Brian Schatz

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. It sounds like you want to stay here all night and get this done.

Mr. SCHATZ. Would you be willing to work on a unanimous consent request to effectuate that?

Mr. SCHATZ. Regular order, please.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I was going to give some prepared remarks, but I want to be a little quicker because I see the Senator from Virginia here, and I know how devastating a government shutdown is for the State of Virginia. It is terrible for Hawaii--for our shipyards and our Federal workers. I do want to respond to my friend from Alaska. He is my friend. We overuse that word in the U.S. Senate; that is true. Dan Sullivan is my friend, but he is wrong on this. First of all, a small point: The NFL Network is back up and running on the Armed Forces Network. That was fixed on Saturday. Second of all, there were unanimous consent requests on Friday night to make sure that we pay the military. On Friday night, a unanimous consent request was made to pay the military. It was objected to by the majority leader. And then we tried again yesterday, and it was objected to by the majority leader. So when the junior Senator from Alaska alleges that we are emerging with slick talking points about the need to support our military servicemembers and civilian DOD employees, I take personal offense. I agree, it should not be slick talking points. This should not be a bludgeon that one party or one Member of one party uses against the other party. But let's just get our facts straight about what happened. I am not excusing what a government shutdown does to people--civilian, DOD, servicemembers, other government employees, essential, nonessential, the people who depend--not just the workers but the people who get services from the workers. I am not defending this shutdown, but let the facts be clear. On the night of the beginning of the shutdown, a Democratic Senator tried to ensure that at least we minimize the harm for our servicemembers, and then we did it again yesterday, and both times it was objected to by the majority leader. With that, I will deliver my other remarks later and yield the floor to the Senator from Virginia.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, will the Senator from North Carolina yield for a question?

Mr. SCHATZ. Regular order, please.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, regular order.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I thought I heard the Senator from North Carolina suggest that we stay in and get this done tonight. I think we still have a chance to get this done before 1 a.m.

Mr. SCHATZ. I still have the floor. And if we don't get this done by 1 a.m., I personally don't think we should adjourn. I think this should be personally uncomfortable and physically uncomfortable. I think we should be embarrassed by this. I think you make a very good point. I think we should stay in until we get this done. It is disappointing to me, when I hear all of that. Yet when I ask you if you would be willing to work on a unanimous consent request to effectuate what you have just said, the answer is no.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, so here is the state of play. There is a group of 19 to 22 U.S. Senators, a bipartisan group that is trying to find a pathway forward. Senators Schumer and McConnell had a meeting. We don't know exactly how that went. There are some reasons to be encouraged. I think there are not that many reasons to be overly optimistic, but there is a pathway out of this. We can get out of this mess. I think lots of us understand, a lot of us having served in the legislature or at the executive level, actually at the county level as well. We all understand how insane this is to do four CRs in a row, and we all understand that we work very hard to get to the U.S. Senate. I am looking at all of you and thinking about how difficult everybody's race was just to arrive at the world's greatest deliberative body. Forgetting, for the moment, someone's calculus about who has a temporary or even long-term partisan advantage in light of this shutdown, we all know shutdowns make this institution weaker, and we all know shutdowns make Senators weaker. We don't fight tooth and nail and go through that awful process--there are some joyful moments in a campaign, but nobody necessarily looks forward to it. It is a tough thing. You don't go through that so you can diminish the body in which you serve, and we are diminished by this process. General Mattis may have put it best when he said no enemy has done more harm to the readiness of the military than the combined impact of spending caps in 9 of the last 10 years operating under a CR. Nobody wants to do this anymore. We can't do CRs forever, but right now we need one to keep everyone at the table without hurting the American people. That is the purpose of the Brown UC and the Murphy UC, which is to say: Whatever our disagreements are, we have an opportunity, by unanimous consent, to make sure we don't punish the American people for our inability to agree with each other. Why not keep the government open for 24 or 48 or 72 hours? From my standpoint, looking at my constituents in the State of Hawaii, we have extraordinary National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration workers; we have an incredible presence of the Department of Defense, civilian DOD employees as well as servicemembers; we have National Park Service people who do extraordinary work. We have lots of government employees, and it is not their fault. It is not their fault. So I have a very simple unanimous consent request. It is a little different than the others. The others were to try to avoid this cataclysm, but should we be unable to avoid this cataclysm, I think we should keep our government workers whole because they didn't do this to us. We are doing this to them. So my UC request does a very simple thing. It just makes sure that whatever idiocy happens over the next 6 hours or 6 days or 6 weeks, that they are held harmless. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 290, S. 2274, to provide for compensation to Federal employees affected by lapses in appropriations; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I just want to briefly respond to the Senator from North Carolina. I actually agree it would be a half measure to open the government for 24 hours; it would be a half measure to pass just CHIP; it would be a half measure to open the government for 72 hours, but the alternative is that we are doing nothing. Sure, it is a little goofy to keep the government open for 24 hours as we negotiate. It is absolutely goofy. It is embarrassing. It is less embarrassing than actually shutting down the government while we negotiate. Opening the government for 72 hours, a little strange--not our highest watermark in terms of our legislative prowess. It is pretty embarrassing. What is more embarrassing? Shutting the government down. Passing CHIP after it has expired by consent, awful--not the world's greatest deliberative body's greatest moment. What is worse? Objecting to doing that. We want to make sure our Federal employees are made whole. I agree with the Senator from North Carolina, this is a half measure, but do you know what? If I am a Federal employee, I will take a half measure because right now we are giving them nothing. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I have one last unanimous consent request, and I appreciate the participation from the Senator from North Carolina. I appreciate our dialogue here. I think this is constructive and productive. This last UC request is very simple. It is the same one, with a small modification that Senator McCaskill made on Friday night, and that is very simple. Every time we have done a shutdown--I have been involved in one. It was the ``Green Eggs and Ham'' Affordable Care Act shutdown. It was the worst period of time I ever spent in the Senate. Sherrod Brown always says: No whining on the yacht. Don't feel sorry for yourself for serving in the U.S. Senate. It is a privilege. It is a great job. Shutdowns are miserable. But during that shutdown and during every other shutdown that I am aware of, we always took care of our servicemembers. Senator McCaskill on Friday night put that UC in so that we made sure everyone who is serving in harm's way or prepared to serve in harm's way, supports our military, gets paid. Frankly, in the heat of the moment on Friday night, when there was still a lack of clarity whether we were going to get through it without a shutdown, I understand nobody wanted to allow a UC request of any sort to go through. But then Friday came, and it was is not at all clear that we were going to move on this. And now we are into Sunday, and I don't know where we are with this, but I am getting increasingly worried. So it is really hard for me to understand why we wouldn't unanimously consent to pay our servicemembers. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 36, H.R. 1301; that the amendment at the desk, providing for continuing appropriations for pay and death benefits for members of the armed services, be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I am a member of the Defense Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. As the Senator from North Carolina knows, the way that we do Defense appropriations is with great care. We have markups. We find out what each service branch needs in terms of personnel, in terms of bases and installation, in terms of new acquisitions, and that process takes a fair amount of time. That markup is not done. I would love to move on Defense appropriations, but from the standpoint of responsibly spending hundreds of billions of dollars, we are not there yet, and so, therefore, I object.

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, here is what is happening. Last night, Senate Democrats asked to do a 1-day continuing resolution. They also asked to do a 3-day continuing resolution. What does that mean? That means we were at an impasse because the House- passed continuing resolution was 4 weeks, and that was not acceptable to enough U.S. Senators to pass. If you subject it to a vote, and it doesn't get cloture, it fails. Under normal circumstances, then you try to find out what might be able to get cloture, but we were so close to the deadline that we needed something called a unanimous consent request. In other words, we needed every single U.S. Senator to accede to the idea that we should vote on something. It is not unusual for a unanimous consent request to be granted. A lot of times it is just perfunctory stuff, everyday stuff to kind of move something in a schedule, allow someone to have 10 more minutes to speak, or whatever it may be, but on big things, you don't always grant consent. I get that. Think about where we were. We were on the precipice of the government shutdown, and Senator Nelson from Florida asked for unanimous consent-- in other words, all 100 U.S. Senators agreeing--to bring up a measure that would have kept the government open; the idea being that is better than a shutdown; the idea being that everybody on the Senate floor was actually behaving like a Senator last night who did not want to shut down the government. There were lots of very interesting, constructive, and productive bipartisan conversations. We were close. We weren't that close--we weren't 10 minutes away--but we weren't so far apart that it wasn't worth trying. That is why Senator Nelson said: Why don't we buy ourselves another 24 hours and not shut down the government. The majority leader objected. It was the majority leader's prerogative to allow it to be voted on. Had that been subjected to a vote, I doubt there would have been more than a handful of people voting against it. Nobody wants a government shutdown. Senator Nelson provided the opportunity for us to avoid this. Then Senator Tester said: OK. Maybe 1 day is too short. Maybe we can't get this done in 20. My view was we should have 12-hour CRs. We should have absolute, burning pressure on ourselves. It should be physically miserable. We should be here. We should be working. We should be negotiating. That is my view. I think we should be on 12-hour CRs. Listen, I can't go home, right? I live pretty far away, but even for those who live on the Eastern Seaboard, I don't think anybody should be comfortable this weekend--politically, physically, mentally. To understand what is happening to the country, you should not be comfortable. You should be embarrassed. I think we should be on 12-hour CRs. OK. A 24-hour CR, I was fine with that. That got rejected. How about a 3-day CR? That is what President Trump wanted to do to try to close the deal, but those were rejected. No one can explain to the public why we can't keep the government open for a few days to negotiate without punishing the whole country. Nobody wins during a shutdown. We were so close to an agreement. The overarching reason we didn't reach an agreement is, we have an erratic White House. I have been trying to dial down my rhetoric in this context. I am looking at the Presiding Officer, who is a Republican, with whom I have a constructive working relationship. If we are going to get out of this, we have to get out of this together. So I am trying to watch my tone because we are going to have to vote on something together at some point. The simple fact is, the White House has been erratic and inconsistent in this process. There was at least a framework for a deal on January 11, and it got blown up in that very famous meeting with the expletives. Then there was at least a framework for a deal yesterday, and it got--now very famously--blown up by a subsequent meeting and a subsequent phone call. Here we are with four continuing resolutions in 4 months. We haven't actually been able to work on the appropriations process. We haven't done great with appropriations in the past 5 years since I have been here, but, occasionally we will get an omnibus done. Occasionally, we will have proper markups. Occasionally, we will look at each executive agency and do our job properly. It is not the regular order like it used to be with my predecessor and many of the people of the Senate of old. It was not as bad as this. A CR month by month, week by week--enough is enough. Instead of trying to deal with this, the White House is failing to address these baseline issues and then creates new crises. This was a manufactured crisis on DACA. They didn't need to create this crisis, but now we have one. Instead of using the Executive's authority to solve problems, they are focusing on the wrong things. They are punishing children who were brought to this country through no fault of their own and now are as American as anyone in Congress, except in the eyes of the law, but there is a level of inconsistency, as a euphemism, that we have had to deal with in these negotiations. The White House told the Republicans to fund CHIP as part of a 30-day spending bill, and then the President tweeted we should only fund CHIP if it is part of a long-term solution. We had a deal on the table to help Dreamers in exchange for border funding only to have the White House change its mind. That happened once when the deal was blown up a couple weeks ago and then yesterday. Senate Republicans may feel comfortable; they may feel uncomfortable. I don't know. I think it probably depends on the Member, but they are in a holding pattern waiting for Presidential leadership, and they don't know what the White House wants. They don't want to move on legislation without the White House's approval, but trying to get clarity from the administration on this or any other issue is a fool's errand because it changes by the hour and certainly by the day. That is why we are in this position. It is not unusual for Congress to have disagreements between the parties, within the political parties, between the House and the Senate. That is the way the legislative process works. It is a messy process, but the way an executive is supposed to play that role, they are supposed to wield that authority, that power. Whether it is a Governor or a mayor or a President, when it gets close--and we are close--the executive is supposed to close the deal. This Executive does the opposite. This Executive has blown up every deal every time. Sometimes we are far apart, and it gets worse. Sometimes we are vanishingly close, and it gets blown up, but what an executive is supposed to do is play that role, play that adult in the room. Right now, we are a ship without a captain. That is why we are marking the 1-year anniversary of this administration with a government shutdown. That is why hundreds of thousands of people across the country are marching to say they are dissatisfied with the direction of this country. The year 2017 in this U.S. Senate, it was a unique year. That is because we had basically no bipartisanship on the Senate floor. There were a few things that went by unanimous consent. The process of the U.S. Senate is supposed to be that you submit a bill on the floor, and it takes a week or two. Everybody offers amendments. There is lots of haggling. It is kind of messy. People talk too long, people argue, but in the end, you move a piece of legislation. It is a bipartisan process by construct. We are supposed to be different than the House. We are not a majoritarian institution. We are supposed to be a moderating force on the country. We are supposed to be the adults in the room. The way you do that is through an open amendment process. I want everybody to know we had a couple of situations where Democrats were allowed to offer amendments, but that was in something called vote-arama. I know the Presiding Officer hates vote-arama. I know most people in the U.S. Senate hate vote-arama. Why? Because it is a farce. It is worse than student council. Everyone is just doing stuff to position themselves back home. None of the things we vote on in the vote-arama process has any force of law or is going to be enacted. There is nothing meaningful that happens in vote-arama. Other than that, not one single, solitary Democratic amendment was considered on the U.S. Senate floor. No Democratic Senator had their amendment considered on the Senate floor except inside of the process called vote- arama, which we all know is a farce. So we haven't had bipartisanship. I was so encouraged when the majority leader, early this year--I think the first week of the year right before convening--said he wants to do things on the basis of 60 votes, which is the way the Senate has always worked. I know he considers himself an institutionalist. I understand they felt it imperative to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act and do their tax cuts via the reconciliation process, which is a 51-vote threshold, but he basically announced: We are going to do bipartisan stuff this year. But what we have is an erratic administration that changes its position every hour, and so it is very difficult to get to 60. They lack the clarity, they lack the capacity, and it appears they lack the desire to govern in a bipartisan fashion. So I just want to be very clear. Democrats are ready and eager to talk. We are here to find a way forward, but that does require Presidential leadership. I don't understand why we couldn't have a 1-day CR, a 2-day CR, or a 5-day CR. I don't understand why we can't negotiate with the government open. When Bill Nelson comes to the floor and says: Why don't we buy ourselves another 24 hours so that civilian DOD employees can get paid, so people at the Pearl Harbor Shipyard can get paid, so people who work for the Federal Government can get paid, so some of the people who work in the U.S. Congress, in security and elsewhere, parking--all of these wonderful civil servants are not going to get paid. All of these services are going to get shut down tomorrow--not tomorrow but Monday morning--because nobody is even going to allow Bill Nelson's proposal to even get a vote. If you guys don't want to do a 24-hour CR, vote against it, but at least allow us to keep the government open and keep these negotiations open. Now is the time for Congress to conduct itself as the article I branch--as a separate, coequal branch of government. And we are not--I understand the politics. We just had 8 years of President Obama, and obviously Democrats were very eager to understand the administration's position so we could calibrate and coordinate. We didn't always do the same thing, but you have to keep an open ear to what a President of your party desires to do. But when a President of your party is either totally unclear or changes his mind every 12 hours, then you have to make a judgment that you are going to exercise your constitutional obligation and get the job done with his participation or over his objections. That is what we need to do on a bipartisan basis. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I want to cover what I think are the seven worst aspects of this tax bill. The first thing is that this is not a middle-class tax cut. Credible, independent analysis of this bill found that the richest 1 percent of the United States will get $85 billion of the benefits in the year 2019. These Americans will get a tax cut of more than $55,000 per person while taxpayers who fall in the middle of the road will get a couple of hundred bucks. Many in the middle class will pay more because of this bill. People making $30,000 or less will see a tax increase of about 10 percent. Even foreign investors will do better than the middle class in this bill. What do I mean by foreign investors? I mean foreign investors. I mean people who don't live in the United States but who own stock or are investors in American companies. In 2019, they will get a $48 billion tax benefit. That is a bigger benefit than more than half of the rest of the country will get from this bill. You have to work hard to design a tax plan that helps the middle class less than this one does. In fact, the Washington Post looked at this plan a few weeks ago and found that it is the worst tax plan for the middle class in 50 years. Here is the thing. It shouldn't be that hard to do a middle-class tax cut; you just do a middle-class tax cut. The No. 2 reason this bill is horrible is it is primarily written for special interests. Republicans couldn't give the middle class a bigger tax break because they needed all of that money for special interests. Real estate firms will see an immediate 16 percent decrease in taxes next year. For families who own multimillion-dollar hotels, that makes this a great bill. Big banks and financial firms also win. Over the next 10 years, financial firms will save $250 billion. Over the next 10 years, financial firms will save $250 billion. The biggest single beneficiary is Wells Fargo. What I remember from the last election was that the lesson the voters were teaching us across America was a populous lesson, that they were sick of financial institutions and the very powerful politically and the very powerful economically running us. Here we are giving a massive tax break to Wells Fargo, an estimated 18-percent boost in earnings just for Wells Fargo. This is not a bank that has been a good player recently. They were mired in scandal after they bilked customers into buying auto insurance and created thousands of fake credit card and bank accounts. People are not getting a tax cut. Corporations are getting a tax cut, and no one knows how we are going to pay for all of this. This brings me to No. 3. If passed, this bill will increase the Federal deficit by a minimum of $1.5 trillion. With $1.5 trillion, we can pay down every single student loan in the country and still have enough money left over for middle-class tax cuts. Instead, we are going to make sure that Wells Fargo investors have another banner year. There was an entire group of Republicans elected to the Congress on the premise that the Federal debt and deficit were too high and that we needed fiscal discipline and fiscal responsibility, and now they are adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit. No. 4, this bill is just bad economic policy. It is premised on the idea that if you provide a tax cut for corporations, they will share it, essentially; that if you give money to a corporation and they take that money and they reinvest it in their physical plant, they make additional developments--maybe they build a new factory, or maybe they pay their people more. That sounds great. Here is the problem: The corporate sector is sitting on an unprecedented amount of cash already. The corporate sector has lots of cash already. So we have a lesson in what they will do with extra cash, right? If they were going to use extra cash to pay their people more or invest more in physical infrastructure or expand their businesses, they would already be doing that because they are already sitting on record amounts of capital. But they are not doing that. What they are doing is stock buybacks and dividends. In other words, they are paying off their shareholders. When a group of American CEOs was asked what they were going to do with the windfall money they are about to receive, they did not say they are going to pay their people more; they did not say they are going to invest more in expanding their businesses; they indicated that they are going to do what they have been doing with their record amounts of cash, which is pour it back into stock buybacks and dividends. This is bad economic policy. Forget the moral part for a moment. Even at the macroeconomic level, this is not smart. No. 5, this is bad policy because it is a bad process. This bill was written in secret. It was rushed, and it was 100 percent partisan. We know it didn't have to be that way. One of the things I said to some of my colleagues with whom I have a strong relationship is, listen, why don't we try to do this subject to a 60-vote threshold? Why don't we try to find bipartisan agreement? And then, listen, if you find that we are operating with you in bad faith, if you find that there is no room for compromise, drop the threshold down and do it with a 51-vote margin, but at least you will have exhausted the possibility of bipartisanship. They started with 51 votes. What does that mean? That means they never wanted to listen to Democrats. That is why this process is so flawed. And now the House just sent over a bill that is so messed up, they are going to have to vote again tomorrow. To fix the garbage they sent over this afternoon, they are already talking about an additional technical fixes bill to do next year. This is the product that you get when you don't have public hearings, when you don't have bipartisanship, and when you don't take your time. No. 6, this bill is bad for healthcare. People's premiums are going to skyrocket, and 13 million Americans are going to go without health insurance. No. 7, this bill increases income inequality. This bill changes our tax system to reward wealth over work. For me, American capitalism is about, you work hard, you have a good idea, and you are rewarded. It is not about, your dad was rich, he passed the money down, and you are rewarded. American capitalism is about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But what we are doing with the Tax Code is unprecedented-- except for during the gilded age. What we are doing with the Tax Code right now is saying: We value already being rich more than we value someone who is climbing that mountain. That is a foundational moral question--do we value work, or do we value wealth? The problem with this bill--and we can go through process and policy and politics, but the foundational problem with this bill is that, through this document, we are declaring that we value people's wealth that already exists. We value passive income more than we value earned income. And that is not good for the United States of America. That is the problem with this bill. We are telling people that we value people who already have money more than people who are climbing that hill. That is why I oppose this bill so strongly, and I think that is why people across America--for the very first time, at least in recent history but maybe in American history, we have a tax cut bill that is so deeply unpopular because people understand what a rotten piece of legislation this is. I urge my colleagues to oppose it. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the Senate has, actually, already considered Bill Wehrum to be the Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency, who is the person in charge of the rules to administer the Clean Air Act at the EPA. This person has already been considered, and the Senate decided that he was not right for the job. Over 10 years ago, President Bush nominated Mr. Wehrum to head the Office of Air and Radiation at the EPA. He was rejected because his 6- year record as an employee at the EPA told the Senators all that they needed to know. As the ranking member, Jim Jeffords, put it at the time: ``Mr. Wehrum's disdain for the Clean Air Act is alarming.'' If you disagree with the foundational Federal law that we use to keep our air clean, then it is hard to believe that you can competently lead the EPA's efforts when it comes to protecting our right to clean air. A decade later, nothing has changed. Mr. Wehrum has done nothing that should change our minds about his ability to lead the EPA. This, of course, is part of a pattern. This administration continues to nominate anti-science, pro-pollution, climate-denying people to lead the U.S. agencies that are in charge of science and climate. Scott Pruitt has denied a century's worth of established science and basic facts that say that climate change is real, urgent, and caused by humans. He now leads the No. 1 Federal Agency that is charged with working on climate change. Then there is Jim Bridenstine, who hopes to lead NASA, which is one of our Nation's top science agencies. He, too, is still on the fence about climate change. Meanwhile, 13 Federal agencies, including the EPA and NASA, just published a dire report that reads that greenhouse gases released by human activity are to blame for rising temperatures and severe weather throughout the world. This is why Mr. Wehrum should not go any further. It is really very simple. Our own government scientists say that climate change is real, urgent, and caused by humans. If you do not want to take their word for it, here in the United States in this year alone, a record number of category 4 hurricanes killed dozens of people and destroyed or damaged entire communities in the southern United States and Puerto Rico. Wildfires killed dozens of people and burned more than 8.4 million acres in the Northwest. Droughts lasting for months wiped out farmers' crops and forced ranchers to sell livestock in the Midwest. The city of Seattle had soot on cars from the wildfires. For a period, the State of Montana, depending on where you were, looked like it was literally on fire. The U.S. Forest Service's budget is soon to be more than 50 percent firefighting. This is supposed to be the Forest Service for the conservation and management of our forests, and now it is the Federal firefighting of our forests. There have been 15 severe weather events this year that have resulted in losses exceeding $1 billion. That is what insurance companies and reinsurance companies consider to be the threshold. They consider a big event--a catastrophic event--from an insurance standpoint to be a $1 billion event. We had 15 of them this year in the United States. In the past 10 years, the U.S. Government has spent more than $350 billion in helping communities recover from severe weather, and that is before our getting through with the various and necessary disaster supplemental budget requests that are coming down for Florida, Houston, and Puerto Rico. Look, severe weather is a reality or whatever you want to call it. If you feel uncomfortable politically calling it ``climate change,'' fine, but severe weather is actually already happening. It is now a moral issue, and it is a fiscal issue. It has taken a huge toll on our economy, on the American taxpayer, and on local communities. For the most part, we do not budget for these costs because we have decided that these are one-time events, but they just happen to be one-time events that are occurring more and more frequently and that are costing more and more. Because of the leadership vacuum that Scott Pruitt and Donald Trump have created, States and cities and the private sector have been stepping up so that the United States can stay on track to cut carbon emissions and fight climate change. Yet the Federal Government still has a responsibility here, not just a moral responsibility but a legal one, for the climate will keep changing, the costs will keep rising, and more and more people will feel the effects. Instead of stepping up so that our Federal debt does not balloon and our coastlines do not erode and our security is not threatened, this administration keeps nominating people like Mr. Wehrum to deny that climate is an issue and that the government ought to act. Throughout his career, Mr. Wehrum has demonstrated antipathy for the very laws that he is now going to be tasked with upholding. When he held this position in an acting capacity in the 2000s--in other words, he was filling in until he was confirmed but was never confirmed--he was sued dozens of times for not doing his job. Time and again, the courts found that, in fact, he was putting special interests over science and over the public good. This is not just a rhetorical statement. These are 27 times that Mr. Wehrum lost in court for exceeding his authorities under the law. Here is where he kept getting specifically into trouble. Mr. Wehrum is a former lawyer for the very industries that the EPA regulates-- chemical companies, utility companies, the auto industry. This is the experience that he relied on while he worked at the EPA, which is fair enough so far, but when the Agency started working on a rule that regulated pollution from powerplants, Mr. Wehrum took language from his former law firm--again, which represented powerplants--and gave it to the EPA to put into the rule. In other words, the EPA did not look to experts and scientists to decide how best to regulate powerplants; it looked to the powerplants' lawyers. Mr. Wehrum's job was to protect clean air and public health, and he failed at that job by siding with special interests over that mission. The courts actually stepped in 27 times, and he lost 27 times. One case went all the way to the Supreme Court under Mr. Wehrum. The EPA said that it did not have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide from automobiles, but under U.S. law, the EPA must regulate all emissions that are damaging to human health and welfare, and the Supreme Court has acknowledged that carbon pollution fits that description. Just to be clear, under the EPA's responsibility to administer the Clean Air Act, the EPA does not just have the authority to regulate carbon emissions; it has the obligation to regulate carbon emissions. In other words, anything that is airborne that causes harm to people, to public health, must be regulated. The EPA does not simply decide which of these airborne pollutants must be regulated; it has to regulate all of those pollutants that cause damage to public health. Clearly, carbon fits that category on a commonsense level, but the Supreme Court also decided that. There have been more intense storms, as we have seen from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and others, that are certainly bad for human health and well-being, and the Supreme Court has agreed. The EPA has the authority and the obligation to regulate these greenhouse gases. We do not need to go through this again. Mr. Wehrum has already shown that he is not the right leader for the EPA. He will not commit to taking the necessary steps to address severe weather. He will not fight for clean air. He will fight for his former clients. This is not an accusation. It is based on exactly what he did when he was in the same position. It is the reason the Senate rejected him 10 years ago. With this kind of information in front of us, there is no way we can put Mr. Wehrum back in charge of the office that is tasked with regulating carbon pollution, not when we are facing a planetary emergency, not when the fiscal and human costs of inaction are so clear. The EPA needs leadership that understands the crisis we are facing and that understands and is willing to do everything in its power to address it. Mr. Wehrum has clearly demonstrated that he is not the right person for this job. I will vote no on this nominee, and I urge my colleagues to do the same. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, here is what is happening with so-called ``tax reform.'' Tonight, the Budget Committee is voting on a budget resolution that does two things. First, it sets the spending limits for everything in the government-- environment, energy, defense, healthcare, education, transportation, and so on. Second, it includes something called reconciliation instructions that basically direct all of the committees to report back with legislation that either increases or decreases the Federal deficit by a certain amount. This time around, here is what they are doing--asking the Senate Finance Committee to draft legislation to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion. Again, this is going to pass on a party-line vote, with Republicans prevailing, to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion. This is what will start the tax reform process. That is not all. Republicans still haven't given up on decimating our healthcare system. They are still trying to cut Medicaid and, this time, Medicare, and they are going to use this tax bill. They are going to cut $473 billion from Medicare at a time when our population is getting older and many seniors are already struggling. They are also going to cut $1 trillion from Medicaid. This is the program that pays for one out of every two births in this country. It helps millions of families who have loved ones in nursing home care. Last week, they tried to pass a healthcare bill that cut taxes. Now they are trying to pass a tax bill that will cut healthcare. Their proposal will, actually, increase the deficit by $4 trillion. That is 12 zeros. Here is what we could do with $4 trillion. We could completely rebuild half of the airports in the United States. We could put 20 million people through 4 years of college. We could pay off the debt for every student loan. Instead, the United States is going to be in the red by $4 trillion, but after they cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and one-half trillion dollars from Medicare, the party that has railed against the Federal debt and deficit will still add $2.5 trillion to the deficit. This is all so that they can give tax cuts to the richest people in the United States. I promise you, I understand that both parties are sometimes guilty of exaggerating and that sometimes both parties are guilty of relying on talking points and relying on caricatures of the other side, but you couldn't caricature this bill if you tried. This bill is already a caricature of what people say Republicans are all about, which is to shred the social safety net and provide tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. They are going to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent, and they are going to cut tax rates across the board, but the people who will actually benefit will be the people at the top. The Tax Policy Center, which is a nonpartisan, highly respected group, has crunched the numbers, and they found that within 10 years, 80 percent of the benefits of this $4 trillion tax bill will go to 1 percent of Americans. Remember what is happening. We are borrowing a huge chunk of this, and whatever is not borrowed comes out of Medicare and Medicaid. So the programs that pay for women to give birth in a hospital or for elderly people to get healthcare will be decimated, and the wealthiest Americans will pay less in taxes. This is bad policy, not just for the people who work hard but for the whole economy. I want to give you a specific example. Again, both parties rely on talking points, and both parties accuse each other of having the wrong set of ideas, but we have an example of what happens when you do this. This bill is actually modeled after what they did in the State of Kansas. The State government eliminated one of its business taxes, telling people that it would help the State's economy. Instead, the economy slowed down, which left them with even lower tax revenues. They had to cut government programs, like education, and now people do not want to send their kids to Kansas public schools anymore because they do not have the resources to educate their children. This is not a path that America should follow. Everyone needs to pay their fair share, and that includes big corporations and the people who are benefiting from the system and making millions of dollars every year, but in this proposal, they are the ones getting all of the tax breaks. Companies already have huge tax breaks. Some corporations end up paying zero in Federal income tax every April 15 even though they are making healthy profits. They have teams of lawyers and accountants who help them dodge paying even a penny to the Federal Government. That is why corporate income taxes make up less than 10 percent of all of the revenue to the Federal Treasury. Meanwhile, at least 30 percent of the middle class will actually pay more if the Republicans succeed with their tax reform package. Think about this. Thirty percent of the middle class is going to see tax increases in their tax bills. Why? It is because they have to find some money to subsidize the tax cuts for the richest people. Some of the money will be found by borrowing; some of the money will be found by making cuts to Medicare and Medicaid; and some of the money will be found by increasing taxes on the middle class. One out of every two households with children will see its taxes go up under this plan. Increasing taxes for these people while decreasing them for big corporations is not a plan for economic growth. We have heard over and over that Republicans do not want to add to the deficit--I don't either--but this is, literally, what they are voting to do tonight. Again, this is not a talking point. This is not a sort of rhetorical flourish. The bill, itself, provides for $1.5 trillion worth of deficit spending. Yet it is not deficit spending on the military; it is not deficit spending on disaster response; and it is not deficit spending on Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security or any of the social safety net programs that they claim is the problem with the Federal budget. It is deficit spending for the purpose of a tax cut, 80 percent of which is going to 1 percent of the country. This is not conservative-- certainly not fiscally conservative--and it will not help us to grow the economy. It is no surprise that this policy is bad, because, again, the process has been so bad. With healthcare, they ignored regular order. They obliterated the committee process. They ignored Democrats. They ignored the way the U.S. Senate is supposed to work, and they failed. One Republican Senator says that he will not vote for anything that adds one penny to the deficit. Another Republican Senator said that he will not do anything that does not cut taxes for everybody. It already does not meet that test. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle--Republicans too--have promised not to cut Medicaid or Medicare. It violates all of those promises. If you did not like the ACA repeal because it cut Medicaid, guess what. This cuts Medicaid more. If you made a promise to your voters not to cut Medicare, you should be aware that this bill provides for one- half trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare. If you are railing against debt and deficits, this is the biggest budget buster that I have ever seen in my short, 5-year career in the U.S. Senate. During the campaign, the President of the United States promised not to cut Medicare, and the senior Senator from Arizona has called for regular order. This violates every procedural and policy principle that has been articulated on this Senate floor since I have been here. I do not see a way forward on this legislation when it has been conceived in a purely partisan way. It will only take us deeper into dysfunction. For the sake of the Senate, let's stop going down this path. Let's restore regular order and work together on a bipartisan tax reform process. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, before my planned remarks on the Federal Communications Commission, I want to say a few words about the awful events that happened in Las Vegas. Our hearts are with the families affected by the tragedy and with the city of Las Vegas, and we do send them our best wishes and our prayers. But we can do more than send our thoughts and prayers to the grieving. We can do more than thank the first responders. We can do more than lower the flag to half mast. We can take a stand against gun violence by passing commonsense gun safety laws. Otherwise, this becomes a ritual of mass murder, mourning, and moving on. Let's stop this awful ritual. Let's stop the violence. Let's do something about it. Mr. President, I wish to talk about the nomination of Chairman Ajit Pai to lead the Federal Communications Commission for another 5 years. When it comes to Chairman Pai, personally and professionally, I want to say that I believe in his integrity as a public servant, and I believe he is smart and qualified. But the FCC is supposed to create competition and protect consumers, and Chairman Pai isn't doing that. First, Chairman Pai's FCC is trying to get rid of net neutrality. Net neutrality is a Federal rule that says ISPs--internet service providers--must treat all content equally. They can't discriminate by making certain kinds of content slower, charging more for other kinds of content, or blocking some content altogether. That is the basic premise of the internet. Once you pay for your broadband internet access and then you jump on a browser, everything comes down to the same speeds. It is so foundational to the way we use the internet that it is actually hard to describe a future without net neutrality, but it could be that you pay your ISP, and certain websites download fast. Certain websites are almost impossible to find. For certain websites, you have to pay a premium just to be able to capture their content. Forget what you may have to pay Hulu, Netflix, and others. The ISP will essentially control your access to the internet. That is why net neutrality was so important. It is not that, in that moment, things were necessarily undermining the current internet but that, without a firm rule, these companies may have incentives to change the internet as we know it. When Chairman Pai announced that the FCC would review the rules on net neutrality, he said: ``This is a fight we intend to wage, and it is a fight that we are going to win.'' But that is not how the FCC is supposed to work. This is a quasi-judicial agency. They are supposed to propose a rule, allow the public to weigh in, and then the agency considers the comments before making a decision. Chairman Pai had made it clear from the beginning that he had already made up his mind. Even though there were 22 million individual comments from American citizens about what we should do with the free and open internet, he had decided in advance of that. Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern. Right after Congress took away the FCC's ability to protect people's privacy online, he wrote an op-ed that essentially read that this is good news. It is pretty unusual to have a chairman of a quasi-judicial body weigh in on something that the legislative branch does or to completely disregard the process for public input. Chairman Pai has not yet demonstrated a willingness to stray from the party line. One of the things I like about him is that I know that he has a big brain. We have talked policy, and when we have had private conversations, I have seen that he has liked the engagement, that he likes the job, and that he likes public service. The challenge is that there has been no instance in which he has done anything that was other than predictably Republican. That is OK for now, as it has been a relatively short tenure, but what we need in an FCC Chairman is someone who takes his own views and the facts, as the record becomes established, and makes up his own mind. He is not a Republican while he is on the FCC. His job is to apply the facts and his own judgment. During the confirmation hearing, I asked him about the President of the United States calling the media the ``enemy of the state.'' He would not say one way or another what he thought of those comments or how he would guide the FCC based on those comments. At some point, he needs to demonstrate some independence from his party and from the President. With this vote, the Senate has a chance to say that the person who leads the FCC should understand, at a bare minimum, how to run a quasi- judicial agency in a nonpartisan fashion, that he or she should value public input, and that he or she should not simply go along with what the party is asking and implement it no matter how it stacks up against the statute. Here is another example. Earlier this year, Chairman Pai rolled back a rule in order to allow local TV stations to be bought up without any limits by one single company. This decision seemed to be for the benefit of one company, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which just happens to be a company with strong conservative leanings. Sinclair is already the largest owner of local broadcasting stations in the United States, but now it is trying to buy another company, Tribune Media, which would expand Sinclair's reach into 72 percent of the households. For decades, both Congress and the FCC have taken steps to protect local broadcasting because it has benefited the public interest. So, under normal circumstances, Sinclair would not be able to buy up these other stations, but Chairman Pai has changed the rules so that this company will have even more power and reach. The secondary beneficiary of this change will be the Republican Party, because Sinclair has a decades-long history of pressuring its local stations to broadcast certain news that helps the Republican cause. We need an independent Chairman at the helm of the FCC. We need someone who will make decisions based on statute, not based on political affiliation. That is why I will vote no on Mr. Pai's nomination, but I hope that I will be proven wrong. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I want to thank the senior Senator from Texas for his leadership in the disaster response, and I pledge my commitment to whatever is needed for Houston and the areas around Houston, as well as Florida. I appreciate the commitment at the legislative level for what needs to be done in Puerto Rico. Mr. President, we also need to continue to apply pressure to the administration because it does appear as though there is an unequal response between what is happening in Puerto Rico and what has happened in Houston and in Florida. So we need to hold as a country the executive branch accountable for the lack of a sense of urgency for 3.5 million Americans who are mostly going to be without power for 9 months, who are currently without potable water, who are in a devastated situation. It is our obligation to do everything we can. Mr. President, the Senate is about to make an important decision about who leads the Federal agency that oversees everything from the internet, to the TV, to radio. This vote is a choice: We can either give our stamp of approval on the FCC's direction under the leadership of Chairman Pai, or we can decide that his leadership has put the FCC on the wrong track and that it is time for someone else to take charge. Generally speaking, here is how I approach a nomination. There are three reasons one might reject a nominee. If the person is corrupt, it is a nonstarter. If the person is nonqualified, it is also a nonstarter. And even on policy grounds, in the policy space, just disagreeing with someone can often boil down to the fact that there is a President from another party and is not sufficient to vote no. Chairman Pai is someone I know. He is skillful, he is a decent human being, he is very smart, and he is qualified. When we disagree, we can do it in a way that doesn't ruin our ability to work together on the following day on the following issue. And this is no small thing in today's political climate. So it is important that if we are ever going to get something done, we are able to disagree and find common ground afterward. I do like Chairman Pai as a person. I think he is ethical and he is capable. But he is just so wrong on policy. For me, that means he is not the right leader for the FCC. I want to highlight four of the concerns I have. First, the FCC really is trying to end the internet as we know it by getting rid of net neutrality. If they succeed, your internet service provider will have the power to stop you from seeing certain kinds of content. They will be the ones that make decisions about what you can access online and how fast and how much you have to pay for it. Some people say that companies aren't going to change the internet because it is not in their interest to change the internet, even if the law goes away. But think about this: Most often, these ISPs are publicly traded companies, and they are going to make decisions based on their own financial interests. It is not just an objective; it is their obligation. If there is an opportunity to change their business model for internet service, they are duty bound to pursue it. They do not have any obligation to a free and open internet; they have an obligation to shareholders and to profits. That is why net neutrality exists in the first place--because we should not leave it up to any company to decide whether they are going to charge people more to stream video, for example, or block certain content altogether. If we allow the FCC to end net neutrality, Americans across the country are going to find that the internet no longer works in the way that it should. And this has happened under Chairman Pai's leadership. It is not just bad policy that he is pursuing; they have also had some serious process fouls. When Chairman Pai announced that the FCC was revisiting the rules, he made clear that the FCC was going to get rid of net neutrality regardless of what happened throughout the process. He said: ``This is a fight we intend to wage and it is a fight we intend to win.'' Why is that a significant thing to say? ``This is a fight we intend to wage and it is a fight we intend to win.'' This a quasi-judicial agency. They just opened up a public comment period. There were 22 million members of the public who submitted public comments after the Chairman of the Commission has already announced that he has decided which way they are going to go. I think that is antithetical to the governing statute, and it is antithetical to the basic premise that if you have an open comment period where an individual has an opportunity to express themselves, you have to listen to them. You don't say: I already decided, but you 22 million people-- if you have an opinion, I will be happy to receive it and file it and do what I planned to do all along. That is the exact opposite of how this is supposed to work. The agency proposes the rule, the public weighs in, and then the agency considers the comments from the public in making the decision. But Chairman Pai turned it upside down. The FCC has tried to diminish the fact that so many people tried to weigh in. About 96 percent of the roughly 22 million people who have weighed in have weighed in in favor of net neutrality. They are trying to lay the groundwork to get rid of net neutrality even though the vast majority of people are for it. By doing that, the FCC is effectively saying that lobbyists and law firms matter more than regular citizens. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The FCC has claimed that cyber attacks kept people from being able to comment, but they have not been forthcoming about what exactly happened, and we are still working in our oversight role to figure that all out. Secondly, I would like to address media ownership. Local TV broadcasters are an essential part of every community. People know their local TV station. They trust it. There is a range of perspectives offered. Because the broadcasters are based in the community, they have relationships with their viewers that make their content better and more relevant. For decades, Congress and the FCC have taken steps to keep local broadcasting local because it benefits the public interest. These are the public airways. It is like fast food options across the country. You may not mind McDonald's once in a while, but you don't want that to be the only option in your hometown. You want something that captures the local culture in your community. That is what local broadcasting does. It makes TV in Honolulu different from TV in Hartford or Houston. But now the American tradition of local broadcasting is in real danger because the FCC is going to change the rules so that these stations can be bought out by a single company without any limits. I have no doubt this would create a world of sort of nationalized content distributed through each of these local companies, with consumers having to watch whatever is distributed to them by their national headquarters. This is no longer local news, and this is not the broadcast media that Americans deserve. The third area I want to talk about is broadband access. Right now, Americans have widely different levels of internet speed basically based on where they live. In some places, you have great broadband access, no trouble streaming video, accessing government services online, downloading, uploading, but in rural and Tribal communities, they are very, very far behind. As the FCC noted, 39 percent of rural America and 41 percent of those on Tribal land lack access to advanced broadband. Even if they have cell phones with internet access, a mobile network will typically offer slower speed than fixed broadband, so they can't go online and do the things we can in Washington, DC, or in many other cities across the country. So everyone, on a bipartisan basis, understands that this needs to change. High-speed broadband is the cornerstone to economic development, public safety, and quality of life in every community, no matter how many people live in your community. The FCC has historically worked so that every home, school, and business has had adequate access to the internet because that is what it will take to unlock the innovation and potential for all Americans. The FCC has worked on this issue by setting the bar for what it will take to connect more Americans to the internet. There is already a threshold in place which says that this is what high-speed internet access is, so we know who has it and who doesn't. But instead of actually working to get more people broadband, the FCC is working to change the definition of broadband so that it looks as if they have gotten people more broadband. That way they can say that more Americans are covered, even if they have internet service that does not meet their needs. In other words, they are not actually solving the problem; they are literally just redefining what it means to have access. Rather than giving people access, they are papering over the problem that they are not solving. This is a real issue, and it is something that the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee members have worked on on a bipartisan basis. The way to get more people broadband access is to get more people broadband access. It is not to change the rules and to change the metrics so that you can come back to the Congress and say: Look, we just achieved more access by allowing these companies to claim that people are covered who are not. The fourth and final concern I want to raise is a little more sensitive because, as I said, I like Chairman Pai, and I respect Chairman Pai, but he made some comments during his confirmation hearing that worried me. I asked if he agreed with the President's comments calling the media the enemy of the state. He would not give a direct answer. I understand that Mr. Pai is a Republican. That is not the problem. I understand Republicans will be appointed in a Republican administration. I am the former Democratic Party chairman of the State of Hawaii, so I understand party loyalty. I respect party loyalty. We have a President and a White House that are pushing to blur the legal, moral, and ethical boundaries in our Nation's Capital. This is not the time to get cute when we ask a question about the rule of law. This is not the time to finesse an answer. The only acceptable answer is this: I will not let anyone interfere with my work, whether it is the President or anyone else, and the media is not the enemy of the state. Mr. Pai did not take that opportunity. This was one of a few opportunities Mr. Pai had to be unequivocal. The senior Senator from New Mexico, if I remember correctly, and other members of the panel, sort of gave him a second and third bite at the apple so that he could get it right. It was an easy one to get right. I understand it is politically complicated, but sometimes you have to set aside the politics and just say what is right and do what is right. My instinct is that he will not use the FCC to do anything that crosses any ethical boundaries that I am worried about, but the fact that he will not say so leaves an opening that should not be there. The President has tweeted about media companies that give him bad coverage. He consistently refers to the media as ``fake news'' media and ``garbage'' media and makes unsubstantiated claims about various networks and newspapers and threatens to come after them. So it is not out of the realm of possibility that this could go beyond some partisan talking point from the Democrats in the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and into a real crisis. I just want to hear from Mr. Pai. He will be confirmed on Monday, but I want to hear from Mr. Pai that he does not believe the media is the enemy of the state and he will not allow any interference from the White House. I would like to end by bringing this back to the American people. This vote is our chance to stand up for them. There will not be a vote on net neutrality on the floor in the next weeks or months, but they deserve to keep their faith in local broadcasting, they deserve a free and open internet, and they deserve to have adequate access to the internet no matter where they live. That is why I have to vote no on this nominee. I admire Chairman Pai. I like him as a person, but he is the wrong leader for the FCC. I urge my colleagues to join me and vote no on his nomination. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, for the past several months, Republicans in Washington have done just about everything they can to hide their healthcare repeal bill. Remember that way back in the beginning they tried to actually move a bill without a CBO score. Then, they realized that even Republicans didn't want to vote on something without knowing how much it would cost or how many people would lose healthcare coverage. So they said the score didn't matter or that it was wrong, except for in the areas where they liked the numbers. They trashed the CBO even though, for the last 8 years, they referred to the CBO to make their argument against the Affordable Care Act. When that didn't work, they tapped 13 men to draft a bill in secret. It is no surprise that a bill crafted without women, without hearings, and without Democrats was not able to cross the finish line. Now they are actually back to their original plan, which is to push legislation without a score from the CBO. In other words, we are going to go to next week, and we are going to vote without knowing how bad this bill is. This is not the way the Senate is supposed to work. If there is no score, there should be no vote. Clearly, CBO got back to the Senate today and said that they will have enough time to analyze the fiscal impact of this proposal, but they will not be able to analyze the impact it has on our constituents. So do you remember the last 2 or 3 iterations of this bill? People were concerned with the fiscal impact. But remember that the headlines were that 18 million people lose coverage, 26 million people lose coverage, and 32 million people lose coverage. We are going to vote next week not knowing how many people are going to lose coverage. It shouldn't matter what side of the aisle you sit on. We should all be able to agree that something as complicated as healthcare needs as much debate as we could possibly get, and that is certainly more than the 90 seconds that procedurally we have left on this bill. After all, this is one-sixth of the American economy, but for the third time this year, Republicans are going to do whatever it takes to pass a healthcare bill, even if no one knows what is in it or what it will do, even if this bill is very clearly bad policy. By doing this, they are letting down millions of Americans who were counting on the Senate to be the cooling saucer and to slow down and consider policy carefully. There has been very little debate around this bill. We have not heard from doctors. We have not heard from patients or advocacy groups. We have not heard from healthcare administrators or economists. That is because we have had no hearings. Just tonight, Senate Finance Chairman Hatch announced that on Monday at 10 a.m. his committee will hold a hearing on the bill, and I am hopeful that, through that process, we will begin to understand the damage that this bill will do. But right now, here is what we know. This is actually the most extreme of all of the versions of TrumpCare that we have seen. Here is what it does. It eliminates everything in the ACA that was essential: tax credits and subsidies to help people to afford their insurance; the Medicaid expansion, which is very, very successful and very popular; and the protocols that we have in place for people with preexisting conditions. It eliminates Medicaid as we know it. This bill eliminates Medicaid as we know it. So what they did was that they established block grants, which means you get a fixed amount. Each State gets a fixed amount for Medicaid. Then, those Medicaid block grants disappear after 10 years. It is shocking to me that having failed to get the votes, they went further to the right, with deeper cuts to Medicaid--both to the Medicaid expansion program and to the Medicaid Program as it existed before the Affordable Care Act. They went ahead and said: You know, we only got to 49 votes last time. So I think what we should do is to eliminate all of the subsidies, all of the patient protections, all of the essential health benefits, and all of the Medicaid expansion, and let's take Medicaid as it exists and eviscerate it. The latest version of TrumpCare will take healthcare coverage away from tens of millions of people. Last week our country hit an important milestone. The number of Americans who do not have health insurance fell to a historic low of 8.8 percent. That means that 9 out of 10 Americans now have health insurance. But instead of celebrating this milestone, Republicans are about to end our country's progress on healthcare. Americans who don't lose their coverage will still get hurt with higher premiums or insurance plans that don't cover basic things like getting help for opioid addiction, pregnancy, hospital stays, mental health. So if this bill passes, healthcare will no longer be a right in this country. It will be a privilege. It depends on where you live, where you work, and how much money you make. This bill devastates one of the best and most successful programs this country has, and that is Medicaid. This is a program that helps one out of every five Americans and two out of every five children. It helps one out of every two families with a newborn baby, and it covers three out of every four long-term nursing home residents. Medicaid saves lives--nursing home patients, people struggling with opioid addiction, and people who are working two jobs but still don't have enough to cover their own healthcare. This bill destroys Medicaid as we know it. They start off by putting traditional Medicaid into what they call per capita caps or block grants. That basically means that, whatever money was spent last year, that is the amount the State gets in perpetuity until they just zero it out completely. What that means is that States will be left without adequate Federal funding for Medicaid. Think about what this means for the healthcare infrastructure in this country. In many States hospitals and local governments have actually designed the healthcare system based on a certain amount of Federal funding coming in. If you take away that funding, hospitals will collapse. In rural areas, hospitals and clinics will close, and people will be left without options and ultimately without access. That is just the damage done by cutting Medicaid. This bill also lets insurance companies opt out of covering what they call ``essential health benefits.'' This is a term of art, a piece of jargon. So I want to explain what this means. Under current law, there are certain things that have to be in any healthcare plan. Those are called essential health benefits. You buy a healthcare plan, wherever you buy it. If you get an employer-covered plan, if it is a DOD plan or a VA plan, or if you are on the exchange--whatever it is--it has to cover certain things. Let me list what is covered right now as an essential health benefit: ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance abuse services, prescription drugs, rehab, lab services, preventive and wellness services, chronic disease management, and pediatric services. These are the things that actually have to be in your healthcare plan under ACA. Yet do you know what this bill does? It says: No need. Configure your healthcare plan however you see fit. If you are a health insurance company and if you are a for-profit health insurance company, you are going to pick and choose these things based on what is profitable, and if there is a certain thing that is costing you a lot of money, you are under no obligation to provide any of these health benefits because it is not in the law anymore. This eviscerates essential health benefits. This bill will also take away protections for people with preexisting conditions. Nothing will hold States back from allowing insurers to charge people with diabetes more or people with cancer more for their health insurance. Experts have started to look at what this will mean for people with preexisting conditions, and they will pay thousands of dollars more. A patient with asthma will pay more than $4,000 a year extra if this bill passes, while a patient with metastatic cancer will pay $142,000 extra. If you have metastatic cancer, this bill will cost you $142,000. If you have a kid with asthma, that will be $4,000 a year. This is their healthcare bill--to charge people more who get sick. That is their healthcare bill. Everything that is working under our healthcare system is being shredded by this bill. Take Planned Parenthood. These health centers serve millions of women and men across the country. They are part of the solution, not the problem, but this bill cuts funding to Planned Parenthood, which will cause many of these clinics to close. I want you to think about how many people in this country are actually employed in the healthcare industry. When the Affordable Care Act started to kick in, research estimated that as many as half a million jobs were created. But if millions of people are to lose their insurance, that means that they will lose access. If fewer people can access healthcare, that means that we will have fewer doctors, nurses, and technicians. In other words, cuts to healthcare coverage are also cuts to American jobs. I know that, in a lot of rural communities across Hawaii and across West Virginia and across the country, the community healthcare centers or the small rural hospitals are not just the centers of their communities in a social context or in a community context, but a lot of the time they are the economic drivers. So this will do great damage to rural America. I end by making clear what this means for Americans and their healthcare. This is bad policy, plain and simple. It is bad if you live in a State like Ohio, where lives have literally been changed because people now have access to prescription drugs or to a primary care provider under Medicaid. It is bad for people who buy their insurance on the exchanges because their prices are going to go up. It is really bad for people with disabilities. This is not unusual. For whatever reason, people with disabilities are the first to be punished when the battle over healthcare comes up. It is bad for people with preexisting conditions because States will no longer be required to protect their ability to get healthcare. This bill does not pass Senator Cassidy's own Jimmy Kimmel test. That is why more than half a million doctors in the United States have come out as being opposed to this bill, because it will take healthcare away from the people who need it, who are sick, and who will not be able to get healthcare if the bill goes into law. This may feel like the zombie bill we have killed several times already. I know it feels like that for me. I am sure that people are exhausted. I am sure that people thought this was over. We had that magnificent moment on the Senate floor when John McCain walked over to that well right there and did a thumbs down. I tell everybody back home that it is so rare that politics is just like the movies, but that night was just like the movies. John McCain saved healthcare for the American people and put us on a path toward regular order. What does ``regular order'' mean? I did not know what that phrase meant until I came to this institution. Regular order just means that the Senate understands that it has a special obligation in American society--that we are the place in which we are supposed to handle tough issues. Chairman McCain pricked our consciences as Senators. Forget Democrats and Republicans; forget Liberals and Conservatives. We are all here because we want to try to make a difference. So there we were with Lamar Alexander, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Patty Murray, the top Democrat on that committee. They were ready to work on a bipartisan basis. Lamar had held hearings and, by all accounts, they had had tough negotiations and difficult challenges, not as much progress as you would want or as quickly as you would want. That is the way legislating works. They are in a bipartisan process, and we show up here, and that process is in danger of being blown up. This bill is a rotten piece of legislation. It is not like this thing has been vetted by experts. It is not like this thing is bipartisan. It is not like this thing will help. It would be one thing if this were absolutely necessary. Then, you could make some procedural accommodations because you just must. This is a political necessity for a party that has not yet had a legislative win. That is why they are doing this. They are in a hurry because they have until September 30 to check a box called ``We repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act.'' They have no new ideas. So what they did was to take all of the bad ideas from all of their previous bills and put them into one bill, and they are going to take one last swing at it. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am, not just on policy but on process. I was never prouder to be in the Senate than on that early morning, after a long session, when John came in and, in my view, saved the Senate and put us on a path toward regular order. Do not blow that up. We have a chance to do things in a bipartisan way and restore the dignity of this institution, but what we are fixing to do next week will take us in a very, very dark direction. I yield the floor.