Marco Rubio

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I am pleased to recognize Carla Ross, the Escambia County Teacher of the Year from Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, FL. Carla was recognized for bringing enthusiasm into the classroom every day. She has a different style of teaching, with her classroom being more of a hands-on experience, which her students find to be more enjoyable and have excelled in this leaning environment. Carla is an instructor for the marketing and entrepreneurship academy at Booker T. Washington High School. She became a teacher after moving to Pensacola and has been with Escambia County schools for 35 years. She never envisioned herself becoming a teacher, having hated school when she was in high school and college. Carla fell in love with this career after working with her students and brought her passion for the business world into the schoolhouse. She immerses her students into the real world of work, teaching every aspect of running a business, production, advertising, sales, and distribution. This provides nonstop activity for her students to stay on task. They know their work is done under the watchful eye of someone they see as more than a teacher. I extend my best wishes to Carla for all the hard work she has done for her students. I look forward to hearing of her continued success in the years ahead.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I recognize Jennifer Wingate, the Gilchrist County Teacher of the Year from Trenton High School in Trenton, FL. In only her second year of teaching in the public school system, Jennifer was named Teacher of the Year because she earned the respect of her students, peers, and administrators. She began her teaching with private music lessons and has directed church choirs and praise teams. In order to engage students, Jennifer teaches the historical or emotional context of each piece of music they are learning to play. In her first year as band director, her commitment helped the Trenton High School Band receive a superior rating at the district musical assessment for the first time in more than a decade. Jennifer's motto when teaching her students is S.U.D.A.: spirit, unity, discipline, and attitude. Each of these traits are valued by Jennifer and were adopted from her own mentor. Jennifer graduated in 2011 from Newberry College in Newberry, SC, with a bachelor of arts degree in applied music. After relocating to Florida, she was hired as the band director and music appreciation teacher for Trenton High School. She also teaches music appreciation to nonband students. I extend my best wishes to Jennifer for her dedication to her students and music and congratulate her on this award.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I recognize Chasey Niebrugge, the Lee County Teacher of the Year from River Hall Elementary School in Alva, FL. Chasey was named Teacher of the Year because she encompasses all the components of a model teacher. Described as talented, innovative, and committed to expanding learning beyond the classroom, she changed the intensive intervention/exceptional student education program at her school from a program that lacked resources and true inclusion practices to a program that is thriving. Students who were struggling are now flourishing. Her II/ESE students are a huge part of the school's family and are included in all activities they are able to attend. She creates an engaging, differentiated, and safe classroom environment where her students are expected to do their personal best. Chasey believes that continuing her own learning outside of her classroom is extremely important and a large part of her success as a teacher. Chasey feels that every single day is a new opportunity for a child to learn. As an educator, she believes it is her responsibility to provide the best learning experience for her students. She has always wanted to teach, believing this to be her passion and that she is meant to be with her students. Chasey is a graduate from Estero High School and is a former basketball and softball athlete. She is the intensive intervention/ exceptional student education teacher at River Hall Elementary School. I express my sincere thanks and appreciation to Chasey and offer my best wishes on her future endeavors.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I recognize Hannah Howe, Alyssa Hofmann, Maggie Zendehrouh, Zack Chace, and Cameron Shearer for qualifying to the National Ocean Sciences Bowl. These exceptional students from Viera High School are advancing to the 21st Annual National Ocean Sciences Bowl being held in Boulder, CO. The team previously won the Manatee Bowl, which was hosted by the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. This year, more than 1,500 students from 231 schools in 31 States competed in 23 regional National Oceans Sciences Bowl competitions. These five students demonstrated their knowledge of the ocean and its role in Earth system science during this year's theme, ``Our Ocean Shaping Weather,'' and proving victorious. I extend my best wishes to Viera High School's Ocean Science Academic Team and look forward to hearing of their continued success.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I would like to recognize Team Invictus, the Fort Myers High School robotics team in Fort Myers, FL. Team Invictus is comprised of Fort Myers High School students and is the first robotics team from Lee County to reach the world competition in Houston, TX. The team built a robot in 6 weeks and won the Rookie All-Star award in Orlando, FL. The Fort Myers High School robotics program has only existed for 4 months, launching in December 2017, and is helping prepare the students for life after high school. The members of Team Invictus are honored to be a part of this experience as they continue to grow and make history in the Fort Myers community. I extend my best wishes to Team Invictus and look forward to hearing of their continued success.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, we are on the nomination of Congressman Bridenstine to be the new Administrator at NASA. I want to tie it into what I will talk about in a moment because it comes down to Presidential appointments and the problems we are running into with regard to them. I was not enthused by the nomination. It is nothing personal against Mr. Bridenstine. I feel that NASA is an organization that needs to be led by a space professional. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago, the Acting Administrator resigned--or, I should say, retired. His last day on the job is the 30th. So it leaves us with the prospect of this incredibly important agency for Florida and the country with a vacancy in its top job. We are on our second Acting Administrator. If one were to do the math, even if Congressman Bridenstine were to withdraw and a new vetting process were to begin for a new nominee, by the time it would work its way through the administration, the committee process, and the floor, the way things are going here, we could be into February-March, at the earliest, of next year. There is no way NASA can go 2 years and X number of months without having a permanent Administrator. One makes these decisions always under the context that a President should have significant discretion in picking the team. Whether you like it or not, millions of Americans last year voted for the President. He was elected, and he has a right to govern. In 4 years--in less than 4 years now, in 2\1/2\ years--the American people will have the chance, once again, through our democratic process, to opine on whether or not they will want him to have a second term. Our job here is to provide advice and consent. We are to analyze these nominees and determine whether or not we want to support them. My view of it is, as has been the tradition of the Senate for the entire existence of the Republic, that we give great deference to the President on choosing the qualifications. We want to make sure that people are qualified and that there is nothing about them that would disqualify them. It is my view that the more important the job the more discretion the President deserves. It is why, although I had significant reservations about the nomination of Secretary Tillerson, I decided to support it, because I believed the President deserved significant discretion. When you get to the subsecretaries and the like, I think that discretion diminishes. It is what has led me to decide to support Congressman Bridenstine, despite my reservations, and it is what, I hope, will lead my colleagues--at least a sufficient number--to support the nomination of Mike Pompeo to be the Secretary of State. Let me read you some of the previous votes we have had here in the Senate. All but one of them predates my service. Colin Powell was confirmed by a voice vote, which is almost unimaginable in a 21st century Senate, but in 2001, on January 20, by a unanimous voice vote, he was confirmed as the Secretary of State. A few years later, in 2005, Condoleezza Rice was confirmed as Secretary of State by a vote of 85 to 13. Now, it was still 13 noes, but, nonetheless, it was 85 yeses. I assure you that not everyone who voted for her was happy about her nomination. People didn't necessarily agree with her. One of the people who supported her, I believe, was future President Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton was nominated and confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 94 to 2, and I promise you that a significant number of the Members on my side of the aisle may have respected Secretary Clinton but strongly disagreed with her and her views on a number of issues, but, nonetheless, they felt the President deserved to have his nominee. When she resigned, her replacement was then-Senator Kerry, who was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, with whom I had significant policy disagreements in the Senate and during his time as Secretary of State. Yet I, along with 93 other Members of the Senate, supported his nomination, and he was confirmed.

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

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I recognize Dr. Janet Bisogno, the Osceola County Teacher of the Year from Celebration High School in Celebration, FL. Janet was named Teacher of the Year in recognition of her accomplishments as an outstanding educator and for her passion and devotion to challenging students towards success. She is considered one of Osceola County's most dynamic and well-respected teachers. Janet gives students tremendous opportunities to participate in science as an immersed experience, including fun but challenging labs and learning opportunities. In both 2016 and 2017, her students scored higher than the world average on IB biology exams. Her students have had a 100-percent pass rate on the end of course exam since she began teaching Pre-IB biology. Janet's leadership in her science professional learning community has been instrumental in moving all students forward. Colleagues say Janet creates strong and positive relationships with her students, which contribute to a successful classroom environment. She traveled with students to Peru, where they completed an academic field study on the Amazon. Janet has volunteered on numerous committees, and is an engaged member of the school's department chair committee, which works towards school improvement. Janet is a graduate of Wright University and received her doctorate from the University of Central Florida. She was previously an educator at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic School. She has been a teacher at Celebration High School since August 2009. I extend my best wishes to Janet for her hard work and dedication and look forward to hearing of her continued success in the years to come.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I joined President Trump in Florida to discuss the benefits of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act with local businesses. Due to these important discussions, I will miss today's vote. (At the request of Mr. DURBIN, the following statement was ordered to be printed in the Record.)

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I wish to recognize Asa Jernigan, the Nassau County Teacher of the Year from Fernandina Beach Middle School in Fernandina Beach, FL. Asa's dedication to both his students and profession led to him being named Teacher of the Year. For 34 years, Asa has taught at both the middle and high school levels. His bands have earned the accolades with 26 consecutive years of superior ratings, as well as having numerous students selected for All-District and All-State Bands. Many of his former students have become professional musicians who perform around the world. Asa shares his passion and expertise of music to colleagues across the district and State. Asa works on various different efforts, such as supervising new band directors, articulating with the Fernandina Beach High School band program, and serving on the Florida Bandmasters Association small schools and mentoring committees. Asa received his bachelor of music education from Troy University and was a member of the Sound of the South marching band. He currently is the band director at Fernandina Beach Middle School, where he has worked for a total of 17 years. I would like to recognize Asa for all his hard work and dedication to his students and look forward to hearing of his continued success in the years to come.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I would like to recognize Brandon Jenkins, the Brevard County Teacher of the Year from Heritage High School in Palm Bay, FL. Brandon received this important recognition based on his teaching philosophy and practice, leadership, professional development, and encouragement of parental engagement in the learning process. After Brandon was named Teacher of the Year, he said it felt like proof his hard work was not in vain. It has always been a dream of his to touch the lives of students, as his life was touched many years ago. Under Brandon's leadership, Heritage has seen its band membership grow from 15 to 130 students. The band's ratings have improved from previously receiving poor ratings at competitions to becoming a superior-rated concert band for the past 3 years. Brandon earned his bachelor of science degree in music education from Winston-Salem State University and master of music degree in wind conducting from Messiah College. He became the band director at Heritage High School and has been a Brevard County Public School teacher for 5 years. I extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to Brandon for all his hard work and dedication he has given to his students. I wish him continued success in the years to come.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I recognize Heather Hickox, the Baker County Teacher of the Year from Baker County Pre-K/ Kindergarten Center in Macclenny, FL. Heather was named Teacher of the Year after exhibiting great use of strategies to meet all learning styles. In her classroom, mathematical concepts are taught well beyond what is expected to be seen at her students' grade level. She is also known for showing excellent orientation to her lessons through clearly posted objectives and activation of background knowledge. According to Heather, every student is important and deserves the chance to achieve their goals. She believes it is the job of teachers to support and encourage students on their journey, to help them find their passions, and to give them the tools they need to be successful. Heather received her bachelor of arts degree in elementary education in 2010 from the University of North Florida, graduating summa cum laude and on the president's list. She began her teaching career at Baker County Pre-K/Kindergarten Center and has been there for 6 years. I extend my best wishes to Heather for all the hard work and dedication she has for her students and look forward to hearing of her continued success in the years to come.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I recognize Lilliemarie Gore, the Alachua County Teacher of the Year from Idylwild Elementary School in Gainesville, FL. When Lilliemarie was named Teacher of the Year, she thanked two of her own teachers who played important roles in her life, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Gloria Jean Merriex. Mrs. Jackson was her third-grade teacher who inspired her to use education as a vehicle to escape the tough Miami neighborhood where she grew up. Mrs. Merriex was a teacher Lilliemarie worked with at Duval Elementary School who was known for using rhymes, music, and other innovative techniques to teach math to students. While Lilliemarie learned about teaching concepts and theories in college, she said the 4 years of mentoring by Gloria taught her the fundamentals of teaching. Lilliemarie says teaching starts with having a genuine love for students and believes that, when the children know you love them, they are willing to jump through hoops to do whatever needs to be done. She loves her kids with everything she has, and they know she loves them. Lilliemarie attended the University of Florida and earned degrees in early elementary and special education. She is a fourth-grade teacher at Idylwild Elementary School and has been an Alachua County Public School teacher for 5 years. I would like to extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to Lilliemarie for all the fine work she has done and wish her continued success in the years to come.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I recognize Tammy Freeman, the Broward County Teacher of the Year from Monarch High School in Coconut Creek, FL. Tammy received the Teacher of the Year award because of her efforts to challenge and encourage young learners to grow as critical thinkers. She empowers her students by not only instilling skills to help them become successful in life, but also by helping them see how important their own voice truly is. Instead of giving her students the answers, which she believes makes them dependent on her, Tammy instead empowers her students by teaching them the process to discover the answers on their own. According to her, this will help them become better thinkers and learners throughout their lifetime. Tammy believes a commitment to personalized instruction builds students' confidence in their abilities and a strong foundation for a lifetime of learning. Tammy is dedicated to knowing each of her students and walks into her classroom each day with the desire to inspire her students, the same way she was inspired by her own teachers. Tammy has been an English teacher at Monarch High School for 10 years and serves as chair of the language arts department. Her passion for her work has earned the respect and admiration of both students and colleagues, and she has shown outstanding ability as both collaborator and leader. I would like to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to Tammy for all the hard work she has done for her students, and I extend my best wishes on her continued success in the years to come.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, since the tragedy 3 weeks ago tomorrow in Parkland, FL, we have all, as a nation, had a conversation about how did this happen, why did it happen, and what can we do to make sure something like this never happens again. As part of that conversation, we have spent a significant amount of time talking to all sorts of different groups and individuals--from students and teachers impacted by this to experts across the country, to other communities that have put in place policies to address this. We have learned a lot about not just this particular incident but some of the dangers around the country. It is interesting, just in the last couple of weeks since it happened, you have seen a significant increase in the number of potential shooters who have been reported to law enforcement and people who have been arrested. I think one of the lessons from this terrible tragedy is, we live in a day and age when someone who is out there talking about hurting people has to be taken seriously. We can no longer afford to be a country in which people make these sorts of threats, and they are taken lightly. Based on all of this information we have gathered, last week I came to the floor and announced a number of initiatives that I hope the Senate will move forward on to make sure these things never happen again. It is important to begin by recognizing that those of us who serve here are in the business of passing laws and making public policy. Making public policy isn't just about coming up with the best idea you can come up with, but it is also about coming up with the best idea you can come up with that actually has a chance of being implemented into law. What that means is, in order to get something done, we need 60 votes in the Senate on virtually any issue, we need a majority of the votes in the House, and we need a White House that is willing to sign it. If those three things don't happen, you do not have a law. So what we spent time trying to do is identify what can we get 60 votes for in the Senate, can pass in the House, and be signed by the President that will make a difference. That has been our criteria. That does not mean there are not other important issues that deserve to be debated--and they will continue to be debated--but it means what can we pass quickly and put in place because, unlike tax policy or some of the other issues we talk about here, there is a time urgency related to this. The time urgency is that it is fair to say there is a high probability that somewhere in America today there is someone like the killer in Parkland who has ideas about doing something similar, and we do not have the luxury of waiting until November or waiting until next year before we act, especially if there are things we agree on. Something remarkable happened over the weekend. Almost all of the 17 families impacted by this horrifying event came together and spent a significant amount of time meeting and talking because they wanted to issue a joint statement as families. It was difficult because these families and some of the people in these families have very different views on a number of issues, including on the Second Amendment, but the one thing they all agreed on is, our schools should be safe places and that when we drop our children at school in the morning, they should be safe, and no one should be worried there is a possibility their children may not come home that afternoon because someone walked into the school and took their life. I would say that is not just true of these 17 families; I think that is true of the country. No matter where you are on the issues regarding the Second Amendment--how much or how little you believe our laws should govern and regulate the sale of guns and what type of guns should be sold--I cannot imagine there is anyone in this country in their right mind who does not believe our schools should be safe. I also do not believe there is anyone in this country in their right mind who would disagree, if we have the opportunity to identify someone before they act, we should act against them and stop them. Because there is such broad consensus on those issues, those are the first steps I believe we should try to take. Now, sometimes when you describe it that way, people think, ``Well, that is all you are going to do or that is all you want to talk about,'' and that is not true. That can't be true because these Second Amendment issues preexist Parkland. We have debated them in the past, and we will continue to debate them in the future. They often find their ways into court. So those issues aren't going anywhere, and they will continue to be here for us to debate and act on, if the body so chooses. The issue that I am afraid will go away, the issue I am afraid may be forgotten in a number of weeks is the fact that, in this case, there was the chance to stop the shooter before he acted. There were clear signs. It is one of the things you see in every single one of these events. It isn't like from one moment to the next they woke up one morning in a bad mood and did these sorts of things. They had been showing signs, for a significant period of time, in case after case after case. If we know this, should we not then create systems in this country to identify people before they act and stop them? On that point, I believe there is broad consensus, and on that point is where I think we should start. Let's act. If there is a law we can pass or a program we can put in place to prevent one of these things from happening, let's do it. Obviously, we may part ways on different views on the other parts of this, but at least, for now, we are together to get these things done. This is the commonsense way forward. This is the way people operate in real life. In real life, if you and another group of people agree on something, you do the thing you agree on first, you get that out of the way, and then you have the debate and the vote on the things you may not have a consensus on. We have a chance to do some things, and they are meaningful. The first is a bill Senator Hatch introduced yesterday. We joined him, along with a broad bipartisan coalition, on the STOP School Violence Act. Senator Hatch's bill is a bill that was innovated by Sandy Hook Promise. It is their No. 1 legislative priority right now, and it is a bill I cannot imagine having a single ``no'' vote in the U.S. Senate. What the bill does is it basically creates a Federal grant program through the Department of Justice for States and through the States' local communities to create risk assessment programs--in essence, to have programs in place to train teachers, administrators, and students to identify the warning signs of someone who may hurt themselves or may hurt other people. It also sets up a task force in each one of these school districts to monitor these students, to identify them collectively. For example, if it had existed in Broward County or something like it that was effective, you can only imagine a room where the sheriff's office and the school and the Department of Children and Families and potentially even the FBI were all there comparing notes. If those entities had been together in one room comparing notes, the sheriff's office would have said we have been to his house 40 times for all sorts of things. The school would have said we had to kick him out, and we had to do all kinds of things because he had fights, he was violent, and made threats. The FBI would say someone actually called our hotline and said this guy was going to shoot up a school. I cannot imagine, through that collaboration, there would not have been action or, at least, the opportunity for action. It didn't happen that way, and we have a chance now to change that. By the way, I saw last week where it was described by some media outlets as a modest bill. This is not modest. Just because it is not controversial doesn't make it modest. Preventing an attack, identifying an attacker, and stopping them before they act is the best thing we could possibly do. Hopefully, the STOP School Violence Act is something we will be able to move on fairly quickly. The House announced earlier today that they will be taking that bill up next week on the floor, and I hope we will move quickly to pass Senator Hatch's bill that has already over 20 other Senators involved in it. Another bill that has been filed that we have joined with as well, with Senators Toomey and Coons, is ``Lie and Try.'' Another problem we have identified in the broader scheme of things is that local law enforcement may not always have sufficient information to investigate individuals who try to buy a firearm, knowing that they are prohibited from doing so. Under our current law, when a person fails an FBI background check, some State law enforcement authorities are not even made aware of the failed background check. Individuals who are willing to lie and try to buy a gun in these situations could very well be very dangerous, and laws are only as good as our willingness and our ability to enforce them. We have to crack down on this. If someone who is ineligible to buy a firearm is trying to buy a firearm, shouldn't law enforcement already, at least, know that--because they may be able to take that piece of information and put it together with other pieces of information to realize this is someone we need to be looking at because they might be up to something. I hope we can pass that. Again, I cannot imagine anyone not being in favor of it. This law would require Federal authorities to alert State law enforcement within 24 hours when someone who is prohibited from buying a firearm lies and tries to do so. The third thing I hope we will look at--and we are working on the language now to address this--is the PROMISE Initiative in schools. As I already said, improving our prevention and information sharing systems as the first two pieces of legislation would do is the best thing we can do to stop school shootings before they happen, but these systems will not work if the clearest warning signs of school shootings--suspicious and violent misbehavior at the school--are not reported in the appropriate places in the first place. Anything blocking this flow of information is very dangerous, and it is a risk to our children. For this reason, a directive to schools issued by the Federal Government during the previous administration deserves for us to look at it again. In 2014, the Department of Education, working with the Department of Justice, issued guidance which used the threat of reduced Federal funding to encourage schools to alter how and which misconduct at school is reported to law enforcement. Now, the goal of this directive was to reduce the school-to-prison pipeline, to reduce suspensions and expulsions, to prevent racially biased discipline. These are laudable goals, which I share and support, but we have to balance that with some common sense. The failure to report violent misbehavior from students-- like the shooter in Parkland--to law enforcement can end up having some very serious repercussions as we saw. So no matter how laudable this goal is, it is not worth risking the safety of our children or losing the public's trust and the trust of our parents about sending their kids to school. This directive needs to be refined. It has to allow for schools and law enforcement to communicate, when warranted, for the safety of the student and the community, and furthermore we need clear pathways of intervention and repercussions that need to be established and followed so local education agencies and law enforcement are effectively able to work together to either navigate students back onto the correct path, properly identify and address red flags that can lead to severe consequences or prevent a student from being lost in the system altogether. Yesterday, I wrote to the Department of Education and the Department of Justice, and I asked them to immediately revise this directive from 2014, and any associated guidance, to make sure that schools are appropriately reporting violence and dangerous actions to local law enforcement. In addition to asking them to do that, proactively, I will also be introducing legislation to make sure that the Federal Government does not fail our children in this way. Finally, I believe the Parkland shooting has identified an area of law that can be improved to reduce gun violence of all kinds, particularly school shootings. Amidst the many systems that we have in place, law enforcement often lacks a flexible tool that they can use to prevent the sale or the possession of guns to someone who should not have them, based on their behavior and the behavior that they have exhibited around those who know them best. There has to be a way to identify and prevent circumstances like what occurred in Parkland, while also preserving the Second Amendment constitutional right of law-abiding Americans and the right to due process. That is why we are working to try to figure out a way to encourage States to enact policies like the gun violence restraining order, so State and local law enforcement and families who have identified someone who is at risk of either taking their own life or hurting other people could petition a court to obtain a court order that allows law enforcement temporarily to stop that person either from buying a gun or from possessing that gun and the ammunition. This would put power back in the hands of people who see something, not just to say something, but they have the opportunity to do something about it. We continue to work on what the right formulation of that is. The most effective implementation is at the State level. We are trying to figure it out with our colleagues. There are different ideas floating around about the right way to structure it. It has to have strong due process. You don't want this used to abuse people. You don't want courts to misuse it or have it being used for false claims, but we need to have a tool at our disposal. If the schools and local law enforcement, and others, identify someone who poses a threat but has yet to commit a crime, there has to be a tool available to stop them from buying guns or using the ones they already have. The State of Florida is probably going to be passing, either today or tomorrow, a law that puts that in State law. Other States like Indiana and California have one as well. What can we do at the Federal level to incentivize more States to do this and have these tools? That is what we are working on. Hopefully, we will have the resolution on a bill that doesn't just work, but that can pass. We can all file the perfect bill in our own minds, but if it doesn't have 60 votes, it is nothing but a piece of paper. That is why we need to work toward that. I want to conclude by mentioning one of the students, Kyle Kashuv, who is a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Like many students at that school, he is motivated to advocate for changes in our laws to prevent something like what happened in his school from ever happening again. In his advocacy, he wants to make sure that the Second Amendment is protected. His No. 1 concern is to make sure that the rights of innocent Americans aren't infringed upon. His opinion on this issue might be different from some of his other classmates, but that doesn't change their shared goal, which is to stop this from happening to anyone ever again. Although their opinions may vary, he and his classmates still go to school together and still root for the same sports teams at their school. They take the same classes with the same teachers, and they still faced the same danger on February 14. As they lift their voices in political discourse to advocate for change, they have differences. They have differences on some issues, but they share a common goal, to keep themselves and students like them safe. I think we can learn something from this example--from them and from their parents. The lessons learned from Parkland are that changes can be made. Some of them I just mentioned action on would immediately reduce the chances of school shootings but would not infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of all Americans. The Members elected to the Senate, like the students at Parkland, have a wide array of opinions on many of these issues, but I think we all share a common goal. We all agree that our schools should be safe. So I am here to urge my colleagues to remember that we have to share a country, no matter what our views may be on any political issue. We have to find a way not just to live together but to thrive as a nation. We have to find a way to keep our children safe. If we keep that in mind, I am sure we can work together to create real, enduring consensus on solutions, on things we agree on that will stop these from happening again. We can have respectful and productive debates on the issues upon which our Nation and this body are still divided, but let us first come together and do the things we agree on. Then we will have the time to argue and debate and solve the things we may not agree on. This is the opportunity before us, and we should not let it pass us by. I yield the floor.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, it was 2 weeks ago yesterday that the tragic incident in Parkland took place--one of many that have impacted our country over the last decade and beyond. That community in Parkland, FL, and the residents of the State of Florida whom I represent--and, frankly, the entire Nation--have demanded not just action but immediate action. We know--and anyone who watches this process is well aware--that there are deep differences on how far and how much we should restrict the Second Amendment right of every American. We know there are deep differences about whether some of those proposed restrictions work. I imagine those debates and those differences will not be easily resolved and will continue, but I also know there is widespread support and agreement that we must act now--as soon as possible--to do everything we can to prevent another tragedy like Parkland from happening anywhere else ever again. That is a consensus position. No matter where one falls on this debate, no matter how one feels about how far or how restricted restrictions on gun sales in America should be, no matter what your views are on that, I don't know of anyone who is in favor of school shootings, and I don't know anyone who is in favor of seeing another one happen. There is common ground in that regard. What I have tried to do, over the last couple of weeks, is undertake efforts to determine what changes in Federal law not only could have prevented this attack but could prevent future ones. In that vein, I have met with State and Federal law enforcement investigators involved not just in this case but in gun laws in general. I have met with students and with teachers from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, including two teachers who were injured in the attack. I have met with school board administrators. I have met with the community at large, including an appearance last week at a nationally televised townhall. I have been in contact with several of the parents of the victims who lost their lives. I have also spoken to experts in firearm sales. I have spoken to a number of federally licensed firearm dealers who talked about some of the frustrations they have with our existing law and their inability to address people who ultimately turn out to be individuals who should not own any gun of any kind. So based on these meetings, based on all of this input, and based on all of the other research that is out there leading up to now, the first thing I want to say is, I actually believe this attack could have and should have been prevented if current law had been fully enforced. This killer was a well-known danger to the school district. He was a well-known danger to the Broward Sheriff's office. He was a well-known danger to his neighborhood. He was also the subject of two separate and specific warnings to law enforcement agencies: a call to the Broward Sheriff's office last November, a call to an FBI hotline in January. In essence, we are always telling people, if you see something, say something. People saw something and people said something and other people saw it as well over a course of time. Yet somehow this deranged and violent individual was able to pass a background check and purchase not 1 but 10 separate firearms, and this deranged and violent individual was ultimately able to walk right into the school a few minutes before dismissal and take the lives of 17 innocent Floridians. This tragedy is the result of a massive multisystemic failure--a failure involving Federal agencies, State agencies, and local authorities who all failed to both identify the threat he posed and coordinate a response to stop him before he took action. It is this failure I hope we will focus on by addressing the shortcomings and vulnerabilities in our current laws and in our current policies. We may still have a debate on the broader issues of regulating gun sales, but irrespective of that debate, we still must and should do this. So today I wanted to come here for a few minutes and announce a comprehensive plan--not a simple bill you just vote on and move on but a series of measures I believe could prevent these attacks before they happen and that also help schools protect their students and their teachers. I believe these ideas should all enjoy bipartisan support, and, if passed, could and should help prevent the next potential mass shooting. These are ideas I outline not just because they work, but because I believe we can get the votes to pass them. Sixty votes in the Senate, a majority in the House, and the signature of a President--that is what it takes to turn an idea into a law, and these ideas I am about to outline both work and, I believe, could enjoy that widespread support. One of the things we have learned is, our schools are woefully unprepared to prevent an attack before it occurs. Furthermore, during my visits to the site of the attack and my followup meeting with teachers at the school, I learned of various changes to school facilities and practices which could have stopped this attack or improved the response. Therefore, I will be joining later today with Senator Orrin Hatch and others in introducing the STOP School Violence Act. If passed, this law would provide Federal grants to do some important things that would have been really helpful in this case: strengthen school security infrastructure of the school, provide school training for everyone--administrators, teachers, even students--to be able to identify threats and to report them. Something that really would be helpful is the creation of a school threat assessment and crisis intervention team. There is a successful program in Los Angeles that does this. That is a team that is a coordination between law enforcement, other State agencies, school districts and the like where they are all talking to each other about students and former students who may pose a threat of violence and intervene before they act. A second issue we identified is that even if law enforcement, school administrators, or family members believe an individual poses the risk of committing an act of violence, they have very few options to prevent them from purchasing any gun or taking away the guns they already have. Therefore, I intend to present a new law--perhaps in coordination with others who are working on it now--that will lead to the creation of gun violence restraining orders, something that will give law enforcement and close family members the option of obtaining a court order to prevent gun sales or remove guns from individuals who pose a threat. To be clear, the due process in such a situation would be on the front end, not on the back end. The third issue we uncovered is, Federal law appears to discourage school systems from reporting dangerous students to law enforcement. I don't support criminalizing all school misconduct, but a student who has threatened violence, who has exhibited violent behavior needs to be reported to law enforcement. A student who has committed a crime by issuing a threat of death using social media--a crime under Florida law--that needs to be reported, but under Broward County school policies, pursuant to something called the PROMISE Program, reporting a student, a dangerous one, to law enforcement is the sixth step--step 6--in their plan. Therefore, I intend to propose changes to the Federal Youth PROMISE Program so a school district plan under this program does not delay and does not discourage law enforcement from being alerted to dangerous and violent or hazardous behavior. Fourth, we need to strengthen background checks. That is why I have joined with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle pushing for the immediate passage of Fix NICS--something that will require all Federal agencies and incentivize every State to fully report relevant information to the national background check database--because a background check is only as good as the information that is on it. This deranged killer was able to buy guns on 10 separate occasions because he would have passed any background check because none of this stuff that was known about him was reported to that system. Fifth, we must begin to prosecute the purchase of guns by people prohibited from doing so. Next week, I hope to be joining a bipartisan group, led by Senators Toomey and Coons, in filing the ``Lie and Try'' bill, which will require the FBI to notify States when someone who is not allowed to buy a gun, tries to buy a gun and fails the background check, so they can be investigated, so they can be prosecuted. In addition, we will be presenting a new law to provide more prosecutors to go after straw purchases, which is where someone buys a gun on behalf of someone else because that someone else could not pass the background check. Now, there are some additional reforms that I am open to: the possibility of looking at age limits on semiautomatic rifles, the notion of looking at what could be done with high-capacity magazines. We will continue to explore and look at those. These reforms do not enjoy the sort of widespread support in Congress that the other measures I have announced do, and, in order to successfully pass, these ideas will have to be crafted in a way that actually contributes to greater public safety but also do not unnecessarily or unfairly infringe on the Second Amendment right of all law-abiding adults to protect themselves and their families, to hunt, or to participate in recreational shooting. Ultimately, there are things we can do that have widespread, bipartisan support that we can act on, that we can get passed, that will actually make a difference. These are impactful things. I urge the Senate and the House, all of my colleagues here, do not hold hostage a piece of legislation that would work and that we all support because it doesn't have everything you want. There are things we can act on and do, and there are things we can continue to argue over, debate, and perhaps do in the future, but on the things we agree on--and they happen to be things that could have prevented this attack and will prevent future attacks--let's get those done. I have outlined those here today. There may be others, but we owe it not just to the victims and the families of Parkland but to all Americans everywhere; for this attack may have happened in Southern Florida, but there is no reason it can't happen somewhere else and, I fear, will happen somewhere else if we do not fix the deficiencies and the flaws in our policies, in our laws, and in the way they are enforced. We have learned from this incident what is wrong with our system. Let us fix it. We have an opportunity to do so while we continue to debate and work on the issues we do not agree on. That is what I hope we will do, and that is what I commit to doing everything I can to achieve. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I join my colleague, the senior Senator from Florida, with a broken heart, as does most of the Nation due to the events of yesterday. There, indeed, was a time in the history of our country where after an event such as this there was a mourning period that followed with a policy debate, but today, that time is interrelated and intermixed. I don't blame it. I am not upset about it. In fact, I think there have been too many of these events now. That is why we continue to face it. I think it is legitimate to say that even as we mourn, we have an obligation to ask ourselves, Is there something we could have done or should do to ensure that we don't see these things happening? It is cliche to say, but I think it is important to say: I am the father of two young ladies who happen to be in high school. I cannot imagine, but I can only envision, what it would be like if one day walking through the Capitol I get a text or one of those news alerts that says there has been a shooting in the high school they attend. I can only imagine how fearful it would be when suddenly those texts are not being answered, and those calls are not being returned. I thought about that last night and what it must feel like to be one of those parents at the hotel waiting for word because you hadn't heard from your children in hours or how painful it must have been for those whose job it was to go to these parents and inform them that their child's life--whom they had sent off to school in the morning, perhaps just weeks away from graduation--had ended senselessly in an event such as this. Because of what happened yesterday and because it is happening so often, people from across the political spectrum are arguing, there has to be something we can do; you have to be able to do something. I agree with that sentiment. I understand it. I would add, though, that if we do something, it should be something that works. The struggle up to this point has been that most of the proposals that have been offered would not have prevented not just yesterday's tragedy but any of those in recent history. I am going to say now what I am going to really emphasize at the end. Just because these proposals would not have prevented these events does not mean we raise our hands and say, therefore, there is nothing we can do. It is a tough issue. Part of the reason it is so hard to prevent these events is because if someone decides they are going to take it upon themselves to kill people, whether it is a political assassination of one person or the mass killing of many, if one person decides to do it, and they are committed to that task, it is a very difficult thing to stop. Again, that does not mean we should not try to prevent as many of them as we can. Perhaps the answer to how to prevent them begins by asking ourselves, What do these things have in common? They have two things in common. The first is that every single one of them was premeditated and planned. None of these shootings were an act of passion, where someone got up in the morning, was upset, and decided to do something out of rage. They all involved careful planning and premeditation. They deliberately took steps to get the guns, the weapons, the ammunition they needed. In many cases, they carefully studied the outline of the target they were going to go after. They specifically planned soft targets. There is evidence of that in this case. They planned to maximize the loss of life. They acquired the weapon they needed, and they used tactics they needed to kill as many people as they could. By the way, that premeditation and planning is one of the reasons why these laws that have been proposed wouldn't have prevented it. When someone is planning and premeditating an attack, they will figure out a way to evade those laws or, quite frankly, to comply with them in order to get around them. That may be an argument for new laws of a different kind, but it is what makes it hard, though not impossible. The second thing they have in common is, almost all of these attacks were preceded by clear signs of what was to come. A cursory review this morning of just a handful of the recent cases points that out. We are all familiar with the loss of life of over 20 people at a Texas church not long ago. This was a case of a killer whose wife had said he had tried to kill her. He was an individual who had been arrested and convicted for domestic violence, which had, unfortunately, never been reported to the background check system. He was an individual who had escaped a mental health facility, who had been caught sneaking guns onto an Air Force base while on Active Duty, who had been discharged from the military for bad conduct, who had had social media posts that had bragged about buying dogs so as to shoot them, and who had actually expressed admiration for the South Carolina killer in that church killing a few years ago. He was an individual who had actually been charged with animal mistreatment just a few years earlier. At Sandy Hook, we know the killer had a spreadsheet with details of the previous school shootings. He was also an individual whose mental state had rapidly deteriorated to the point at which he had spoken to no one but his mother, whom he ultimately had killed before having carried out the horrific massacre. He had been someone who had been isolated in a room all day, who had largely played video games. The Pulse attack was precipitated and inspired by an adherence to the jihadist ideology. As Senator Nelson has already pointed out, this individual not once but twice had been on the FBI's radar screen and both times had been cleared. They had interviewed him, and they had asked him questions. He hadn't met the standard for staying on the list, and he had gone off. We are still learning facts about yesterday's killer. Unlike these others, we may learn more because he was apprehended alive. Authorities have had an opportunity to question him, and that will continue. Here is what we know: We know he was expelled from school for behavior the administrators often thought was dangerous. We know now from press accounts that both teachers and students did not act surprised that he was the assailant. In fact, many of them said there was a running joke--obviously not a joke anymore--that, one day, he would do something like this. We know the media and others have discovered social media posts that are, in hindsight, deeply disturbing, as they point to the glorification of gun violence and murder and even animal cruelty, apparently. We saw reports this morning of a post on YouTube a year ago on which he posted that he wanted to be a school shooter. The FBI was alerted to this and had followed up, by the way, in an interview with the person who had alerted them. They all have this premeditation in common, and we sit here in hindsight, in seeing all of these little points and say, taken together, those are warning signs. The problem is, they are not taken together because the people who might have known about his being expelled may not have known about the social media posts, and the people who knew about the social media posts may not have known what he wrote on YouTube, and the people who knew about the YouTube may not have known about the fact that the police had been called several times for different reasons and so forth--hence, the challenge in finding something that works. There are a lot of proposals, and I will share them because I have heard them before, and I hear them today. I am not diminishing them. I don't want this to be taken as ``because it will not work, I don't even want to hear your argument.'' I understand. I really do. You read in the newspaper that they used certain kinds of guns; therefore, let's make it harder to get those kinds of guns. I don't have some sort of de facto religious objection to that or some ideological commitment to that per se. There are all kinds of guns that are outlawed and weaponry that is outlawed and/or a special category. The problem is, we did that once, and it didn't work for a lot of reasons. One of them is that there are already millions of them on the streets, and those things last 100 years. You could pass a law that makes it hard to get this kind of gun in a new condition, but you are going to struggle to keep it out of the hands of someone who has decided that is what he wants to use because there are so many of them out there already that would be grandfathered in. You could do a background check. The truth is, in almost all of these cases I have cited, the individuals either erroneously passed background checks or would have passed them or did. Even if they couldn't pass the background checks, they could buy the guns the way MS-13 does and other gangs and other street elements do--from the black market. Again, it is not that we shouldn't have the background check. I am just trying to be clear and honest here. If someone has decided ``I am going to commit this crime,'' he will find a way to get the gun to do it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a law that makes it harder. It just means, to be honest, that it is not going to stop this from happening. You could still pass the law per se, but you are still going to have these horrible attacks. That is why I do think that in some circles, it is not fair or right to create this impression that somehow this attack happened yesterday because there is some law out there that we could have passed to have prevented it. If there had been such a law that could have prevented what happened yesterday, I think a lot of people would have supported it, but I also want to be honest with the people who share my point of view on these issues. I think it is also wrong to say there is nothing we can do. I would admit that, perhaps, even I in the past, in the way I have addressed this issue or have spoken about it, may have come off as dismissive in the argument that since none of these laws would have worked, there is just nothing we can do, and we will just have to deal with it. Just because I don't have a quick or an easy answer for how to prevent these doesn't mean we don't have an obligation to try and find one, and by finding one, I don't mean a quick and easy answer. I mean an answer that would work. When I took office here, I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States--every element of it. I didn't write the Constitution, but I agree with it, and I support it. The Second Amendment is in the Constitution, and you can debate what the outlines of the Second Amendment are or how far it goes, but it is in there, and I happen to support it. Oftentimes, I happen to point to the Second Amendment and say it is the Second Amendment that is right after free speech, which tells you how important it was to those who wrote those words. I still believe every bit of that. If it is fair to say the Second Amendment is so important--and I reiterate it because of how high up it is in the ranking from first to second, its being the second one--then I have to recognize there is a part of the Constitution that was written even before the Second Amendment. It is the preamble. That preamble lays out why we have a Constitution and, ultimately, why we have a government. In it, it reads that two of the reasons we have a government and, therefore, two of the reasons we have a Senate is to ensure domestic tranquility and to promote the general welfare. These school shootings and mass shootings and murders we are seeing now at an accelerated pace are, by definition, a threat to our domestic tranquility and a threat to our general welfare--the murder of children in schools, the murder of moviegoers, the murder of people at a church, the murder of people at a dance club on a Saturday night. These are all places at which we should be enjoying the general welfare and domestic tranquility. Even as we recognize that the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to bear arms and protect themselves--a right I strongly support and will continue to support--we must also recognize that same Constitution places upon this government an obligation to ensure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare. We must confront the fact that, over the last 20 years, these attacks have accelerated. We must recognize the evidence that they are not isolated from one another and are building upon one another. We must recognize the scary reality that even as the Nation mourns and the parents grieve, there is a high probability, if not a certainty, that somewhere in America right now, some equally troubled, deranged, and violent individual is reading and watching coverage of this attack and gaining from it not sorrow but inspiration. Even as we speak here now, even as we stand here in mourning, and even as the days go by, there are probably some people out there who are going to try to do this because of what happened yesterday. That is a frightening thought, but it is a reality. It challenges us to find an answer to a very difficult issue of all of these bits and pieces of information out there. How do we in this society confront those who do things about which in another era we would just say, ``Well, they are just strange people. They are just weird. They are just going through a phase''? We cannot do it anymore. There is no longer such a thing as just innocent postings online that you just look at and say, ``Well, that is just them. They are just strange. They don't mean anything by it'' or ``they are harmless.'' We cannot assume that anymore--none of us. How do we create a system in which all of these disconnected pieces and bits of data could somehow be tied together so whenever it was that this killer got ahold of these weapons and before conducting this attack, someone would say, ``Hold on a second. This person is the person who got expelled from school, who had these social media posts, who said he wanted to be a school shooter, who had his adopted mother pass away in November and who is now living, isolated, whose fellow students had all suspected him of being a person who could, one day, be violent''? How do you take these bits and pieces of information and turn them into a usable source of data that perhaps either prevents the acquisition of a weapon or, preferably, intervenes in that person's life before he carries this out? If anyone here tells you he has that one figured out, he is not being honest. This is hard, but we need to do it. We need to somehow figure it out because it goes to the very core of why we exist. There is no greater obligation of our government than to keep our people safe from threats, both foreign and domestic, and we must acknowledge that this is a threat. For whatever reason, we now live in a society in which someone, at 19 years of age, in the freest and the most prosperous Nation in all of human history, has decided to take it upon himself to take the lives of 17 individuals and severely injure 14 others--and to actually, probably, try to kill even more. What is happening in our country, in our culture, in our society? If there is something to be done with our laws, we should do that too. I am not saying don't focus on the gun part, but we also have to focus on the violence part, for to talk about gun violence requires you to talk about both, and the violence part is the one that goes well beyond an easy government solution and entails all kinds of different aspects of modern life that we are still grappling with. I hope we can start to figure it out. I haven't had the time, frankly, in less than 18 hours, to bring to the floor a proposal for how we will move forward or what the forum will be for this conversation to even begin. I know we can no longer just chalk it up to just isolated incidents because it has happened too often. Sadly, I believe it will happen again until we confront it and try to solve it. I hope we will, and I believe we can. I believe we must, for, as I said at the outset and will say in conclusion, it goes to the core of why we even exist to begin with--to keep our people safe no matter how new, how different, or how unique the threat may be. I yield the floor.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, today I want to commemorate the life of Gladys Llanes, who passed away last week in Miami, FL. As she was in life, in the end, she was surrounded by family and friends who loved and cared for her deeply. Gladys served as a senior constituent services representative in my office specializing in immigration issues. I was not the first Senator for whom Gladys worked. That honor goes to the senior Senator from New Jersey. Even though she had lived in South Florida for a number of years, Gladys remained a Jersey girl through and through. I was fortunate to have Gladys in my office, and the people of Florida were fortunate to have Gladys working for them because she was the best at what she did. I do not say that as conjecture; I know she was the best. I heard it from her colleagues, from the constituents she served, from the attorneys she assisted, and from the agency with which she worked daily. Gladys was so good at her job that, when the agency wanted to train their own staff on how to work with congressional offices, they brought Gladys to their training throughout the country to help teach agency staff. That is high praise and an acknowledgment of professional excellence. The stories have come rushing out as people have heard of her passing: families reunited who thought they would never see each other again, daughters able to spend the last moments of their parent's life with them because of a visa issued, family members who needed admittance to this country to donate organs to loved ones, children who are alive today because Gladys helped them get into this country to receive the lifesaving treatment they needed. Repeatedly, Gladys found ways to make the seemingly impossible possible. She lived an impactful and meaningful life and touched thousands of lives for the better. But there was so much more to Gladys than just her professional success. Gladys was fiercely patriotic and loved America--not the ideals of America or America in theory, she loved America, and she made it her mission to see as much of it as possible. In her 50th year, Gladys met her goal of seeing each of the 50 States. Just driving through a State or transferring in an airport did not count; she actually had to spend time there. She loved to visit lighthouses, national parks, and Major League Baseball stadiums. Thwarted constantly in her goal to see all the ballparks because they kept opening new ones, she had a ready excuse to go back to those cities again and see another game. Gladys did not just love America; she loved Americans. She could not visit to a town, eat a meal, fly on a plane, or stand in a line without making a friend. Funny and full of life, Gladys attracted friends like few others. She knew someone almost everywhere and stayed in touch constantly. When she would go back through their State, she would go out of her way to visit, share a meal, and stay at their homes. When folks from across the country came to south Florida, they wanted see the ocean and feel the Sun, but they also wanted to catch up with their friend Gladys. Everywhere that Gladys went, she took photos. Family photos, landscape photos, photos of friends--Gladys would tell you, if you did not take a photo, how would you know it happened? I cannot count how many photos I took with Gladys--easily dozens. We took one together almost every time I saw her, and I can trace how being a Senator has aged me just going through my photos with Gladys over the years. Sometimes I would take a photo with her after having taken one a few days before and wonder why we needed to take another one so soon. Nevertheless, Gladys always insisted we take one more photo. What we would not give to have a few more opportunities to take more photos with her. A photo captures a moment in times, moments that are fleeting and pass instantly, but added up, life is a series of moments and memories. Gladys Llanes captured those moments to live a life full of joy and accomplishment. She is missed by her friends and family, and we will remember her and all the moments she was with us.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I want to add to Senator Nelson's comments. First, let me just say, in a time when there is a lot of noise and news about the divisions in American politics, despite differences of opinion on issues, this is what I believe the people of Florida want us to do; that is, to come here and work together on the issues we can work together on. I must say, the ability to work with Senator Nelson on this has been invaluable, to have two different Senators from two different parties singing from the same song sheet about the priorities that are critical to our State. What is unique about this storm and disaster relief is, the impact wasn't just on Florida, it was also the impact on Puerto Rico. When the House passed its relief package at the end of December, it had a lot of good things in it. The President came out with his proposal, and it had some good things, but it needed work. The House took it, and the House added a few things to it. Over the last 2 months, we have had the ability to work in the Senate, not in front of the cameras and not, obviously, through a series of press conferences, but in the way legislation is put together. The way we worked together and our offices worked together, we were able to come out with a concise, unified position on the needs of both Florida and Puerto Rico, working with the leadership of the Democratic Party on his side and the Republican Party on ours. I have to tell you, in a place where it is very hard to get 60 percent of what you want--and that is a win--when you start to go through some of the items that are going to be in this relief package, it would be hard to complain. With perhaps a small exception here or there, virtually all of the things that are critical for disaster relief for Florida--and to a large extent as well for Puerto Rico--are going to be included. I think, while a lot of us are very concerned about how long it took--we should have done this 4 weeks ago or 3 weeks ago--there are other reasons why it was held up. It wasn't disaster relief that was holding it up, it was the other issues at play that were holding it up. In fact, this was being held until the other things were agreed upon. Now we are able to move forward. I have to state that while no one wants to have a hurricane and no one wants to have a natural disaster, this is a response we should be happy about. I think it is a testament to the sorts of things we can achieve in the Senate when we can put aside our differences on other issues and work together on this. By the way, I want to state, because I don't want anyone to read into what I said about big differences, that although we may vote differently on a lot of issues, Senator Nelson and I have cooperated on a host of things, from judges to anything that impacts Florida. I hope we can get to doing that more as a Senate, not just for us in Florida. Maybe Senator Nelson and I are just always in a good mood because it doesn't snow in Florida, and it is warm when everybody else is cold, but I think the people of Florida should be pleased with our ability to work together. Some highlights, and Senator Nelson touched on a lot of them. I will start on the Puerto Rico part because it is the one we still see the impact of on a regular basis. Let me just, as an aside, say that Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner, who is basically the Member of Congress representing Puerto Rico in the House, is an extraordinary advocate for Puerto Rico--not a good one, not a great one, an extraordinary one. She is tireless, nonstop. I am talking about Sunday evenings, Sunday nights, early Monday morning, she is constantly working. She is an incredible partner in this endeavor, and the things she has been able to achieve-- because even when we had agreement on many items in the Senate, we had to go to Jenniffer for her help to make sure the leadership in the House would be on board. The respect that House leadership has for her was instrumental. In the end, the way this is now lined up, no matter what we agreed to here, if we send it over there, and they don't want it, we couldn't do it. Her ability to get the House to go along with these changes is invaluable, and I just need to say that publicly. So much of this is due directly to her. She is the voice of Puerto Rico in Washington. To the extent these things are happening above and beyond what would have already happened, it is, in large respect, due to having her here. She is just phenomenal, and the ability to work with her has made this possible. Senator Nelson talked about the Medicaid cliff Puerto Rico faces. Last year, we were able to fill that gap for 1 year. This measure does it for 2 years, at 100 percent--called FMAP. Now, for the next 2 years, Puerto Rico doesn't have to worry about that. They can focus on other issues. There is money in disaster relief to repair infrastructure and money to repair hospitals and community health centers. There is $75 million for displaced college students who had to leave their school in Puerto Rico or in the Virgin Islands, for that matter. There is $11 billion for CDBG-DR funds, which will go directly to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, including $2 billion for repairing the electrical grid. There is $45 million to restore the Customs House in San Juan. There is money for Job Corps centers to help retrain and get people going again, to get employment functioning. There is money for Coast Guard repairs. The U.S. border in the Caribbean is Puerto Rico, so we have the Coast Guard there not only to respond to disasters at sea but to be able to enforce law and prevent drug smuggling. If someone smuggles drugs into Puerto Rico, you are in the United States. There is no Customs from that point forward. It is so critical. There is also help to repair clinics that were serving women, infants, and children; HHS funding; transportation funding, particularly improvements to the FAA and the facilities at the airport and the Federal highways. Everything that is important is in there. There is more to do. Next week, we will have a new initiative--and I am not prepared to discuss it yet--in addition, that is separate from disaster relief, to help Puerto Rico not just to recover from the storm but to set itself up for long-term success, and I look forward to unveiling that next week. For the time being, this is perhaps the first good news the people from Puerto Rico have gotten from Washington since the storm hit, and I just want to say it is due to the partnership of Senator Nelson and myself but also frankly the extraordinary assistance of the leadership of my party in the Senate, Senator McConnell, the Appropriations staff, and Members on both sides of the aisle who have all, from the very beginning, expressed a willingness to be helpful. We don't often come to the floor to talk about the good news of our process, but we couldn't be more pleased. Senator Nelson talked about the impact on Florida. We will rapidly go through some of those. We have come to the floor multiple times to talk about the need to help the Florida citrus industry, Florida's signature crop. This has the money to do so. This will be an incredibly large effort for the Secretary of Agriculture to administer this, but I know I speak for Florida's growers when I say this is important work. Feeding our Nation is important work, and I stand committed to working with the Secretary and with our commissioner of agriculture, Adam Putnam, who is aware of this and has been instrumental in putting together this package--really important. There is important funding for the Emergency Watershed Protection Program, Emergency Conservation Program, rural development water and wastewater grants, Emergency Food Assistance Program, funding to repair the Agricultural Research Service facilities. There are four of these damaged in Florida. Those are the facilities that are going to innovate the cures we need to save Florida citrus in the long term. There is money for education, particularly educational infrastructure repairs to help displaced students and to hire new teachers. This is especially important. We have now seen thousands of U.S. citizen students who have come from Puerto Rico to Florida to get their education. There is money to help higher education facilities, to rebuild facilities that were damaged in the storm. There is money to help displaced higher education students. There is $35 million for Project SERV, which are education-related expenses for local education agencies and higher education institutions to help them recover from violent or traumatic events. There is $25 million to assist homeless students, and $650 million for Head Start. I will note there are 45 damaged Head Start facilities in Florida. There is relief for the community block grant funding to the tune of $28 billion, of which $16 billion will be directed for unmet needs and $12 billion for mitigation to prevent the loss of these facilities in the future. The list goes on. There is more. We will be putting out even more details. The Army Corps has a lot of important projects in Florida, but there is one in particular that if we go through it, there is over $600 million for repairs to the operations and maintenance funds, $810 million in flood control and coastal emergencies funding. We had Everglades restoration projects going on in Florida that were damaged by the storm, including these large retaining ponds which are basically lakes--enormous bodies of water that are used to clean out phosphates. Some were overrun and flood-damaged. This helps. In addition, there is funding to expedite the completion of the Herbert Hoover Dike, which is critically important to the people living in the Glades communities just south of Lake Okeechobee. This expedites that. This wasn't part of the budget in the beginning. This is a project that has already been authorized, but the ability to move that forward is critical because it will help free up funds and time for all the other important projects in regard to restoring the Everglades and preventing the overflow of Lake Okeechobee, which could kill people. There is one project in particular, the ``South Atlantic Coastal Study.'' It is a Federal project that looks at vulnerabilities of coastal areas to sea level rise and things of that nature. That is going to be a part of this because ongoing in the future we will continue to see the threat posed by storm surge and the like, and there is language in there modeled after a bill I filed that gives the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response direct hiring authority to ensure that HHS has the necessary emergency medical personnel to respond to another natural disaster because the hurricane season is about 5 months away. There is $60 million for community health center repairs. There are about 28 in Florida and nearly 100 in Puerto Rico, and $50 million for NIH for specific grants and infrastructure repairs. Within the topline numbers for FEMA in this, there will be a total of $33 billion for Stafford reimbursable costs, and we are involved in ongoing discussions with the administration, which is responsible for directly coordinating with the Governors in the States in regard to this, but this should be more than enough to pay the unmet costs for hospital repairs, medical services, et cetera. A couple more points. We have a massive debris problem, particularly in Monroe County. These canals in the Florida Keys have refrigerators, lawn furniture, sunken boats, and this has money in there to help clean that up. Local governments ran out of money, and they can't do it. This repairs Coast Guard facilities that were damaged by the storms. There are funds in the amount of $1.65 billion for Small Business Administration loans. The National Park Service--I recently toured the Everglades with Secretary Zinke--this has $207.6 million for construction that will include repairs to the destroyed facilities of the National Park Service. Funding under the Department of Transportation will include $140 million for Florida. That includes $8 million for FAA facilities, $100 million just for Florida's Federal Highway Administration, $27 million for Florida's Transit Administration. Finally, under FEMA, the Disaster Relief Fund is fully funded to meet the unmet needs. This money will ensure that FEMA has the resources needed to assist disaster survivors as well as to repair and restore damaged infrastructure in Florida and in Puerto Rico. I hope we can get support for this. I saw the Senator from Texas here a few moments ago. I imagine he may speak to this at some point. Texas also suffered terribly. The Virgin Islands suffered. California had the fires. I would state, it took longer than we wanted to, but I think the people of Florida should be very pleased with the disaster relief package the Senate is about to present and hopefully will pass and pass in the House. This is good news. I was grateful to be a part of it. I thank my staff. They worked incredibly hard to help advance this. We have been waiting for this day. We are excited this day is finally here. It makes our service here really meaningful when we can take our actions and turn them into progress and results. This is one of the reasons I ran for reelection, when at one point I didn't think I would. It was to come back and make a difference. Today, I know working with so many others, including Jenniffer Gonzalez in the House and Senator Nelson and our leadership in the Senate, we are about to make a real difference. It makes our time here rewarding. I am excited to have been a part of it, and I am looking forward to doing more. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I want to begin by thanking Senator Nelson, the senior Senator from our State, for once again raising this on the floor. I am glad to be able to follow him and to make many of the same points about the importance of acting on this. The Presiding Officer is from a State that has been impacted by storms. He knows that long after the cameras leave and long after the stories have been written, real people's lives have been disrupted, sometimes permanently, certainly in ways that we don't think about. We have come to think about hurricane damage as roofs being ripped off of buildings and trees in the road, and once those are picked up, everything is back to normal. What we don't recognize is that underneath all of that is the long-term damage done to a small business that went 2 weeks without any sort of income, so they closed. There is the impact we see in the Florida Keys, where there are a lot of people, for example, who have used their retirement savings to buy a small property that they rent out in the Florida Keys. It is very common. They buy a small townhouse, they rent it out in the winter for people to stay there, and then they use it in the summer for their family. Well, guess what. This winter they are probably not getting a lot of visitors. In some cases--I know of one in particular--there is all this debris from the storm that is sitting in the canal. It is not very attractive for a visitor to come to the Keys and stay in a townhouse where they can't even go out into the ocean because the canals and the waterways that take them out have refrigerators floating in them and have all kind of debris in them. By the way, there is still debris there from previous storms, almost 15 years--10 years ago. What does that mean? That means the owner of the unit doesn't have the rent they were using to pay the mortgage. She might be a teacher or he might be a firefighter, and now they are not getting the income they were counting on to make the mortgage, so they potentially could fall behind and could lose this rental property that they had invested in for their family. These are not rich people. These are people who had an investment for the future and had a good business model until the storm came. That is not measured anywhere, but that is real harm. The small businesses have been harmed. The Florida Keys, in particular, is a place that has had lot of small businesses that have been there for a long time. Some of these places have gone months without clients. If that person doesn't come and rent out that unit I just described, that means that person isn't using the fuel from the local gas station, isn't eating at the local restaurants, and isn't contributing to the local economy. To top it off, it is so expensive. Imagine if you are a worker at one of these buildings making $15 an hour. It is so expensive. They already had a housing problem, and this has made it worse. So it would be a mistake to say that the hurricane damage is over, and the effort to address it ends the minute the trees are removed from the road and the roofs are tarped and repaired. It goes on for a while. In the case of this particular storm, Florida was also impacted by the impact that Maria had on Puerto Rico. As Senator Nelson just outlined, up to 300,000 American citizens--I say that because there are still a lot of people wondering, why are we giving aid to Puerto Rico? Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and its residents are U.S. citizens. There are 300,000 U.S. citizens from Puerto Rico who have moved to Florida. They enrich our State, but our schools weren't counting on the kids, so they have to scramble to deal with that. Our housing stock--I met with a group of people on Friday. We still have people living in hotels who have been there for 3 or 4 months. Even if they wanted to go out and find an apartment, there is nothing available. There are all sorts of challenges. We have heard stories, for example, that they have to pay a $75 application fee for each one of the housing units they apply for, even if they are turned down. Just figure that out. If someone applies to just three or four of them, that is a lot of money out of pocket for someone who has already lost everything in the storm. Florida is facing that as well. I am disappointed. If someone had told me that we would get to the last week of January without taking up disaster relief, I would have been surprised because we had a chance to actually address this at the end of last year. The House sent over a bill that didn't go far enough. The Senate had ideas about how to make it better, and then for reasons involving leverage and using it as a tool to get people to vote for CRs--short-term spending at the end--it has been held up. That is unfortunate because these problems are only getting worse, not better, as time goes on. Senator Nelson talked about the citrus industry. One of our signature crops, if not our signature crop, was already being challenged by citrus greening, which is a terrible disease. Senator Nelson and I went to some of those groves together, and there are growers who basically were already hurting. They have lost everything for this year. There is no money coming in. The fruit is gone. Once that fruit touches the ground and that ground is wet, you can't sell it. The trees are damaged. It is not as though we can just buy a new tree at Walmart, and in 1 year it produces. It has to put it in the ground, and it takes 5 years before it will start to produce. They are hurting, and they are wondering, should I replant? Is this a good business for me to be in? Some of these families have been in citrus for three or four or five generations, and this could be the end, not just the end for them but the end of Florida citrus. We helped them in the tax bill with the ability to immediately expense replanting, but that will not be enough. That is why this package has to include USDA resources to help replace these lost trees and rehabilitate the groves that were flooded. This is critical and essential to our food supply. The Army Corps of Engineers plays a huge role in the State of Florida. For example, there is the Herbert Hoover Dike, which is a dike on Lake Okeechobee that would prevent a catastrophic flooding event, should the lake levels rise too high. We have people living just south of it, and what happened, almost a century ago, is that people died because of flooding there. So this dike was built. It has been found to be and rated among the most vulnerable water infrastructure projects in the Nation, and we are lucky that it wasn't breached in the storm, but it could have been, had the rainfall been located at the right place at the right time. It has been the priority of our delegation for a long time to expedite the construction of rehabilitation to strengthen that dike. This is a good opportunity to do that because there will be other storms. Because the project was delayed when the storm hit, this is a chance to finish that role. Other parts that are critical to Florida's economy are beach renourishment and intracoastal navigation projects. These are hugely important and not just what makes Florida an attractive place to live; it is the reason people visit. Some of these beaches were severely eroded. Particularly in Northeast Florida, there is no beach, and the water is coming up to the edge of the property lines. If there is no beach, the hotels and the condominiums that rent out on that beach do not have visitors. People will not go there unless there is sand on the beach, and the erosion that happens in a storm like this needs to be fixed. Of course, we have all been engaged, and I hope all are committed to our Everglades restoration projects. The Everglades are some of the most unique environments on the planet. They happen to be in the United States and happen to be in our home State. In these Everglades restoration projects, we want to continue to make progress toward our goal of saving them. By the way, the Everglades are a source of water for over 8 million Floridians. So I hope the disaster funding also addresses all the work that was destroyed and the damage that happened to a lot of the restoration projects that were in place. I will not go deep into education because Senator Nelson has already addressed that, but suffice it to say we had thousands of students who were displaced, and we add to that thousands of people from Puerto Rico whom the school districts welcome but weren't counting on. Now we have to accommodate classroom space. In many cases, for these children, although everyone in Puerto Rico learns English and Spanish, their primary language is Spanish, so we have to get instructors who are able to bring them to proficiency in English. That is a challenge. All of that is falling on the State of Florida as well. While Florida welcomes our fellow Americans from Puerto Rico who are seeking refuge, the costs need to be accounted for. We had hospitals that were damaged from the storms, and the repairs to some of these continue to rise. In some cases, these hospital repairs resulted in the closure of the hospital for more than a year. There is a hospital in the Keys that is going to be completely rebuilt. If you have ever been to the Florida Keys, the distances are bad, and there is a hospital that is going to have to be completely rebuilt. In addition to all of that, we have our healthcare providers in Florida who provided charitable care, not just to Floridians after the storm but to displaced Americans from Puerto Rico and from the U.S. Virgin Islands. They need to be reimbursed for doing that. They didn't sit back and say: We are not going to do it unless you send us a check. They did it, and there were real expenses. Then they were also hit by the storm, and they are dealing with those new expenses. By the way, one of the things I hope we will do is expedite hiring authority for medical personnel in HHS because, for years, we have failed to maintain adequate levels of personnel willing to give a couple of weeks of their time to aid in a time of disaster. Our medical teams are depleted, and at this rate we will already have a staffing shortage by the next hurricane season, which is just a few months away. NOAA, another Federal agency--the disaster bill needs to fund the continued removal of the things I have already discussed: marine debris, lost lobster traps, capsized vessels. There is an environmental component to it, and there is an economic component to it. If our canal is full of refrigerators, debris, things that need to be removed, the water cannot be navigated. The value of all that property is wiped out, and also what is wiped out is the desire of people to come and visit. Beyond increasing--or as we call it around here ``plussing up''-- critical FEMA accounts like the Disaster Relief Fund, we should also include language in the bill to protect counties, cities, towns, and individual homeowners who received FEMA disaster assistance from the uncertainty about when the Federal Government may come back in a few years and claw back that support. In essence, they can come back in a few years and say: We gave you too much money; give it back to us. If someone did something wrong, I am not talking about that. I am talking about a good faith estimate that both sides agreed on, and they delivered the money, and then 4 years later they show up and say: Hey, we have looked at it again, and in hindsight we gave you $1,000 more in the case of an individual or $50,000 or $100,000 more in the case of a city or a county, and now they have to scramble to pay this back. So I will continue to work to make sure that FEMA has the resources it needs to assist for recovery victims for both short-term and long-term recovery but without this threat of clawback, and there are ways to do that which will allow us to be fiscally responsible. I have already talked about the housing issue in Monroe County in Southwest Florida. Monroe County is in the Florida Keys, and that is why it is critical that FEMA has the resources to utilize programs such as direct relief assistance, which will enable the Federal Government to lease a property that would not generally be available to the public, such as corporate lodging, to house survivors, to house people, as opposed to just giving them a voucher and saying: Go find a hotel. Here is what happens. They get a hotel in South Dade in Homestead, and the big rates come in February, and everyone gets kicked out in February because those rooms were booked a year ago at those rates, and they have nowhere to go. It is disruptive. If we were able to lease out an entire long-term corporate housing or lodging facility, these people would have some certainty to go about their lives while their homes and their lives are rebuilt. Programs such as Direct Lease assistance provide the type of flexibility that Florida and, quite frankly, the whole country needs. We are going to continue to advocate for the program so we can provide roofs over the heads of displaced Floridians and Puerto Ricans. Infrastructure damage throughout Florida is also substantial. In particular, I was able to go down to the Everglades to Flamingo. It is a place we have gone often. It is one of the places we leave from to go fishing with my children. The facilities there were already in bad shape, to be frank. It looked like something out of one of those 1960s black-and-white movies they show in schools. This place was badly hurt. Again, this is Federal property. That is a national park that belongs to the American people, under the custody of the Federal Government, and it was wiped out and hurt and destroyed. We need to help rebuild it. By the way, that includes airports, NASA--the Kennedy Space Center--which also suffered damages. I have a couple more points, then I will close. Housing and Urban Development. On December 14, I introduced the Disaster Assistance Simplification Act. That prohibits HUD from penalizing victims of natural disasters who apply but then turn down an SBA disaster loan. So if you apply for an SBA disaster loan, HUD will come back and take away your assistance or render you ineligible for HUD assistance not because you received the HUD loan but because you applied for it. That should be taken out. I have worked with colleagues to ensure that this language is included in the upcoming supplemental because I don't understand how we can allow unsynchronized and burdensome disaster assistance programs to make recovery more difficult for someone impacted by a storm. You just went through a storm. Your business was destroyed. Your home was destroyed. Your family had to move to another county or another city. On top of that, you have to agonize over what the Federal Government may or may not give you. If they gave it to you, you have to agonize over when they may come back and take it away. We can't further victimize victims by penalizing victims who do not take assistance. Our laws are discouraging people from applying for SBA disaster loans. Again, on that particular point, I am not talking about people who are double-dipping. I am talking about people who applied for HUD and SBA. Just the act of applying for that loan means you can't get the HUD assistance. That is ridiculous. I will close with Puerto Rico. It doesn't get enough attention, in my mind. We read about the situation every day. Now the articles are saying: Can you believe they still don't have electricity in Puerto Rico? There are a lot of problems that need to be addressed. Puerto Rico had a lot of problems before the storm. At end of the day, here is the bottom line. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. It is the responsibility of the United States. These are American citizens. They are children. They are residents. They wear the uniform of this country. If you go to Arlington Cemetery, not far from here, you will see their names after paying the ultimate sacrifice. They contribute to every area of our lives, whether they choose to live on the mainland or on the island. Perhaps because it isn't always in the headlines, a lot of people just don't understand its status, its importance, and our relationship and obligations. We have been involved from the very beginning, not just because of the impact it has had on Florida but because, on a personal level, I have so many friends and people I care about who live there. If you live in Florida, you know people who have people they love who live there. Right after the storm, I sent three members of my staff, who spent over a week at their emergency operations center, just trying to act as a conduit to facilitate between Federal efforts and the efforts of Puerto Rico's government, but the work that remains is extraordinary. I talk about the people who are still displaced. We have seen the story of people losing their housing vouchers who were staying in a hotel. People say: We just heard from the government in Puerto Rico that your home is habitable so you are done. Check out tomorrow afternoon. They have nowhere to go. If they have family, maybe, but if they don't, where do they go that night? It is a problem. We have seen that happen in Connecticut and fear it could happen in other places. On the disaster relief, we think recovering is not just about putting up light posts. We think it is about helping the economy grow, about attracting business and investment back, and about helping people who want to stay to be able to stay. We have a number of provisions we hope will be included. One is a temporary payroll tax deduction so whatever it is you get paid, you get to keep more of it. It would be temporary for a year, but at least it is a way of giving people a raise without being a burden on businesses. We would also like to see a temporary expansion of the child tax credit. Because of a quirk in the law, people who file taxes from Puerto Rico are not eligible for it at its full value the way someone on the mainland would be. Again, all they have to do is move to Florida, and they can do it. These are U.S. citizens. If they can fight in our Armed Forces, if they pledge allegiance to our flag, if they are citizens of our Nation, why should they not be entitled to the same tax versions there that they would be if they were living on the mainland? We also need to deal with, as Senator Nelson talked about, the Medicaid cliff. Because of the healthcare law that passed a number of years ago, the funding mechanism that was created places them in a position where soon they will run out of money in their Medicaid Program. Ultimately, what will happen is, people who need these services will move to Florida or some other State, and then they will sign up for Medicaid in the States and get what they couldn't get in Puerto Rico. It will actually cost more. If money is what you are worried about, it will cost more in the long run not to do it than to do it. I also think we need to increase funding for energy grid technical assistance from the Department of Energy. On that note, I would say, we are getting reports that they are being forced to rebuild using the exact same equipment that was there before the storm. Some of this equipment is so old, it isn't even manufactured anymore. They don't make it anymore. They had to retrofit and make things up. If we are going to rebuild or help rebuild the grid in Puerto Rico, shouldn't they be able to put in something that is modern as opposed to rebuilding the old stuff? That makes no sense. It will actually make the system more resilient. A lot of these proposals may meet with resistance, but they all make sense. We can justify every single one of them. I hope we will pursue them. I worked very closely with Resident Commissioner Jenniffer Gonzalez on these efforts. I am grateful for her strong advocacy and the support of so many of my colleagues on behalf of our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico. I close by asking our colleagues this. I know we have the policy work this week. The Democrats and Republicans are doing their thing. I know we have funding issues a week from this Friday that we have to address. I know immigration is an important issue that we need to confront, but do not forget about disaster relief. We have to get it done for the people out west in California, the people in Texas, the people of Florida, the people of Puerto Rico, and for our fellow Americans who were hurt by the hurricanes this season and the fires of 2017. I yield the floor.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I ask to have printed in the Record an article that was published in yesterday's Pensacola News Journal, ``Meet the Santa Rosa Teacher of the Year.'' I commend Ms. Erin Cosky for her dedication to Florida's students, and wish her well in the State's Teacher of the Year selection process. The material follows: [From the Pensacola News Journal USA Today Network, Jan. 24, 2018] Meet the Santa Rosa Teacher of the Year Florida.--Gulf Breeze High School science teacher Erin Cosky has been selected as the Santa Rosa County School District's Teacher of the Year. The news was announced during a surprise visit to Cosky's classroom Wednesday morning. Cosky teaches earth and space science and advanced placement environmental science at the school. She is Santa Rosa's nominee for the Florida Department of Education's Teacher of the Year 2019. The Florida Teacher of the Year will be selected in May and will serve as Florida's nominee for National Teacher of the Year, which will be announced in January 2019. Cosky, other nominees for the award and all Santa Rosa County educators will be honored at Santa Rosa's Golden Apple Celebration on March 2.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I ask to have printed in the Record an article that was published in the Orlando Sentinel, ``Seminole Announces Three Teacher-of-the-Year Finalists.'' I commend Ms. Samantha Neff, Ms. Leesa Lavender, and Ms. Julie DelRusso for their dedication to Florida's students and wish them well in the State's Teacher of the Year Selection process. The material follows: [From the Orlando Sentinel, Jan. 24, 2018] Seminole Announces Three Teacher-of-the-Year Finalists (By Leslie Postal) A math coach, a civics teacher and a high school instructor who works with students with disabilities were tapped Wednesday as finalists for Seminole County's teacher-of-the- year honors. The winner will be announced March 15 and will then be in the running for Florida's top teacher award. Seminole's three finalists are: Samantha Neff, a math coach at Idyllwilde Elementary School, who has been an elementary school teacher in the district for 17 years and also teaches at the University of Central Florida. Leesa Lavender, a seventh-grade civics teacher at Markham Woods Middle School, who has taught middle school social studies since 2007. Julie DelRusso, who works with 9th-to-12th-grade students through the district's Exceptional Student Support Services Department. She's been a teacher with the district for 25 years. The district will announce the winner at the teacher-of- the-year ceremony at the Hilton Orlando/Altamonte Springs.

Mr. RUBIO

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, it might surprise some people here that while what we are dealing with here is important, we are not the center of the universe. All across this country, as I was reminded this morning when calling home and speaking with friends and family and my wife and my children, life goes on. Most Americans, I think, are aware that there is an issue going on here in Washington, DC, with regard to funding the government. But I doubt very few of them are sitting in front of the CNN countdown clock, where I guess now we are on the ticker because we are into the shutdown, living it--some sort of reality drama. It doesn't mean it is not important, but it is a reality that life goes on. People aren't following this every single day and aren't checking their phones on a 15-minute basis to find out how this thing is going to be fixed. I think a lot of people are a little bit confused about what is happening here. If you are just listening to it off the top, in between things or maybe on the radio, maybe some people have the perception that this is all about a disagreement regarding the budget and/or a disagreement solely about an issue that is of critical importance, and we need to deal with it right away. That is just not accurate. I will get to that in a moment. But it is still hard for people to understand how this happens. When I explain to people where we are and how we got here, it doesn't make sense to a lot of people. I want to begin by saying, the Bible says that there is nothing new under the Sun. It is one of the things that came into my mind early this morning. I had occasion a few weeks ago, around the New Year, to spend some time with my family at the wonderful national park facilities, which I hope are open today, in Philadelphia and in the halls where our Constitution, the very document that designed our system of government, that each of us appeals to, that each of us has sworn allegiance to, was debated. That debate was a contentious one. It began on the 23rd of May and ended on the 17th of September of the year 1787. It was actually contentious from the start. In fact, the New York delegation stayed only a few days, and the delegation from Rhode Island straight- out boycotted it. What is ironic, by the way, is one of the most contentious issues in that Constitutional Convention was the creation of the Senate. The creation of this body was a heated discussion. We don't know a lot about the details of that discussion because they had closed the windows, even though it was hot. They didn't go around talking about it. There weren't 24-hour news cycles and Twitter, but we know it was contentious. We know that in the end, this Constitution that we all swear allegiance to and that for over two centuries has helped create an exceptional system of government was approved by 39 of the 55 delegates. There were people who voted against the Constitution. The one thing that was clear is that none of them got everything they wanted. At that time, by the end of that convention--in fact, Monday, September 17, 1787, was the last day of that convention, and one of the delegates was someone named Benjamin Franklin. We all know who that is. He was internationally well known. He wanted to give a short speech to that convention before signing it. He was actually too weak to do the speech himself, so he had someone else deliver the speech. Based on the notes that Madison took, here is what we know, generally, he said. It begins with a line that says: I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve. He goes on to say: I agree to this Constitution with all of its faults. He says: I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? So right from the very beginning in the history of this Nation, we have acknowledged that in order to make progress, it is virtually impossible for everybody in that process to get everything they want. Our job is to move things forward--and I don't want to read the whole thing--but suffice it to say, Franklin's point is maybe he was wrong. He is not perfect. Even though many of us tend to believe we are the only people who are right on this issue, at that stage in his life, he had learned enough to understand he was not the holder of all wisdom; that he had changed his mind on issues when he came upon new information. He also understood that when you bring a group of people together and ask them to come to agreement on something, unless they are clones of one another or unless they all come from the same thought process, you are going to have disagreement, but in order to reach a conclusion, everyone is going to have to get something they need even though no one is going to get everything they want. That was from the very beginning from our very Founders, and it was hard then. Imagine now, in the 21st century, with 50 States and several territories, extraordinary diversity in terms of ideology, opinion, geography, background, and all of it covered by 24-hour news, which basically covers American politics like entertainment, and Twitter feeds on both sides that are constantly driving narratives. Imagine if they had Twitter and 24-hour news during the Constitutional Convention? A, we would know a lot more about what they were saying to and about each other and, B, we may never have had a Constitution, simply because of exacerbating those tensions. I am not here to say we should not have Twitter and 24-hour news, but I am telling you these were factors that were always difficult. Self- government was always hard. Imagine today, with these additional factors of diversity and the way politics is covered, practiced, and discussed. I say that because there is a growing temptation from American politics that largely comes from the base of both parties but often is fed through media narratives, but the goal is to achieve total victory. Total victory is what you want to achieve in a sporting event. You want to win and beat your opponent by as many points as possible, but in a constitutional republic, total victory is nearly impossible, especially in a country like America. It is impossible--impossible--for a President, for any party, or for a faction on any issue to get 100 percent of what they want all the time. Instinctively, despite the fact that they don't work here every day, despite the fact that they don't sit glued in front of the television all day watching politics, most Americans understand this. They know this because it is a reality of life, and they know it instinctively because that is the way our system was designed. That is the way self- government was supposed to function. It is hard. Self-government has never been easy, and it has only gotten harder. So when you talk to someone and you explain what has happened, here are the facts. We had a government funding deadline, meaning that if by midnight this morning we had not passed a bill to authorize more spending, we had a sort of mini-shutdown or partial shutdown of the government. There is a provision that was put in law by President Obama that gave status to young people who were brought into this country illegally by their parents, through no fault of their own, and that provision expires on the 5th of March, about 43 days away. We have a bill before the Senate that funds the government, that keeps it open for 4 weeks--initially. I think now we are down to--with this proposal before the Senate, I think it is going to end on the 9th, so about 3 weeks. There is nothing in that bill that the Democrats are against, but they voted against that bill last night. They are not letting us vote on the other bill today--right now--and intend to vote against it, apparently, when we do vote on it Monday morning, because they want to see their demands met on something that doesn't expire for 43 days. So this is not about whether you are for or against doing something about DACA. It is not because it is not like the government funding expired last night and DACA expired last night and so you have to do both. This is the government funding expired last night and DACA expires in 43 days. When you explain that to people--why would--how does that work? Why does that make sense? Why would they do this? In fairness, I listened to the argument of my Democratic colleagues, and one of the arguments they make is they don't trust the Republican Party on the issue of DACA, but more particularly they don't trust the President to deal with it. So they need to force action now. They need to do something, and they need to use government funding as the leverage to force something to happen. Let me say at the outset that it is a legitimate tool in the toolbox of the legislator on a matter of deep principle to not vote on an important bill in order to get leverage for what you want. If there is something you are deeply principled about and you believe we need to do, it is a legitimate tool to say: I know you really need to do this, and I really need to do that, so I am not going to let you do what you need to do unless you let me do what I need to do. I think that is the argument they are making now. As I pointed out to you earlier, this is not kind of the same because this is a spending bill. In fact, the bill they voted against would expire even before the March 5 deadline. In essence, we would have to have another government funding vote even before we got to March 5, so it is really not a leverage argument. Even if it were, I would say that in order for self-government to work as I have described already, we have to be judicious and careful about how we use these tools. You can't be using them all the time. You have to reserve them for key moments for a lot of reasons. The first, frankly, is international implications. We can talk a lot about Russian interference that occurred. The goal of Russian interference above all else is to sow discord and to create conflict and controversy in American politics so Putin can go around the world saying America likes to lecture everyone about democracy, but their democracy is not a real democracy and their leaders are corrupt and their elections are rigged and all kinds of stuff. That is what he wanted to drive. There are nations like China which under our nose are rapidly working to change the world in our time. While we spend all these days arguing with each other about whatever the outrage of the day is--and every day it is something else--China is working underneath us and all around us to rebuild the world in their image and to their advantage and to our detriment. One of the things they tell other countries is, Americans have a country in decline. These people are in total decline. They are abandoning the world and, more importantly, they can't even govern themselves. So we are doing their job for them when we create these sorts of controversies. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have heated debates on tough issues, and that shouldn't mean that from time to time people reserve the right--and I reserve the right--to use leverage to achieve our goals. I have done it before, and I imagine I will do it again, but we have to be careful about it because it does impact the way the world views us. People watch us all over the world. They don't understand, as some of us do, that this stuff happens, and it all works out. They think, literally, some places believe we are crumbling, being ripped apart at the seams, and it encourages people to do things and nations to do things sometimes through miscalculation. That is the first reason you want to be careful. The second reason you want to be judicious about using these sorts of tools is because, quite frankly, it poisons the process. I would state that the abuse and overuse of these prerogatives of Senators over the last decade has done tremendous damage to the Senate, and it really has impacted our ability to tackle and to solve real problems. I say that as someone who acknowledges the Republicans have done this. Republicans did this kind of stuff. I would argue it was different, but it doesn't matter. Republicans used leverage in situations that people thought we shouldn't have used. Democratic activists now insist that Democrats use the same tool. They did it when they were in the minority, and you need to do it now when you are in the minority. I would also say we have to be careful because, the truth is, we all have matters of deep principle. I have matters of deep principle that haven't been addressed yet. I have a matter of deep principle, and as much as I believe we need to do something about DACA, I have a matter of deep principle that I believe is more urgent and requires attention right away. The people of Florida and the people of Puerto Rico and the people of Texas have a desperate need for disaster relief. Forty percent of the island of Puerto Rico has no electricity. This is a U.S. territory. American citizens are living in third-world conditions. In the State of Florida, our citrus growers are in critical condition. We may not have a U.S. citrus industry based in Florida if this goes on much longer. We still have people living in hotels and motel rooms in Florida because their homes were destroyed. That is a real need that doesn't have any deadline. They needed it yesterday, and we still haven't addressed it. I suppose if I wanted to use this tool-- and some maybe encouraged me to do that--I could come and say: I am not voting on any funding for the government, and I will shut down the government until we deal with disaster relief. The problem is, all 99 other Senators have a principled position as well. So basically all we do is take hostages all day on every principled issue we have at every opportunity we get. Well, you get the picture, and this is happening more and more. By the way, I say all this to you, understanding that if we passed a long-term funding bill--let's say the bill before us funded government through October, and I voted for that and disaster relief hasn't happened yet, there is no guarantee we would get disaster relief. What leverage would I have? So we have to be very judicious about how we use it. I ultimately decided not to do it because I believe the government shutdown ends up hurting the people I am trying to help with disaster relief. There are Federal employees in Puerto Rico who got hit by a hurricane a few months ago and now can't go to work on Monday. If they go to work, they are not getting paid, and it is already difficult over there. There are Federal services in Florida. People are going to call our offices around the country and in Florida on Monday, and even if I have essential staff there to answer the call, there may not be an employee at the Federal agency, where we can pick up the phone and intervene on their behalf. It happens all the time. One of the very common things we face in calls we get is someone has a loved one or relative who was visiting somewhere around the world, maybe in the Western Hemisphere, they were killed in an accident, and they want to bring their body home to be buried. We have to deal with all the paperwork with the Embassy or the consulate and the host country to bring them home. We are not going to be there on Monday to do it because the people we have to call might not even be there to answer the call. In the end, my view of it is, you don't cut off your nose to spite your face, and at this point, you don't shut down the government only to hurt them somewhere else. At the end of the day, this really is not about leverage. It is not. I say this with the highest respect. We disagree on a lot of issues, but the Democratic leader is someone I know understands legislation and understands politics. I personally do not believe this is about leverage. He has to know this because this is really no different than in December. We passed a short-term spending bill in December. Democratic Members voted for that, and the DACA issue was unresolved at the time. By the way, we had a chance to deal with disaster relief in December too. They sent a disaster relief bill over from the House to the Senate, and the Republican leader chose not to take it up--I believe because he wanted to hold it over for this debate. The more things that are pending, the more leverage you have to pose to them. I mean we were going to put additional things on the House bill and send it back. We knew what those things were, but suffice it to say, everything is unresolved, but I don't think this is purely about leverage. Here is what I actually think this is about, and I am here to cite some examples why. In December, as I said, before we got ready to leave for the end of the year, there were a lot of activists involved in the DACA issue that were really pounding on the Democrats to shut down the government unless DACA was handled. To their credit, a number of Democratic Senators didn't do so. They voted not to shut down the government, and the end result was they unleashed a fury of assaults, in terms of pressure and protests and sleep-ins and all kinds of things. This really started in October. I have a number of articles I want to cite. Let's go to October 2, 2017. This is an article that talks about--I will quote from it. I underlined the key provisions. ``Democrats seeking an immigration deal . . . are facing resistance from immigrant activists who are rejecting any compromise that would tighten border security and demanding more extensive legislation to protect . . . immigrants from deportation.'' It goes on to say: ``Despite Democratic leaders' declared commitment to help so-called Dreamers . . . they are catching sustained flak from immigration activists.'' It goes on to say the minority leader in the House, Congresswoman Pelosi, ``faced a vociferous protest from Dreamers a few weeks ago, when activists shouted down her speech and called her a `liar' who helped create a `deportation machine.''' If you haven't seen the video, she did a press conference in, I believe, San Francisco. As she was there doing this press conference for Dreamers, these other Dream activist people showed up and started screaming at her. For those of us on my side of the aisle, we view her as one of the more liberal Members in Congress and certainly someone I have identified as a supporter of the Dream Act. Then you have people saying the Dream Act isn't enough, you have to cover other people. So they are under a lot of pressure. Here is a quote from an immigrant rights activist and a DACA recipient. He said: ``I think Senator Schumer crumbles under pressure just so he can deliver on something.'' These are harsh words from these activists, and this started in October of last year. Now, let's go to this article of December 19. This article begins by saying: Dozens of immigration advocates rallied outside Sen. Chuck Schumer's Manhattan office Tuesday. In both Spanish and English, speakers at the rally demanded that the Senate minority leader ask his fellow Democrats to refrain from supporting any legislation until a clean Dream Act is passed. A clean Dream Act means just vote for the Dream Act, nothing else--no border security or, by the way, any legislation; don't vote for anything until that happens. That is the pressure they were under. The article goes on to say: As Congress negotiates the budget, protesters called for Schumer to help shut down the government if a Dream Act isn't passed by the end of the year, chanting, ``If we don't get it, shut it down.'' Those are the quotes. This was in December. So this article was December 19; this must have been December 18, and the chant outside his office in Manhattan was ``If we don't get it, shut it down.'' So the calls for a shutdown began as far back as December, not 43 days before the deadline but 60 or 70 days before the deadline. Finally, the spokeswoman for the minority leader put out a statement for, I believe, the protesters, and, I guess, the press was assembled. She said: We want to make sure nothing passes until we have the Dream Act in there. They were already telegraphing this in December, so this is not something that has happened in the last 2 days or 3 days. This was ongoing and sustained pressure. There is more. On December 21, there was an article in the Washington Post. The headline is ``In private meeting, Schumer angrily confronted by Hispanic Caucus members as prospects for DACA deal slip again.'' It begins: Disagreements among Democrats over how to keep fighting to enact legal protections for immigrant ``dreamers'' boiled over in the office of Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer on Thursday as he met with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in what several participants described as a tense and heated exchange. With just a few minutes' notice, they showed up in the lobby of Schumer's suite across from the Senate floor in hopes of pressing him to persuade more Senators to vote against the GOP spending plan that was set to be approved in the coming hours. The latest short-term spending plan was set for approval as Democrats this week backed off a pledge to force a vote this month over the fate of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children. The decision angered immigration activists. Later in the article: Several people who attended the meeting, granted anonymity to describe what was expected to be a private exchange, said the meeting with Schumer began with cordial remarks. Rep. Luis Gutierrez . . . unloaded on Schumer, accusing him and Democratic senators of not caring about the fate of dreamers and ``throwing them under the bus.'' In response, Schumer raised his voice, telling Gutierrez not to insult fellow Democrats. Gutierrez shot back, telling Schumer, ``Don't raise your voice.'' [A] few other caucus members made pointed comments toward Schumer. Later in the day, Gutierrez tweeted after all that: ``The fight continues in January . . . I think [we] are [all] on the same page.'' Incredible pressure is being mounted the whole time. There is one more thing I will cite here, and this is from the New Yorker on January 18. [M]any Democratic activists are demanding that Schumer and other elected Democrats vote against the G.O.P. spending bill even at the risk of a government shutdown. . . . On Wednesday, three protesters from the Dream Action Coalition . . . were arrested while demonstrating outside Schumer's office in New York City. Some Democratic activists and strategists are arguing that the Party should take its stand now while the stench of Trump's [alleged you-know-what] comment is still hanging in the air. So this is all about political pressure. That is the leverage point, and that is why this is happening. It is untenable. The position they have established is untenable. Most people in America just wouldn't agree with this. If you are being honest with yourself--I challenge anyone to go into any diner in your State or call 10 people who just kind of follow politics a little bit but are not activists or whatever and ask them: Do you think it is right to shut down the government over an issue that we have until March 5 to fix? Ask them that. Call people and ask them: Do you think it is a smart thing to do to close the Federal Government over an issue that we have another 43 days to address? You know what the answer is going to be; you do. That is why the position they have adopted is untenable, but that tells you the amount of political pressure they are under to do this. This is all motivated by that. This is all motivated by an incredible amount of pressure brought to bear on my Democratic colleagues--in particular, on the Democratic leader--by activists, and it brings us to this point. By the way, I would also argue that the strategy, in addition to being driven by that, is counterproductive. Yesterday, there was supposed to be a meeting with the White House and congressional leaders from both parties to keep working on this issue of DACA. The Democrats didn't show up, probably because they were too busy dealing with the shutdown. So this isn't making arriving at a deal for DACA easier; it is making it harder. On this argument that they don't trust--if we don't do this, we can't trust the President is going to do this, I don't think that is true. I think there is a balance of leverage here that exists that almost guarantees something can happen if we want something to happen. So let's begin with facts. The President of the United States campaigned on a very specific promise, and we know what that promise was. He was going to build a wall and secure the border. The President knows that he needs 60 votes in the Senate. The President knows that he is not going to get a border wall and get increased security unless we do something about DACA. They are well aware of that at the White House, and I think they have said that openly. What is important to remember, as well, is that there isn't going to be a deal on DACA unless we have a deal on the wall. That is the way our system works. I say that to you as someone who supports a wall and supports dealing with DACA. But as I have already talked about earlier, in this system of government, it is not a zero-sum game. It cannot be ``I get the wall and you get nothing,'' and it cannot be ``We get DACA and even more, and you don't get the wall.'' It is not going to work. Right now, we have a lot of wasting of time going on, entertaining ridiculous fantasies about what could be achieved here. A bill that creates permanent status under DACA but would allow some future Congress to stop funding the wall isn't going to pass. The President is not going to sign that. Think about it. If you have a wall that takes 10 years to build and you have DACA that is permanent, the next year they don't fund it, DACA stays, and the wall is not there. They are not going to sign that. A bill that creates a path to citizenship under DACA but then also allows the recipients of that citizenship to use it to bring in their parents who brought them into the country illegally--the President is not going to sign that. That is just reality, and I say this to you as someone who has tremendous sympathy for the young people who were brought here as minors, yes, in violation of the law but through no fault of their own. They didn't commit a crime, and now they find themselves with no legal immigration status. It would be a mistake, in my opinion, to allow their status to expire without a replacement. There are practical reasons why it would be a mistake. We have spent years and taxpayer money educating them. We would be hurting their employers. These people are working somewhere now, and overnight they can't work there anymore. They might own a business, and you would be hurting the people who work for them. Maybe they are married to a U.S. citizen; you would be hurting a U.S. citizen who is their spouse. Maybe they have children who are U.S. citizens, and these children need those parents. You would be hurting them. These are the practical reasons we shouldn't let it expire. There are more reasons we shouldn't let it expire. It is immoral to have laws that punish anyone for the mistakes their parents made. It is immoral to deport someone to a country they have never really lived in. You were 2 years old when you came from Honduras, you don't even speak Spanish, you don't know anybody there, and they are going to send you there--it just doesn't feel right. It is my deepest belief that if DACA expires and 700,000 young adults who have spent the majority of their lives among us are forced to leave this country, I think it would be a dark stain on our history. I think future generations would look back at that and say that was a terrible thing those people did back then. I think we have more support for what I just said in the Republican Party than we have ever had in the 7 years that I have been here. But I have to be fair and I want to be frank. It is also a mistake to overreach on the other side of this argument. It is fair to argue that we should deal with DACA because it is the moral and compassionate thing to do. It is fair to argue that dealing with DACA is in our national interest, but it is a big mistake to demand a right that does not exist. There is no right to illegally immigrate to any country on the planet. No one has a right to DACA, but dealing with DACA is the right thing to do. I think it is also overreaching to insist that not only must DACA recipients be accommodated, but we also have to accommodate their parents. Maybe because I personally know so many people under these circumstances, I am personally open to figuring out something that allows their parents to stay, especially if the children are minors. I understand that is not a majority position in my party, and I have to be honest with you that I believe that if we take the position around here that we are not accepting any deal unless it takes care of both the DACA recipient and the parent--if that is the hard position we adopt and people aren't willing to move off of it, I think there may be no deal at all, and that means that neither the recipients of DACA nor the parents will have anything. By the way, I also think it is overreach to oppose a border wall because you find it symbolically offensive. First, America has a right and, more importantly, a responsibility to protect its borders and enforce its laws. Second, there is not going to be a DACA deal of any kind without a wall, period. Donald Trump is not going to sign, cannot sign, and will not sign a bill that doesn't have real enforcement. That is a fact. That has to happen. So what is the way forward? Right now, the government is shut down. You won't really notice until Monday, but on Monday people will start to notice. DACA expires 6 weeks from Monday. So on Monday, if we haven't done anything, the government will be shut down, and we have 43 days to go until DACA. I think we need to fund the government on a short-term basis--maybe it is February 9--and then we spend the next 3 weeks working on an agreement on defense, an agreement on disaster relief, and an agreement on border security and DACA. For Democrats who are worried they don't have leverage, you have plenty of leverage without shutting down the government. For example, there are two Republicans who oppose short-term spending in general. Then you have several Republican Members who oppose any longer term spending without defense spending increases. In essence, this worry that you have that they are going to fund the government for just 6 months and walk away from DACA--there are at least five Republicans who are going to vote no on that, several because of defense and two because of short-term spending. Then add to that, there are at least three other Republican Members--myself being one of them--who will have a lot of trouble voting for a long-term spending plan that doesn't include disaster relief. That alone gives you leverage to ensure that not only do those issues need to be dealt with, but all three of them would have to be dealt with in order for there to be any long-term deal that forecloses the leverage you want. You have another piece of leverage: The President needs to fulfill his campaign promise, which Americans supported at the ballot box: Build a wall. He knows he can't do that without a DACA deal. So, really, both sides here have leverage. But as long as the government is shut down, we are wasting valuable time. Monday could have been a day that people met and hashed out key details of DACA. Instead, Monday will probably be all about the shutdown--and maybe Tuesday and maybe Wednesday. We are wasting time we do not have. Finally, as for DACA, what is the way forward on that? There are a lot of ideas going around. Here is what I would say to you: The baseline in the core of any agreement is one that basically codifies DACA, in essence, deals with the President's decision to suspend the Executive order on it and funds in a way that can guarantee continued funding the President's immigration enforcement plan. That is the core. You codify DACA, and you do something to ensure that the wall is going to be built and that they can't come back and cancel the funding. Then the Senate can go into an open amendment process and debate any additional matters you want put in there. For example, maybe there is a deal that, instead of codifying DACA alone, it actually creates a pathway to citizenship under DACA, but it eliminates not just DACA applicants but future applicants from being able to sponsor parents. I am not saying that it will pass, but that might be a debate that happens. Even if you can't reach 60 votes on any of these amendments people are offering, even if all those amendments fail, in the end, you are at least left with a bill that secures our border and gives permanent certainty to close to 700,000 people who currently are registered under DACA. As Benjamin Franklin said after he agreed to the Constitution in 1787: We may all be left with a law in which none of us got everything we wanted, but everyone got something that they needed. The DACA recipients would have the certainty of knowing that they can stay in America legally for the rest of their lives, and perhaps future Congresses and future Presidents may build upon that, and the President will have achieved a signature campaign promise and achieved something Republicans--and many Democrats--have been promising to do but have failed to deliver for over 15 years; that is, to secure the border and build a wall. There is a way forward on all of these things. If we remember how our system works, we can start making it happen, but I think it will require us to accept what it takes to make progress in a constitutional Republic. We can't even begin to do it until we end the shutdown. And that is what I hope we will do sooner, rather than later. Mr. President, I yield the floor.