardize the way Federal departments and agencies report their spending to have a more comprehensive and transparent account of where taxpayer dollars are going. It also created a public website to be managed by OMB called USAspending.gov, where taxpayers and policymakers could go to get accurate, accessible information about what these funds are used for. Taxpayers should be able to see where their money goes, and Congress-- which is given the power of the purse in our Federal Government--needs to know what the funds it allocates are being used for to make informed decisions about spending. In 2010, the GAO, Government Accountability Office, looked into how this program was working. What they found was the usefulness of the USAspending.gov website was impaired by the lack of guidance to agencies on how to report their spending. So, in 2014, my colleague Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and I authored what is called the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, the DATA Act. We followed what the GAO had said, and we wrote this legislation to fix the law. The goal of the DATA Act was to create a more consistent spending system across government to improve the efficiency of USAspending.gov and make tracking Federal spending more transparent and accessible. That would ultimately provide the American public and policymakers, we thought, with accurate, consistent, and reliable data on governmentwide spending to eliminate unnecessary spending. Being able to follow Federal dollars from appropriation to the resulting grant or contract that actually occurs is incredibly helpful in that effort. The DATA Act required Federal agencies to report spending in real time down to the location by congressional district by 2017. Now it is time to take stock of how that program is working and to assess the transparency in our Federal spending. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, has taken this task on. Along with the ranking member, Senator Tom Carper, we have looked into the implementation of the DATA Act and how accurately departments and agencies report spending data. What our bipartisan report found was troubling. We reviewed inspectors general, or IG, reports of 25 Federal agencies, making up more than 80 percent of all Federal spending from the second quarter of 2017. At least 55 percent of the spending data--equal to roughly $240 billion those agencies submitted to USAspending.gov--was found to be incomplete, inaccurate, or both. Notably, the IG's report on the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy determined that 100 percent of those Departments' spending data was not accurate. According to the inspectors general, some agencies, such as the Department of Education and the Agency for National Development, did well. They reported accurate data. Unbelievably, about 96 percent of the spending data the Treasury Department submitted for its own Department was not accurate. So the Treasury Department, which the DATA Act says is supposed to monitor other Departments' spending data for accuracy, overwhelmingly submitted inaccurate data itself--and we found that just last month, OMB and the Department of Treasury have updated agency guidance that appears to weaken some of these data standards, which could lead to less accurate and not standardized DATA Act submissions in the future. So we should be doing more to ensure this law is properly implemented, to ensure accountability and accuracy in our finances. We also found deficiencies with the USAspending.gov website itself. The DATA Act requires the website to be user-friendly and accurate. Our investigators found it to sometimes be neither. It is important to remember that the DATA Act is still in its early stages. It was fully implemented just a little over 1 year ago. So it is not yet what we had hoped it would be when it became law in 2014, but it is not too late to improve it. We know it has to be done. Our PSI--Permanent Subcommittee Investigation--report includes recommendations to do just that. First, OMB and the Treasury Department should continue to update the standards and guidelines for agencies to follow when making DATA Act submissions to improve accuracy and accountability of spending. It is really up to them to do it. Second, OMB and the Treasury Department should establish clear definitions for agencies and IGs to follow when conducting reviews of DATA Act compliance to avoid any existing confusion and disparity, which we found is out there today. Finally, the Treasury Department should improve the overall quality of USAspending.gov. These are all reasonable steps, and they are going to help increase accountability within the Federal Government and provide greater transparency for taxpayers. As I mentioned, taxpayers deserve to be able to access accurate information on where their money is going, and lawmakers need to know how departments and agencies are actually spending their resources to be able to conduct proper oversight, plan future budgets, and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in our Federal spending. On the floor today, we were discussing appropriations bills. We will pass another floor appropriations bill this week, I hope. That is good, but part of this process is that we have to be sure we are doing the oversight so that if we are passing spending bills--all 12 should be passed by this Congress--we know where the money is going so we can identify ways to improve the spending. I recognize that a lot of hard work has gone into USAspending.gov to date, and I am grateful for all the support and investments that many outside groups--like the Data Coalition and the Project on Government Oversight--have put into making this project successful. I also appreciate those in the Federal Government who have taken this seriously and have worked hard on this. Although the executive branch has only implemented the law selectively so far, it has already made our government more transparent. If we continue to do the necessary followup to this important law that passed 4 years ago, I am optimistic that it will spur action to make our government spending more accountable, more accurate, and more accessible. That is the goal. Mr. President, I yield back my time.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I want to recognize my dear friends Ida and Irwin Haber for receiving the Jewish National Fund's Northern Ohio Tree of Life Award. This award is given in recognition of outstanding community involvement, professional leadership, and dedication to the cause of American-Israeli friendship with the devotion to peace and the security of human life. Ida and Irwin Haber are of the utmost quality and character for this honor. It is fitting that they receive this award jointly, as their personal and professional lives have been a team effort for the past 44 years and have been guided by their strong Jewish identity and heritage from the start. Ida and Irwin met at a United Synagogue Youth event in high school and have been together ever since. It is their faith and commitment to the Jewish people that helped bring them together, and they remain active members of the Jewish community. Irwin serves as the Ohio chapter Chairman and National Board member of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, on the National Council of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and is a member of the Endowment Fund Committee of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland. Additionally, he and Ida serve in leadership roles for the University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center. Business has been a family venture for the Habers as well. In 1993, Irwin became the chairman and owner and Ida became vice president of the PDI Group. Their leadership and vision for this manufacturer of weapons platform support systems has built an internationally reputable business that provides equipment to U.S. Air Force and Navy and 45 air forces across the world. The PDI Group has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Association and the Department of Commerce for its accomplishments and excellence. Ida and Irwin Haber have led lives of faith and have served their customers and their community admirably. Perhaps their greatest achievement is their beautiful family. They have three adult children, Nathan, Ryan, and Rena, who work for the family business; two daughters-in-law, Yana and Shlomit; and three granddaughters, Arianna, Ava, and Noa. On a personal level, Jane and I are grateful for Ida and Irwin's advice and friendship, for having us to their home for Shabbat dinner, and for numerous other good memories. On behalf of the U.S. Senate, I congratulate Ida and Irwin Haber for being honored with the Jewish National Fund's Northern Ohio Tree of Life Award.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. We have made good progress on the issue of sex trafficking, but it is so related to the issue of opioid abuse. Specifically, as I said, these often go hand in hand. Often, traffickers find people who are addicted. They are vulnerable, they crave the drug, and the trafficker can provide it. But in my home State of Ohio, I have met with survivors, and many times we have found that they find vulnerable people who are not addicted but then make them addicted so they become dependent on the trafficker. This is an issue that relates to so many things, doesn't it? It relates to our workplace because people who are addicted to opioids are not coming into the workforce. One reason we have such high levels of unemployment--people are outside the workforce altogether, not showing up on the unemployment numbers because they aren't even looking for work. The labor force participation rate, as economists call it, is so low right now largely, in my view, because of this opioid issue. Our courts are jammed, our jails are jammed, and our hospitals and emergency rooms are jammed. We have to do more to get at this issue for so many reasons. The driving force in my home State of Ohio and around the country now is this synthetic form of heroin or opioids called fentanyl. It is 50 times more powerful than heroin. There are other drugs--carfentanil is an example--that are even more powerful. These synthetic forms of opioids are causing most of the deaths now in my State of Ohio and around the country. The Centers for Disease Control, CDC, recently issued a report that showed this increase in overdose deaths involving fentanyl. The report analyzed overdose deaths in 10 States hit hardest by the epidemic, including Ohio. They found that fentanyl overdose deaths in those States nearly doubled from the last 6 months of 2016 to the first 6 months of 2017. Of course, 2017 is the last year for which they have good records. It is unbelievable. This synthetic form of heroin is the new scourge of the opioid epidemic, and it is being spread into every other drug too. When I do roundtables back home, as I do regularly, I hear about it being spread into crystal meth, cocaine, and heroin, of course. Twice in roundtable discussions I have had with community leaders, I have heard--once from a police chief and once from a sheriff--very similar stories about a young man who wakes up from an overdose after being saved through Narcan, which is a miracle drug that reverses the effects of an overdose. When the young man comes to, he says: I was just smoking pot. How did I overdose? In both cases, based on the forensics and the information they were able to get from the labs, they found out that of course it wasn't just marijuana; it was marijuana laced with fentanyl. No street drug is safe. They can all kill you. As I have met with these first responders, community leaders, and those in recovery across Ohio--I just did recently with a group called PreventionFIRST!--I have heard what is often brought up by those on the frontlines; that is, that we would be making so much more progress right now on this war against opioids--we have been successful here in this Congress in passing more money for prevention, treatment, and recovery, and those funds are starting to be used back home, and I see it; I see the results, and there are some really exciting things going on--but for the fentanyl. In other words, just as we were finally making progress on prescription drugs and, then, on heroin, now this fentanyl comes in and is creating even more problems. It is so inexpensive, and it is so pervasive. Recently, in Ohio, there were two busts where they were able to apprehend people who were selling fentanyl and find this cache of fentanyl they had. In both cases, it was a massive amount combined. Just these two busts alone, there was enough fentanyl to kill half the people in my State of Ohio. That is how bad it is. Just last week, there was an autopsy that revealed that the death of an Ohio police chief from Kirkersville, in the Columbus area, who was caused by fentanyl. The report said: ``acute intoxication by fentanyl.'' It was an accidental overdose. I have told the story before of the police officer who brushed a couple of flakes off his shirt after a bust. He didn't know it was fentanyl. The flakes were the drug. It got into his skin through his fingers, and he dropped to the ground unconscious and had an overdose. It took several doses of Narcan to save his life. Our first responders are in much more danger with fentanyl than they have ever been, even with heroin, prescription drugs, and other opioids. Addiction has taken too many lives in Ohio. Again, fentanyl is the deadliest drug in this epidemic. There was a recent estimation by a group called the Ohio Alliance for Innovation in Population Health, which suggested that opioids are responsible for more than 500,000 years of life expectancy lost in Ohio between 2010 and 2016. Think about that: 500,000 years of lost life due to opioids in Ohio, just in the 6 years between 2010 and 2016. Often, these are lives of young people who had great promise ahead of them and had become involved in this opioid epidemic, and the addiction takes over, and it is more important than anything. It is more important than their family, more important than their friends, more important than their jobs, more important than their faith, and more important than taking care of themselves. They end up, sadly, losing their lives and all that opportunity and all the purpose God had for them in their lives. We need to turn the tide in this opioid epidemic. We can't do it, in my view, unless we get at this issue of fentanyl because that is the new scourge. We need to look at how it is coming, why it is coming, and why it is so cheap. Here is what is very interesting, and it might be surprising to some people. It is not coming across the border from Mexico, or if it is, it is very little of it. That is where the heroin is coming from, 90 percent of it. It is more pure than ever, more dangerous than ever. The deadly fentanyl is mostly coming through the mail system. It is being mailed into the United States of America, mostly from overseas, mostly from China. There are some evil scientists somewhere in China making this fentanyl and then shipping it into your community. It is the No. 1 killer right now. By the way, opioid overdose and death is the No. 1 cause of death in my home State of Ohio. Nationally, it is now the No. 1 cause of death of people under 50 years old. It surpassed car accidents. It is an epidemic. How could that be? What can we do about it? There is something we can do about it. We have to be sure that the post office helps law enforcement to find these packages as they are coming in and get these packages out of circulation so they don't come into our communities and poison our families, our children, and our neighbors. We have legislation to do that. It is called the STOP Act. One-third of the Members of this Senate have now cosponsored that legislation. We have now had it reported out of the Finance Committee of the Senate. We need to get it to the floor and get it to a vote. It is very simple. It is legislation that Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat of Minnesota, on that side of the aisle, and I have come up with that says the post office should have to do what any other carrier would have to do--FedEx, UPS, DHL. Under law, they have to tell law enforcement in advance what packages are coming in, where it is coming from, what is in it, and where it is going. You have to provide that electronically so you can use big data to sift through the millions of packages that come in and to be able to find ones that are suspect and then immediately use sophisticated equipment to scan and screen those and pull out of circulation the ones that have fentanyl in them. I have been to these distribution centers for these private carrier companies. I have seen how they do it. I have seen the dangerous work the Customs and Border Protection men and women are doing, using a room that has significant ventilation. They have to have masks on and gloves. They have to be very careful about it. Thank God, they are there, because they are saving lives. If you send it through the mail system, that very rarely happens. We did a yearlong study of this in our Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I talked about earlier. We found a number of things that were very troubling. One is just how easy it is to buy fentanyl online. The second is the fact that when these drugs come in through the post office, it is guaranteed delivery. The traffickers will say if you send it by FedEx or another private carrier--UPS, DHL, and others--it is not guaranteed. If you send it through the government agency, no problem. That is not the way it should be. By the way, letter carriers--the mail carriers in my community and your community--want this fixed, too, because they care what comes into their communities. They care about the people whom they serve, and they want to be sure they are not delivering poison. They also are at risk, just like anybody else is who is anywhere in that train. I talked about the law enforcement officers. Think about the other first responders who are using Narcan to revive people. They sometimes get exposed to it. We have too many stories of little kids dying from being accidentally exposed to fentanyl in a home where somebody is using it. It is dangerous stuff. We have to fix this. The information as to where it is from, where it is going, and what is in it, when it is put into a digital format and can be analyzed quickly through incredible intelligence that our Customs and Border Protection people have, to be able to determine whether that package is suspect or not, will make a huge difference in taking this offline and keeping this poison from coming into our communities and ensuring that we can, in fact, begin to stop some of the poison but, at a minimum, it will raise the price by reducing the supply. The post office, frankly, because of the pressure they have gotten from Congress on this over the last few years have begun to start to look at some of this. They have begun to provide some of the electronic data. Based on testimony they provided for our subcommittee just recently, they are now receiving data on about 36 percent of international packages they transport into the country. Unfortunately, of that 36 percent, just over one-third, about 80 percent of those packages, are presented to law enforcement, and 20 percent get lost and end up going into the system, into our communities, even though we know they are suspect. It is very inefficient right now. It is not working well. Plus, some of the data is not decipherable. We have a long way to go. Even if all 36 percent were being delivered to law enforcement, that would mean that 318 million international packages each year were coming in without any screening--318 million packages. The STOP Act is very simple. It holds the post office to the same standard as private carriers--100 percent screenings. It requires that by 2020 they get all this data on all the international packages entering the United States. It is a commonsense solution. It has already passed the House of Representatives recently with a broad bipartisan vote. Our committee has reported it out. We need to get it to the floor and get it voted on. If we do so, by the way, it will be signed because the administration has already issued a statement of administration policy on it, which supports the legislation. It was actually a recommendation of the President's commission on opioids. It is part of the solution. Is it the whole solution? No, but it is a critical part to try to stop some of this new poison, fentanyl, from coming into our communities--the No. 1 killer--so that we can, through treatment and recovery and better prevention efforts and better other law enforcement efforts, truly begin to turn the tide on this opioid epidemic. It is critical that we do so for so many reasons we have talked about this afternoon. My hope is that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will come together, at least on this issue, on the STOP Act, and say yes, we can do something to help those in our community who are suffering, those who are dying from overdoses, those families who are looking to us and saying: What can you do to help? I run into them all the time. Today, I am heading back to Ohio, and I know this weekend I will be talking to people in Cleveland and Cincinnati, where I will be, and in Columbus, and they will be telling me about it. This week, I was walking down the hall back to my office on Tuesday, and a young man came up to me and said: I want to talk to you about something. I figured he was with the media and wanted to ask me a question. I asked him what he wanted. He said: I want to tell you thank you. He started to well up, and I knew what he was talking about. He was talking about a family member of his who had overdosed and died. He was talking about the fact that he appreciates that Congress is finally beginning to respond to this issue, as we have. In the last year and after, we have passed legislation that is historic to deal with this issue, but there is still so much more to do. Let's make the next step getting the STOP Act enacted into law and, therefore, be able to save lives and help people to live their God- given purpose in life. I yield back my time.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I wish to report back to my colleagues here in the Senate and to the American people about the results of legislation which we passed here in the Senate and the House and which was signed into law by the President. We don't do that often enough, and we tend to pass legislation and don't do the oversight to figure out whether it is working. In this case, this was legislation we passed back in April on a bipartisan basis called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. This legislation allows the victims of sex trafficking to get the justice they deserve by being able to sue websites that knowingly trafficked them online and have some accountability for these horrible crimes that are committed online. It also allows prosecutors at the State and local level to prosecute these cases. We drafted the legislation because after looking at this for several years, we realized that there was a rise in trafficking of underage girls, women, and sometimes underage boys and that this was increasing primarily because of the dark side of the internet. We are hearing a lot about what is going on on the internet these days in terms of meddling in our elections and so on. With all the positives, there is also a darker side. We realized this was happening increasingly, and it was a ruthlessly, efficient way to sell people online. We looked at it and found there was a Federal law put in place--with good intentions, I believe--a couple of decades ago to try to ensure freedom of the internet, which, of course, all of us support, but it provided an effective immunity to these websites even if they were knowingly selling people online. So we wrote legislation to get at that, spent about a year trying to get that through the process, and eventually got it to a vote and got it passed. The law that provided the immunity was part of the Communications Decency Act. Again, it was meant to encourage freedom of the internet but was taken too far, particularly in how it was interpreted by the courts. The internet was something we had to address because without that, we would see this increase in drug trafficking and sex trafficking. So what happened? After passing the law, there was a pretty dramatic change. On Monday, I was in Cincinnati, OH, my hometown, at a place called the CHANGE Court. The CHANGE Court is a place where women who are trafficked and incarcerated for prostitution are able to go through a 2-year program to help them get clean and, if they are willing to go through this program, to walk away with a clean record, understanding that sex trafficking is not a crime and that they are in effect victims of trafficking. It is very inspiring to go there. I talked to about a dozen women who are currently in the program and some women who had graduated from the program. The stories are unbelievable--women getting their lives back together; getting back to work and getting back to their families; in almost every case, getting back to their children--in almost every case, these are moms; having the self-respect and dignity that comes with work; getting back with their families; and getting their lives back on track. It is a much better alternative than the system of throwing people into jail who are, in effect, victims of trafficking and not dealing with their issues, whether it is the trauma or the drug addiction. In almost every case, there was a drug addiction issue. Almost all of them were opiate addicts or recovering addicts. One was addicted to alcohol. This is common. In talking to these women, almost every one of them said the same thing, which was that, yes, they had been trafficked online, and they were very interested in this legislation. They had been through it, and they wanted to save future women and girls from having to go down this dark path. We passed the legislation and assessed the legislation meant to help on this issue, and I was able to tell these women at the CHANGE Court what the results were. They are pretty dramatic. On Monday of this week, I also met with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. This is the leading anti- trafficking group in the country. They work day and night trying to stop online sex traffickers. They keep track of the statistics and data. They particularly focus on rescuing kids from being exploited. According to NCMEC, the results from SESTA being signed into law has been swift and significant. NCMEC said: Since the enactment of SESTA and the government's seizure of Backpage, there has been a major disruption in the online marketplace. The robust marketplace for sex trafficking, including the sale of children for rape and sexual abuse, that took a decade to build, fragmented over the course of just a few days. They also said: Many sites or portions of sites where NCMEC knew children previously have been sold for sex have voluntarily shut down. Their bottom line: This means it is much harder to purchase a child . . . online. This means it is much harder to purchase a child online. That is great news, and that is exactly what we intended this legislation to do--to save these kids, women, and sometimes boys from being subjected to this horrific crime. Another analysis was shared with me recently, and you can find this online. This analysis found that since our legislation passed, online ads selling women and children have been reduced by between 60 and 80 percent, depending on the State. That is a dramatic change, having the effect of saving literally thousands of children. I am hopeful we will continue to be vigilant about this issue because when you push something down in one place, it often pops up somewhere else. But we have done an effective job of dealing with a very real problem. Backpage.com, which we talked about, was the industry leader. They have now been shut down. The CEO of the company has pled guilty to numerous money laundering and trafficking-related charges. Because prosecutors can now do their work and go after these online traffickers and because victims of this crime can finally have their day in court, websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking are being shut down and being held liable for their actions. This never would have been possible without the work of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The staff and investigators spent 2 years working on this issue, investigating it. We had to come all the way to the floor of this Chamber in order to enforce our subpoenas to get the information that we were able to unveil, which no one else had been able to find, and that showed clearly that they knew what they remember doing. They knew they were selling underage kids online. I chair that subcommittee. It is bipartisan. I am very proud of those investigators. They do good work, and they deserve to be applauded, given the results we are now seeing. It is not just Backpage; a lot of other, classified websites have also shut down their personal ads or sex-related operations.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to see President Trump's clarification today. The Russians did meddle in our election. That is the consensus not just of the intelligence community, but it is the consensus here among our own Intelligence Committees of the House and Senate, led by Republicans. I will say that Congress has pushed pretty hard against some of the Russian activity, not just the meddling but the illegal annexation of Crimea and Russia's continued support of the Assad regime in Syria, which has caused so much pain and agony. We have passed historic sanctions around here on Russia. Should we have additional sanctions? I am certainly open to that, but it is not as if Congress has not acted. We have also provided, for the first time ever, lethal weapons to the Ukrainians to be able to push back on the eastern border of Ukraine. I pleaded with the Obama administration to provide such weapons, and they never did, and this administration has done so despite protestations from Russia. We just funded $350 million or so to protect our electoral security here in this country and to help our State boards of election to be able to push back against what I am concerned about, which would be interference in yet another election cycle in this country. I am glad that was a bipartisan effort to do so. We have also built up our military, including putting more resources into Central and Eastern Europe and more exercises there to push back, including up-armoring our armored vehicles there because of the threat we now believe is coming from Russia, not just on the eastern border of Ukraine but throughout eastern Central Europe. This administration has actually expelled more Russian diplomats, I think, than any administration at once, at least. In reaction to the poisoning in the UK, we expelled more diplomats than any other country. We also shut down a Russian consulate, I believe, in the State of the colleague who just spoke, and these are all things that have happened. The irony is, the actions speak pretty loudly, don't they? It is unfortunate that our words have not spoken as loudly recently. Again, I appreciate the President's clarification today. I think we need to be honest. We need to be straightforward, and that would result in a better relationship with Russia.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about a couple of topics. I first want to talk about Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh is the President's nominee to be a new Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Yesterday, I had the chance to sit down with Judge Kavanaugh in my office and talk about his judicial philosophy, his view of the role of the courts, and how he would approach some of the tough issues the Court is likely to face. Frankly, I cannot think of anybody who is more qualified to serve as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. This guy's background is incredibly impressive, as is his record, which I will get to in a minute. As important to me is Brett Kavanaugh the person. Let me speak briefly about Brett, because I have known him for over 15 years. I have gotten to know him and his wife. I worked with him in the George W. Bush White House. I also had the opportunity to work with his wife because she was the personal assistant to President George W. Bush. They are both wonderful people. They are a great family. Brett Kavanaugh is a person I have gotten to know, not so much as a legal scholar or a judge but as a friend, and I have watched him as a father and as a husband. He is a guy with great compassion, great humility, and a big heart. In his remarks on Monday at the White House, he talked a little bit about his life outside of being a judge. He talked about coaching his daughter's basketball team. Many of us who have been coaches for our high school kids and grade school kids probably were able to relate to that. I am glad my kids got old enough where they could get better coaching so they wouldn't have all the bad habits I probably taught them. The fact is, that is who he is. He loves his daughters. He coaches the team. He makes that a priority. He talked about tutoring kids, underprivileged kids. That is something he does quietly on his own time and feels strongly about. Finally, he talked a little about the fact that he prepares and serves meals to homeless people who are connected through his church. He talked about the priest whom he works with on that. I talked to the priest afterward, and the priest said: You know, in fact, we do this regularly. In fact, we are going to be serving a meal together on Wednesday. You never heard Brett Kavanaugh talk about that. In fact, in my meeting yesterday, Brett Kavanaugh did not mention that he was going straight from my meeting with him to serve meals to the homeless. I found out after the fact when someone brought to my attention that on Twitter, there was somebody who was there and had taken a photograph of him kind of in the background with a ball cap on. It is not something he brags about. It is not something he told me about. It is not something he does because it is the right thing to do for political purposes; he does it because it is the right thing to do as a Christian and as someone who cares about his community. That is the Brett Kavanaugh I know. I hope that others will see these sides of Brett Kavanaugh as he goes through the confirmation process because I think that as people get to know him through that, they are going to be very impressed. People are going to differ some on judicial philosophy. With regard to what kind of person you would want to see on the Supreme Court of the United States, to look at what will be difficult issues that will come before that Court, you want somebody who has a big heart, who has compassion, and who is humble and has the humility to be able to listen. Brett Kavanaugh is a good listener. He has a very distinguished legal record. There are some great judges out there, but I don't think anybody has qualifications better than Brett Kavanaugh's. He is clearly qualified to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Oftentimes, people call the DC Circuit the second highest court in the land. That is the court on which he already sits. There, serving on the court, he has earned the respect of justices across the spectrum-- judges on the right, judges on the left. He has had a number of law clerks go through his process who end up clerking maybe for the Supreme Court or going into private practice or pro bono work or working with the government. Every one of them I have had the opportunity to know or talk to has glowing things to say about him--one who is my counsel in my own office. He has earned the respect of people whose lives he has touched, who have worked with him. Brett Kavanaugh has a great legal education. He graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy. That is the Justice whom he would replace should he be confirmed. Anthony Kennedy is viewed as a consensus builder. Brett Kavanaugh is a consensus builder. In his more than 300 published opinions, Judge Kavanaugh has proved time and again that he is a judge who deserves that respect because he applies the law fairly and impartially. He is independent, impartial, and smart. He interprets the law and the Constitution rather than try to legislate from the bench, which is very important. I think sometimes we forget about the separation of powers. This is where people are accountable to the voters and where we legislate. The members of the Supreme Court and the lower courts, as well, are meant to interpret those laws and take our great Constitution and faithfully interpret that as well. I think that is a very important judicial philosophy and one that I think most people want. That is what they are looking for in a judge--one who fairly and impartially applies the law and protects the rights guaranteed by our Constitution, not one who advances personal public policy goals by legislating from the bench. Judge Kavanaugh has embodied this philosophy for his entire career as a judge. Professor Kavanaugh, as he is known at Harvard Law School, where he has taught for 10 years, is so committed to the Constitution that his students say he carries a copy of it in his pocket. They also commented that it is a very well-worn copy, because he pulls it out. They say it is almost falling apart from the use he makes of it. It is the Constitution he is loyal to, not partisan politics. According to one student from Harvard Law School: If you didn't know his background that [partisanship] wouldn't come across. You wouldn't think, ``Oh this guy's a Republican or this guy's a conservative.'' He wasn't in class to lecture us on Judge Kavanaugh's policy preferences. He was there to talk about the law. I don't see him as someone motivated by outcomes but as someone motivated in finding out what the law is and what the law says. I think that is a big part of the reason why he is such a widely respected judge and why he is so widely cited by other courts, including the Supreme Court. They have endorsed his opinions more than a dozen times in the Supreme Court of the United States, including some of his dissents that have then become the law of the land. So they pick up his dissent at the DC Circuit and use that in the Supreme Court as the reasoning for a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court. That is highly unusual. I think that speaks to his credibility, his legal competence, and also his hard work. He is a hard worker who focuses on ensuring that he is fully prepared. He is also a dedicated public servant. He has chosen to spend 25 of his last 28 years serving the American people in various jobs. For all these reasons, I think he is a great pick. I think he has the experience and qualifications. I think he is someone who understands the appropriate role of the judiciary and puts that understanding into practice on the bench. He has a record to look at. Just as important to me, though, is that he is a good person. I am proud to support Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will keep an open mind and get to know Brett Kavanaugh, as I have gotten to know him and as I hope the American people will get to know him, before they make a judgment. My hope is that Brett Kavanaugh will become a Supreme Court Justice who will make us all proud. Restore Our Parks Act Mr. President, I also want to talk today about an important topic, which is our national parks. Our parks are an absolute treasure for our country. They are beautiful places, beautiful public lands. As important, they are part of our American culture and part of the history we have as a country, and it is important to preserve that legacy. As an example, in Ohio, we have the Wright brothers' home and shop in Dayton, OH. It stands as an inspiration to anybody who dreams big dreams because that is what these two brothers did. You can see where these two Ohio brothers changed the world. Otherwise, frankly, they lived a pretty ordinary life. Preserving their home and that shop is very important to see that anybody can dream big and make a big difference. We have a responsibility to preserve that site and so many others that are important to our history for generations to come. The National Park System includes more than 84 million acres of parks and historical sites that now attract more than 330 million visitors annually. It is an amazing system. By the way, I was told yesterday that only one department or agency of the Federal Government has more assets than the national parks, and that is the Department of Defense, with all the military bases and all the physical assets they have. Otherwise, it is the parks. The parks have an enormous number of buildings and roads and bridges and water systems and visitors' centers and so on. In my home State of Ohio alone, we have eight of those national parks, including Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which is the 13th most visited park in the United States of America. We are very proud of Cuyahoga Valley, whether it is for biking or hiking or fishing or kayaking. I am one of those 2.7 million visitors in Ohio's national parks every year. In fact, the weekend after this weekend, I will be at Cuyahoga Valley National Park with my wife, enjoying that beautiful park. These parks are treasures, and they have so many wonderful facilities. The problem is that over time we have allowed a maintenance backlog to build up, meaning that so many of these buildings and so much of the infrastructure--the roads, bridges, and water systems I talked about--is deteriorating to the point that some of it is actually not being used. If you go to a national park, you may see that a trail is closed or a visitors' center can't be visited. You may see that some of the facilities that provide overnight lodging aren't available anymore. Why? It is because our parks, frankly, are kind of crumbling from within. They may look great on the outside, and they are beautiful, but there is now a $12 billion backlog of deferred maintenance at our parks. This has become a real problem. By the way, that is equal to nearly four times the annual budget of the parks. They just don't have the resources to keep up with these deferred maintenance costs, which tend to be longer term costs, which tend to be more expensive and longer term. Frankly, they are not as interesting to fund. It is not as interesting for Congress to fund the fixing of the roof on a maintenance building at Yellowstone National Park as it is to set up a new nature program for visitors. So this has become a problem. Think about your own home. If you allow deferred maintenance to build up--if you don't take care of the roof, for instance--what happens? You get a leak in your roof. Then you find out the drywall is ruined or the paint is ruined or the floor is ruined, and the costs mount. That is what is happening in our parks right now. When maintenance projects aren't completed on time, it is called getting delayed or getting deferred, and that is what we are focused on. By the way, nearly two-thirds of that deferred maintenance is attributable to our national parks' aging infrastructure. This would be roads and bridges and buildings and so on. The national parks just celebrated their 100th birthday in 2016, and a lot of us were very excited about that--100 years of these beautiful national treasures. Many of the facilities across the country, therefore, are very old. A lot are more than 80 years old, and some are almost 100 years old and are very badly in need of repair. The visitation to our parks has increased in recent years, and this has added to this burden. So it is not only that there are deferred maintenance costs, where things are being put off, but with more and more visitors, there is more and more pressure on the parks. From 2006 until 2017--in those 10 years, in that period alone--annual visitation to our national parks increased by more than 58 million people. That is a good thing. To me, it is a good thing. More people are getting outdoors, particularly families who are taking their kids outdoors. More people are enjoying the parks and are learning more about nature and about our history, but it has put more and more pressure on the parks. The challenges of keeping up with this aging infrastructure and the increased visitation have stretched the Park Service thin and have required it to focus on just the very immediate maintenance needs it has and to postpone, to delay, these projects that can't be completed on schedule. We can't keep our parks in peak condition with bandaids. Some of this is going to require years of work and planning to go into that, which will require certainty and consistency about funding. When you do the annual appropriations process here, as you know, it is year to year. You do not know how much money you are going to get, and sometimes we cut back. They need to know there is going to be some funding there, some certainty, to be able to make some of these much needed repairs to our parks. Unless we take action, of course, it is just going to get worse. We talked about that. When you don't deal with deferred maintenance, it tends to build up and become worse. We are told that the $12 billion backlog is increasing at a rate of about 3 percent per year. That is because, as the experts have told us, it is a compounding issue, meaning that maintenance projects that go unaddressed often create these other problems. They create more repair costs. The spike in visitation to national parks over recent years has put more pressure on, and the longer we wait, the more expensive it gets. For the taxpayers, it is better to move now to address these maintenance needs than to wait as they become more and more expensive. When roads, bridges, parking lots, and pathways decay, people are not able to visit those sites often. Some are even shut down. I mentioned that there are 330 million people a year who visit our parks. There are also 330 million people, therefore, who are spending money around our parks. It is a huge economic driver. For those who are listening who come from States like mine, where we have big national parks like Cuyahoga Valley National Park, those communities really want to be sure that we continue to have vibrant parks and that people will continue to want to visit and can visit in order to get the broader economic benefit. This is important all over the country. In my State of Ohio alone, where we don't have the big parks like Yellowstone or Yosemite but where we have some great parks, there is more than $100 million in overdue maintenance. For Cuyahoga Valley National Park, for example, there is more than $45 million of backlog, and completing these long-overdue projects will make a huge difference for a visitor's experience. The needed maintenance includes--at Cuyahoga Valley, as an example--$875,000 for badly needed renovations to the Boston Store Visitor Center. I have been there. I have seen it. It needs the help. That includes $274,000 in renovations for a shelter and $6 million in renovations for roads and parking lots to ensure people have parking. It includes water infrastructure improvements. Water infrastructure may not be the sexiest project to support, but it is a very important one. It is very important that we ensure that we have this infrastructure in place. It is the conservative thing to do. Helping our Park Service has long been a priority of mine, as well as dealing with this backlog. About 12 years ago, when I served as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the George W. Bush administration, I launched in our budget something that President Bush and Mrs. Bush were strongly supportive of, which was the Centennial Initiative. Again, in thinking the centennial was coming up in 2016--10 years later--we wanted to put in place the idea of using public-private partnerships to fund the parks. We were successful in getting some of that started. Frankly, Congress did not pass the legislation to do it, but I continued that effort when I came here as a U.S. Senator and as cochair of the Congressional Friends of the National Park Service for its centennial. I authored a bill that we set up in 2006 that finally created this endowment fund to be able to take public-private partnerships. Part of it is in the park. Part of it is with the National Park Foundation. That bill, called the National Park Service Centennial Act, was signed into law in the year of the National Park Service's centennial anniversary. The two funds together that were codified in that law have now provided more than $200 million to address the maintenance backlog. By the way, more than $125 million of that has been from private dollars, non-Federal dollars. The idea was to provide the Federal match to encourage more people who love the parks to contribute. We did better than the legislation required, which was a one-to-one match-- $200 million total, $125 million of which came from non-Federal sources. That funding helps, and I am proud of that. Yet, frankly, as I mentioned earlier, a $12 billion maintenance backlog requires even more. As soon as we are able to do that, we need to do it because the costs are going up. I recently authored legislation with three of my colleagues, Senators Mark Warner, Lamar Alexander, and Angus King--two Republicans, one Democrat, and one Independent. It is called Restore Our Parks Act. The bill now has eight additional cosponsors who are Democrats and Republicans, and I am hopeful that many more of my colleagues will join us. The legislation is the product of a bipartisan agreement on consensus legislation that combines two similar bills that were already introduced. One was with Senator Warner and me, and one was with Senator Alexander and Senator King. The Restore Our Parks Act is a commonsense solution to this $12 billion in long-overdue projects, and it ensures that we can do the maintenance to keep the parks up to speed. It creates a legacy restoration fund that will get half of all of the annual energy revenues over the next 5 years, which are not otherwise allocated, to be used for priority deferred maintenance projects. This is funding-- these are royalties on offshore leases, let's say, and onshore energy projects. Some of this funding currently goes to land and water conservation funding, and it will continue to go there. These are funds that are otherwise unobligated. The bill caps deposits into the fund at $1.3 billion a year, which would provide a total of $6.5 billion for deferred maintenance projects in our parks over the next 5 years. It is not the whole amount now, but it is historic. We have never had this much funding being put into the parks at this time. It will provide that certainty, to know it is going to be there year after year and for this purpose only. About two-thirds of those funds will go toward buildings, utilities, visitors' facilities, and about one-third will go toward transportation projects, like roads and pathways. Through simply using funds that the government is already taking in from these on- and offshore energy development projects and not depositing them in the General Treasury, we can cut our national parks' long-overdue maintenance backlog in half. This is exciting because about half of these projects--about $6 billion of the $12 billion--are what the Park Service calls urgent projects, urgent priorities. So we will at least have the certainty of knowing that the funding will be there for these larger projects that need to get done. It is a certainty we will never find through the annual appropriations process. We will be able to get some of these bigger long-term maintenance projects done and restore the beauty of our parks where needed. This legislation is broadly supported. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and the Trump administration support it. I thank Secretary Zinke personally because he has really committed himself to this issue. When he went through his nomination process, we talked about the maintenance issues at the parks. Like every good fiscal conservative, he said: This needs to be addressed and addressed now; otherwise, it is going to get worse and worse and worse. Instead of adding more to the parks, instead of giving the parks more responsibilities, let's be better stewards of what we have. And I agree with that philosophy. I commend him for that, and I commend him for his support and his help in ensuring that the administration supports it. Mick Mulvaney, the OMB Director, has also been very helpful in ensuring that we can use this funding source and that they are supportive of it. We also have support from so many outside groups. I can't name them all, but I want to mention the National Parks Conservation Association. It has been terrific, as have the Pew Charitable Trusts and so many other groups. The Outdoor Industry Association and many more have endorsed it. Just yesterday, we had a hearing on this legislation in the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks. It was chaired by Steve Daines from Montana, who is, by the way, one of the cosponsors of this legislation. Steve Daines is a guy with a personal passion for the parks in his having grown up in the shadow of Yellowstone National Park. We had experts and conservation groups at our hearing who all voiced their support for this legislation. The director of the Pew Charitable Trusts said it well: Supporting the bipartisan Restore Our Parks Act is a wise investment for a National Park System that has overwhelming support from the American public, that generates hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars for the economy each year, that provides access to world class recreation opportunities, and that preserve our nation's history. Well said. Deb Yandala, who is the CEO of the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park and who is also the president of the national association of all of the friends' groups for the parks, said: Supporters of our national parks across the country are thrilled with this bill. Addressing deferred maintenance will greatly improve the visitor experience and go a long way toward protecting important historic and natural resources in our parks. This bill makes sense, and it will help make our national parks even better for the hundreds of millions of visitors every year who take in their beauty and their history. I urge the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to approve this bill quickly. I know that Senator Murkowski, as chair of that committee, is a strong supporter of our parks, and I know she will be supportive in our moving forward. It is the same with Maria Cantwell, the ranking member. Then I hope the full Senate will vote on this legislation soon--vote on it now--so that we can move forward quickly. We want to make the second 100 years of our national parks as magnificent and successful as the first 100 years have been. This bill is necessary in our being able to do that. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I wish to honor George C. Williams and the crew of the 42-299-28 B-17 Flying Fortress that was shot down over Normandy, France, during WWII 75 years ago on July 4, 1943. George C. Williams, bombardier from Warren, Trumbull County, OH, was killed in action. While assisting the nose gunner, his chute accidentally opened inside the aircraft. Pilot Olof Ballinger offered up his own parachute, but George refused. It is believed that he attempted to fly the plane after all the crew had evacuated. Pilot Olof Maximilian Ballinger, of Newton Falls, Trumbull County, OH, evaded capture and walked alone, with no compass, over the Pyrenees Mountains. He reached safety in Spain in November 1943 and returned to the U.S. He eventually moved to California. Harry W. Basucher, Jr., of Cincinnati, OH, was killed in action inside the plane by enemy cannon fire. Copilot John Marshall Carrah, from Chico, CA, evaded capture and escaped to Switzerland and then to Spain and returned to the U.S. in March 1944 and continued to assist in the war effort. He was a career U.S. Air Force officer retiring as a lieutenant colonel. Byron J. Gronstall, from Van Nuys, CA, who evacuated the plane, was captured by a German patrol. He was a prisoner of war at Stalag 7A. William C. Howell, from Goldsboro, NC, who evaded capture, was seriously wounded. Francis E. Owens, of Pittsburgh, PA, evaded capture but died of exposure in the Pyrenees Mountains while trying to assist other crewmen through the dangerous passage. He was awarded the Soldier's Medal for bravely dragging wounded men out of harm's way. John K. Lane, a radio operator from Deland, FL, was captured and was a prisoner of war at Stalag 7A and 17B. Francis E. Owens found John K. Lane unconscious and dragged him the length of the plane before attaching a parachute and pulling the ripcord while assisting him out of the aircraft. Paul McConnell, the navigator from Montgomery, AL, evaded capture. Albert Wackerman, from Salinas, CA, was killed in action by enemy fire aboard the B-17. A documentary was created about these 10 brave American aviators and will be featured at an event in Warren, OH, on July 2, 2018, at the Samuel E. Lanza Veterans Resource Center. The son of copilot John M. Carrah, who has done extensive research, heard first-person accounts from his father, and assisted in filming the documentary, will speak after the documentary viewing. This event is sponsored by the Tribune Chronicle with assistance from Warren city councilman John Brown. The bravery of the crew of the 42-299-28 B-17 Flying Fortress was indicative of so many of their generation who risked life and limb to liberate Europe from an evil unlike anything our country and allies had ever faced. We can never repay them for their service and sacrifice, but this United States Congress and our Nation are forever grateful for their actions and the actions of so many others like them.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I want to talk about the tax reform legislation that this body passed at the end of last year. It turns out that this week is the 6-month anniversary of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the tax reform legislation. It is time for us to look at it and determine how it is working. It is particularly important because there are a number of provisions in the tax legislation that are not permanent. In other words, there is a sunset on some of the tax cuts. Some of these provisions expire as soon as the end of 2019, which is just the end of next year, so it is time to start thinking about how it works. Second, we have Members on the other side of the aisle saying that we ought to get rid of this altogether. That would mean, of course, big tax increases for a lot of folks. But let's look at what the results are before we take those kinds of votes and make those kinds of decisions. I would submit that in the 6 months since it has been put into place, it has worked incredibly well for the people I represent, for the workers and small businesses I represent, and for those who are concerned about getting wages back up, fighting poverty, and helping to grow the economy. I know that in the debate we are having on the farm bill right now, there has been discussion about the food stamp program. One of the points that are being made is that food stamp spending is actually down right now. It has decreased in the last 6 months. Why? Because the economy is improving. That is a good thing. Before tax reform, let's face it, our economy was incredibly weak. Wages were flat and had been flat for almost a decade. With the Congressional Budget Office estimating that this year's growth was going to be only 2 percent, we were looking at more weak economic performance. We were looking at another year where we were going to be performing way below our potential as an economy. So what happened? A couple months ago, when the Congressional Budget Office looked at what is happening with the economy, which they attributed to pro-growth policies, including tax reform, they said: You know what, the economy is not going to grow at 2 percent this year. Their projection for this year is now 3.3 percent growth. That is a huge difference. Going from 2 percent to 3.3 percent is going to make a world of difference to people in their lives, in our economy, in their ability to see higher wages and better jobs. The economy is doing better. Six months into this new law, the economy is up and running and moving toward its full potential. In the most recent Congressional Budget Office estimate for this quarter, it looks as though we are going to see some significant growth. There is no estimate yet from the CBO, but it was stated that the Federal Reserve gave an estimate of 4.5 percent growth. I don't know if that will happen, but the consensus estimate from economists is that in the second quarter of this year, we are likely to see growth at over 4 percent. We will hear the final number from the Congressional Budget Office at the end of July, but, again, we are seeing more jobs, higher wages, better economic growth, and therefore more opportunity for all Americans. That is a good thing. Why is tax reform helping to create this new opportunity for higher wages and more growth? I am going to discuss three reasons why I believe this tax reform proposal has been helping to get the economy moving and why it is so important to keep these policies in place and to not risk higher taxes on individuals or lower economic growth if we were to move away from this legislation and not make it permanent. No. 1, updating our international tax code has definitely encouraged companies to invest in America. We had a totally outdated international tax code. We had the highest tax rates among all the industrialized countries at the business level for international companies. We had a system that actually encouraged companies to keep their money overseas and therefore spend it overseas. So a company facing our old Tax Code would have had their board and stakeholders saying: Don't bring that money back because it is going to be taxed too high. Keep it overseas. That was crazy. It made no sense whatsoever. Frankly, it took us too long to address that issue, but we finally did. Let me give an example. I am told that in the first quarter of this year, more than $300 billion was brought into this country, repatriated back to America from overseas. This is the profit U.S. companies made overseas, and $300 billion was brought back. Compare that to the first quarter of last year, when $38 billion was brought back. This is because of tax reform. This is good. This money is being brought back to invest in America, and it is the most money on record, by the way. So something is changing, and it is positive. The change to the international system is helping in a number of ways, including companies bringing the money back and investing it here. Second, lowering the tax rate for small and large businesses has resulted in new investments in people, plant equipment, and technology. We have seen it in terms of higher bonuses, higher wages, and increased retirement contributions. There are a lot of examples. We have seen it in terms of investing in new technology and new equipment, which, in the end, is probably as important as anything because--think about it--one thing the economists have said about our economy over the last decade is that we are not improving our productivity as we should. What they mean by that is that the productivity of each worker has been disappointing, and that leads to lower wages and not having higher economic performance. If you make a worker more productive by investing in the latest technology and new equipment, that helps everybody. It helps that worker have a higher salary, and it helps the economy. That is actually happening out there. I have seen the results of it all over Ohio. I represent the State of Ohio, which has a lot of manufacturing and a lot of small businesses. I have gone around and talked with them. I visited 21 individual businesses and held about a dozen roundtable discussions with small and midsized businesses and one large business. We talked about this, and of the 21 businesses I visited, every single one of them is taking the tax savings and investing it in their people, their plant, and their equipment. Some are raising wages. Some are giving bonuses to their employees. Some are buying new equipment. Some are expanding their operations. Some of them are improving employee benefits. There is a company that has three branches of an auto parts store that stopped offering healthcare about 5 years ago because of the cost of the Affordable Care Act. They couldn't afford healthcare. Their people had to go out on the individual market and get it through the Affordable Care Act. They are now offering healthcare again, and the employees are extremely happy. Their costs are down, and their deductibles are down. They did that all with tax savings. Many companies have done a combination of these things. They are investing in their people. There is a small manufacturing company in Cincinnati, and shortly after the tax bill was signed into law, they said: We are going to give $1,000 bonuses to our people. And they did. They also invested in equipment. A company I visited in Columbus, OH, invested in equipment. It is a steel processer. The equipment they used was from 1986. The equipment itself was 31 years old, which is exactly the age of our old Tax Code. Nineteen eighty six was when we last reformed the Tax Code. After we modernized the Tax Code--finally modernized an antiquated tax code that was 31 years old--they got rid of a 31-year-old piece of equipment and replaced it with a brandnew piece of equipment. I thought that was appropriate. That is how these tax savings are being used. There are some groups in town that put up a website saying: These businesses have benefited from this and these employees. I can tell you that it is way understated. I can't find a business in Ohio that hasn't benefited from it. Some are doing more than others, no question about it. Some of the big financial service companies are giving big wage increases. Other small businesses might be investing in a new piece of equipment, but there are so many businesses out there. They are not all putting out press releases or talking about it, but they are doing something. This is good. This is why you see this economic growth coming up, finally, after so many years of flat wages and high expenses. You are seeing people begin to see a little improvement in their wages. That is really important. First are the international parts. Second is what this is doing in terms of the business side and how that affects people. The third one is direct tax relief to individuals because that is part of this bill too. If you hear people talk about this bill--sometimes on the other side of the aisle--you would think that is not in there. It is very much in there. People are able to keep more of their hard-earned money, and it goes directly to the middle-class constituents whom I represent. They are the ones who get the biggest bang for their buck because we doubled the standard deduction, taking it from $12,000 to $24,000 for a family because we doubled the child tax credit, including increasing the part that is refundable. Even if you don't have an income tax liability, you get it. We also lowered tax rates for people. That combination means that people have seen their paychecks go up. About 90 percent of workers in America got a paycheck that had more money going into their bank account rather than to Uncle Sam because their withholding changed. You know this if you are listening today because you probably had this happen to you if you are one of the 90 percent, which you probably are. Uncle Sam is taking a little less withholding, and you are able to keep a little more. As I said consistently during the debate on tax reform, and we went back and forth on this, I just said: Look, the proof is in the paycheck. We can argue this all day long. When people get their paycheck, it is either going to be better or not. For 90 percent of the people I represent, it is better. Of course, they are happy about that. In addition to that, we also made the Tax Code more progressive. What does that mean? That means those at the top of the income ladder are actually paying a larger portion of the overall tax burden, not a smaller portion. Let me say that again. The Tax Code is more progressive. If you are at the top of the income ladder, you are now paying a larger portion of the overall tax burden. At the lower end, you are paying less in terms of the overall tax burden. The biggest percentage tax increase is for those making over $1 million a year, and the biggest tax decrease is for those making $30,000 a year or less. This is why the Joint Committee on Taxation, in response to questions I asked them directly, said that over 3 million Americans now have no tax liability at all in terms of income tax liability thanks to this tax reform effort because they are at the lower end of the economic scale. Before, they had a tax liability, but now they don't because of a lower rate doubling the standard deduction--doubling the tax credit. Three million Americans don't have to worry about Uncle Sam because they don't have tax liability anymore under this bill. This has changed the way our tax bill works. The Joint Committee on Taxation can show you those numbers. All of this resulted in higher wages for the first time in about a decade. This was the strongest wage growth for nonsupervisory employees in 9 years. That is the latest data. You can check it out at the Department of Labor. It also resulted in a lot more optimism out there. If you look at the surveys on optimism--I saw there was one done by an NBC station recently saying this is the highest level of optimism they have seen. There is optimism also in small businesses. The National Federation of Independent Business does surveys regularly. Their surveys are unprecedented because they are coming back saying that small businesses are ready to invest now and planning to invest. In my home State of Ohio, we had the Ohio Chamber of Commerce do a survey recently. They found that 70 percent of the businesses already added new employees. We are now in the second quarter, and 75 percent are planning to add new employees. It is amazing. This is actually happening as we talk because we changed a tax system that was discouraging growth, discouraging investment, and making it harder for people to get ahead, harder to see wages go up to meet expenses. There are good things going on. Since December, the number of long- term unemployed people has decreased by about 400,000 people. The unemployment rate has fallen from 4.9 percent to 4.3 percent in my home State of Ohio. Nationally, unemployment is now down to 3.8 percent, the lowest since 2000. That is all good news. What do you hear now? I hear from businesses, not so much about the tax burden--and, frankly, not so much about the regulatory burden because Congress has also done some things to relieve the regulatory burden, particularly for small businesses--but I hear that finding qualified workers is their biggest challenge. I heard it last weekend, and I will hear it this coming weekend. As a small business person myself, I sense it. It is a major hurdle right now. There is a shortage of workers. A big reason is what economists call the labor force participation rate. What does that mean? It just means the number of Americans who are unemployed and not looking for work at all is higher than it has been in the past. These are folks who are on the sidelines. They are not even reported in the unemployment numbers. It is so bad, our labor force participation rate was at its prerecession level of 66 percent of people working rather than the current 62.7 percent. If we just had a level of 66 percent working 10 years ago, our unemployment rate today would not be 3.8 percent. If you take into account those people, our unemployment rate would be about 8.6 percent. It is pretty disappointing. That is one challenge we still have with this incredible tax relief and tax cut legislation, and increasing economic opportunities, growing jobs, and raising wages. We still have a lot of people who are on the sidelines and not in the workforce. Among able-bodied men, by the way, between 25 and 55, 8.5 million of them are in this category. They are not even showing up in the unemployment numbers. That is wrong. You want them to have the dignity and self-respect that comes from work, and our economy needs these people to be able to work. According to the Congressional Budget Office's 30-year projection they gave us yesterday, they think the labor force participation rate will get even worse. That is what they told us yesterday. It will be declining over the next 30 years to even below what it is now--below 60 percent. That can't happen. That is unacceptable. The low labor force participation rate cannot be the new normal, and it can't get worse. We want people to get that dignity and self-respect that comes from work. We want them to enter into our economy. As the economy is growing and businesses are expanding, there is no better time to reverse this trend, to bring people into the economy and bring them back to work. I have dug into this issue, trying to figure out why this is. There are a number of reasons: dependency on government programs and being sure we don't have people go to work who then lose all their benefits right away--trying to deal with that cliff. Then there is the tax issue. When you go to work, you have higher taxes. We should do more to get people into work making more pay. We should have work requirements in some of these programs. That has been talked about a lot on the floor. We should deal with other issues, including the skills gap. We are doing it with career technical schools and other things. Opioid Epidemic Mr. President, I want to mention the single most important problem we face, and that is the opioid crisis. I say this because the opioid epidemic has hit our country and is, by the way, the No. 1 killer in my State of Ohio right now and in many States around the country. It is already having a devastating impact on everything--on crime, families, the ability for jails to work, our healthcare system to work--but it is also affecting employment in huge ways. A recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that counties with higher levels of opioid prescriptions have lower workforce participation rates. It is no wonder. They surveyed the business community, and about half the organizations they contacted said the opioid epidemic has negatively impacted their businesses. People can't get through the drug tests. Also, people aren't applying for work. Why do I say that? Well, the Department of Labor did a study earlier this year that showed 44 percent of these people outside the workforce altogether, who are off in the shadows or on the sidelines--44 percent of them had taken a drug, a pain medication the previous day. The Brookings Institute says the number is 47 percent. When further pushed, two-thirds said they were taking prescription pain medication. That is amazing. That 44 percent is likely underreported. There is a stigma attached to the opioid crisis. Second, there is a legal issue for a lot of people. It is not like this is an overreported number. That is an amazing number that nearly half of the people who are outside the workforce are saying they are taking pain medication on a daily basis. The sad reality is, again, it is likely to be much higher than that. We know what we have to do. We need to get people into treatment, support them, help them overcome their addiction, and get them back to work and leading productive lives. There are things Congress can and should do to take care of that. I ask unanimous consent to continue to discuss solutions to the opioid epidemic after the majority leader has a chance to make his remarks.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, we talked a little about the growing economy, and we talked about the fact that one of the weaknesses we have is, in spite of a growing economy and lower unemployment--all this good news coming with the tax cuts and tax reforms and investments--we have a problem, which is that many people are outside the workforce altogether. Historically high levels of labor force participation are not being part of the workforce, but instead people are being sidelined. How do you get those people back to work? There are 8.5 million men between 25 and 55, as an example, who are not working. They are not showing up on the unemployment numbers because they are not looking for work. There are a number of reasons for that. The one I think that is most significant today, that puts us at this high level of people outside the workforce, is the opioid epidemic. I am talking about the fact that we have data on this from the Federal Reserve. We have data on this from the Brookings Institute and data from the Department of Labor and the Trump administration showing this is a huge problem. About half the people, for instance, outside the workforce altogether are taking pain medication on a regular basis. This opioid crisis is affecting us in every way. What is Congress doing about it? We have made progress. In the last couple of years, we have made unprecedented progress to combat addiction with legislation like the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, a bipartisan bill I coauthored with my colleague Senator Whitehouse. We have the 20th Century Cures Act, which has been very important in getting funding out to the States to deal with this crisis. We just passed legislation that provides more funding for the kind of treatment and prevention in longer term recovery programs that are proven to work, that have evidence-based results behind them. That is all very important. We need to continue to push back against this addiction by helping people get the care they need and the treatment they need to overcome their dependency. By the way, I have been with three community roundtables in the last few weeks talking specifically about how this funding is being used. It is exciting because it is being used on innovative new ideas that will make a big difference going forward, in terms of getting people who are addicted and overdosing. We are getting them the Narcan they need to save their lives and then not allowing that gap to occur where they go back to that same environment but getting them into treatment. There are quick response teams--a combination of law enforcement, social workers, and treatment providers getting in immediately saying: OK. You overdosed. Your life was saved by this Narcan--this miracle drug that reverses the effect of the overdose. Now, instead of going back to your old community where, unfortunately, many of those people are overdosing again and again, let's get you into treatment. One of these organizations that is funded by the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act is telling me they are getting an 80-percent success rate getting people into treatment. That is huge. It is still too low, but that is so much higher, unfortunately, than what is typical out there. So we are beginning to make progress--closing some of the gaps, getting people into the treatment they need, and sending a stronger prevention message out there, keeping people out of the funnel of addiction in the first place. But, in the meantime, we have a huge problem, and it is not getting better in my home State. It is actually getting worse. In most areas of the State, you will now see higher rates of addiction and more overdoses, and the increase is almost all due to one thing, and that is fentanyl. This is this synthetic form of opioid that is now coming in and kind of taking over, pushing out heroin, prescription drugs, and other drugs. Fentanyl is incredibly powerful--50 times more powerful than heroin. It is incredibly inexpensive. We are told by the experts that most of it is coming from China--not over land from Mexico but from China-- through our U.S. mail system. It is unbelievable. It is a shock, but it is true. It is so potent that a few flakes of it can be deadly. It is totally unacceptable that in some laboratory in China, some evil scientist is making this poison and being allowed to ship it into our country. It is now the No. 1 cause of death in my home State. Two-thirds of our overdose deaths last year, we believe, are going to be as a result of fentanyl, not heroin or prescription drugs. It is tragic and eye- opening that, when you look at what has happened, the Ohio Alliance for Innovation in Population Health has estimated that opioid overdoses were responsible for more than 500,000 years of life expectancy lost in Ohio between 2010 and 2016. It is an interesting way to look at it. It is tragic. More than 500,000 years of life expectancy were lost in Ohio between 2010 and the end of 2016. Overdoses are now the top cause of deaths for all Americans over the age of 50. It is the top cause of death in my home State for everybody. Increasingly, these drug overdoses are from fentanyl. In Ohio, two- thirds of overdose deaths last year were from fentanyl. That is up from about 58 percent in 2016. It is the deadliest, most difficult drug for us to deal with right now. Two weeks ago, the police in Dayton, OH, seized about 20 pounds of fentanyl during a drug arrest. Last Friday, Federal agents in Columbus arrested 4 people and seized 22 pounds of fentanyl. Taken together, these two busts--20 pounds and 22 pounds of fentanyl--is enough fentanyl to kill 9.5 million people. Think about that. By the way, that is about 80 percent of the population in my State of Ohio, from just these two busts alone. On Monday we had a tele-townhall here. We do these on a monthly basis. We asked a number of questions. One question I have started to ask in the last several years is this: Do you know anybody who has been directly affected by the opioid epidemic? We had the highest percentage of response ever at our townhall meeting here on Monday. The tele-townhall response was that 67 percent of the people on the call said yes. Over two-thirds of the people on this call said that yes, they knew someone who has been directly affected by the opioid epidemic. That is the highest level we have had. One woman I spoke to on the call, Pauline from Zanesville, OH, told me a tragic story that is, unfortunately, similar to other ones I hear as I travel across the State. It was about her brother. Her brother had died of an overdose. Her brother, according to her, did not use opioids, and yet he died of an opioid overdose. She said he did smoke marijuana, but she said somehow there was something put into the marijuana that he was smoking that caused him to overdose and die. I hear this story a lot back home. I talked about the three roundtable discussions we had recently in Ohio. In two of those three roundtables, a police chief and a sheriff, respectively, told me about a young man who overdosed, who was saved by Narcan, and then woke up and said: I was just smoking dope. Well, they checked, and guess what it was? It was fentanyl that had been sprinkled into the marijuana. I am sure it is the same situation with Pauline's brother. The fentanyl that she talked about was what killed him. What is the lesson here? It is that every street drug--whether it is cocaine, whether it is heroin, whether it is crystal meth--all of them are now subject to having fentanyl included within them, including description pills, because sometimes they are reformulated to make it look like prescription pills. That fentanyl is the killer. It is not that those other drugs can't cause you to overdose and die also, but with regard to fentanyl, that is the deadliest and riskiest of all. Any of these street drugs can be deadly. We need to combat this drug influx of fentanyl, and Congress has had a breakthrough recently in a way to do that. I mentioned that it primarily comes from China, and it primarily comes through our U.S. postal system. The STOP Act, which is bipartisan legislation that I authored with my colleague Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota--I see her colleague is on the floor now--will combat fentanyl at the source by closing a loophole that is currently in place in the Federal law. After 9/11, we insisted that all of the private carriers--FedEx, UPS, DHL--had to give law enforcement information about every package that comes into America. This was after 9/11, remember. We asked the post office to study it, and we asked the Postmaster General to get together with the Homeland Security people and to come up with an answer. That was 16 years ago, and it hasn't happened. Even though you send something by one of these private carriers, like FedEx, you have to provide this information up front: What is in the package? Where is it from? Where is it going? Electronically, law enforcement takes that big data and decides what packages should be taken offline. They have been able to stop a lot of bad stuff, including fentanyl, from coming through. The post office doesn't require that because we haven't required it here in the Congress. It is time for us to do that. I am pleased to tell you that after a few years of work, last week the House of Representatives passed the STOP Act by a vote of 353 to 52. The appropriate committee here in the Senate that has jurisdiction, the Finance Committee, also agreed to discharge the STOP Act recently. So now we can vote on it in the full Senate and get it to the President's desk to be signed into law. As we developed the STOP Act, we conducted an 18-month investigation into this in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair. We revealed just how easy it was to purchase fentanyl online and have it shipped to the United States. Based on our undercover investigation, these drugs could be found through a simple Google search. Overseas sellers accessed through an undercover investigator, essentially guaranteed delivery if fentanyl was sent through the U.S. Postal Service, not if it was sent through one of the private carriers. Traffickers prefer the Postal Service because it doesn't have the screening that you have through the private carriers. So we need to be sure that the requirement is met with the advanced electronic data that is on all of the packages coming in. It tells law enforcement that they need to be able to use big data to identify suspicious packages and to keep this poison from coming into our communities. That law is something we can do right now. The post office would say: Well, we are beginning to provide that information. Unfortunately, based on their testimony before my subcommittee, even with the pressure from us over the last couple of years, only 36 percent of packages are getting screened, and 20 percent of those aren't presented to law enforcement, based on their testimony. Also, some of the information is not helpful because it is not legible. We need better data. We need to get 100 percent of the packages subject to this data. We need to be sure we can do a better job of, one, stopping the poison from coming into our country, into our communities, into our homes, but also, at the very least, increasing the cost of this. By reducing the supply, we can increase the cost. One of the reasons fentanyl is growing so much is because it is so incredibly powerful, but, also, it is so incredibly inexpensive. Let's have a vote on the STOP Act in the Senate as soon as possible. I think we can do it next month. Let's get it to the President. Let's get it signed into law. There is an urgency here. As I mentioned, in just 7 years, in my home State, Ohioans have lost an estimated half million years of life expectancy as a result of opioid overdoses. The impact is far greater than that, though. There are families who are broken apart. Prisons are flooded. Businesses are deplete of workers because of this addiction. We talked about this earlier. There is a lack of workforce because of this addiction. The STOP Act will allow our country to push back against this international influx of fentanyl and will help our economy continue this positive momentum we have been experiencing since tax reform became law. We can do so by combating this newest and deadliest scourge of the opioid epidemic. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield back my time.