Ben Sasse

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield back.

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

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise in support of S.J. Res. 26, a resolution to disapprove the Obama administration Department of Education's regulation on teacher preparation issues. This resolution is simple. It overturns the last administration's overreach into scores of States and territories, into thousands of college and university teacher preparation programs, and into millions of American classrooms. Last night, I drafted a fairly detailed statement on some of the problems deep inside this regulation, but I have decided to skip past most of that. Why? Because the problem with this regulation is actually much more basic than all of the substantive problems in the regulation. This regulation actually makes the assumption that bureaucrats in Washington, DC, are competent to micromanage teacher training programs in America. That is what this regulation ultimately does, and that is absurd. So I would like to ask three questions of folks who plan to vote to defend this regulation. First, do you really think that bureaucrats in this city know better how to run teacher training programs than people who have spent most of their lives inside actual classrooms with actual future teachers and with students? How many of you have ever run a teacher training program? Has anyone in this body ever run a teacher training program? Because I have--almost. I have spent a lot of my life around these programs. As a kid, with my dad, who was a lifelong public schoolteacher and coach, and I have been in many of these classrooms with him when he was getting master's and continuing education programs; then with my wife who is also a public high school teacher; and then I was a college president at a university that had multiple teacher training programs. I know Keith Rohwer, and I know the other deans of education that have been at Midland University and at many other colleges and universities across Nebraska. Yet, even though I have been around a lot of these programs in some detail, I wouldn't possibly think I am ready to decree all the details inside those programs from thousands and thousands of miles away. Question No. 2, has anyone actually read this regulation that folks are going to say they want to defend on this floor? Because I have been reading in it. I will not claim I have read it, but I have read in it. This is the 695 pages of the regulation itself. There is actually a lot of guidance material as well, but I didn't bring that because I didn't want to have both of my hands occupied. This is the 695 pages of the regulation we are talking about today, and it is actually really silly. If you read inside it, it is filled with enough specificity that if you tried to explain it to thoughtful, generally educated Americans, I submit to you that you would blush. There is a level of detail and a level of specificity in this that we are not possibly competent to defend at the micro level. Question No. 3, can the folks who think this is what Washington, DC, ought to be doing right now--please show me somewhere in this document, the Senate version of the Constitution--show me somewhere in this document where we are given the specific authority to micromanage local programs like this from here. Because, honestly--I mean this sincerely to my colleagues who plan to vote to defend this rule--I don't see how you can defend this document and think that this is conceivably our job from here. We are not competent to do this. Now, a couple of qualifications are in order. Am I suggesting that all teacher training programs in America work well? Heavens, no. There are some that are fairly strong, and there are actually a lot that are really, really poor and weak, but having a good intention to make them better is not the same as actually having accomplished something that will make them better. Good intentions are not enough. For us in this body to act because we have compulsory governmental powers, we would need not merely good intentions, we would also need competence and authority. We have neither of those about teacher training programs. Everyone in this body agrees that education is darn near the center of the future of our country. We all want and we need good teachers. Most of us can remember specific teachers who stood out because of her or his creative presentation, because of their unexpected humor, because of their charm and their compassion, because of their tireless drive, because of their inspired mentorship. None of us in this Chamber who has the privilege of serving our fellow country men and women regret or are unaware of the fact that the skills and the guidance and the abilities that we have are the function of the mentorship and the pedagogy of life-changing teachers early in our lives. We have benefited from and we need good, prepared teachers. If we all agree teachers are critically important to our future, and since we all agree teacher training programs are important and we also agree that some of them aren't very good, the question would be, What would we do about that? What kind of debate should we have about why much education in America isn't good enough? Does anyone in this body sincerely believe that the big, pressing problem in American education is that there aren't enough rules like this coming out of bureaucracies in Washington, DC? Because if you believe that, I would humbly suggest that you should go and meet with some of the ed school faculties back in your State and ask them if you can read them these 695 pages so you can tell them that we have the answers. Read it to them, and then please come back and tell us in this body that they agree with you, that what we really need is more 700-page regulations from Washington, DC, micromanaging things as specific and local as teacher preparation programs. Oh, and one more thing, which is actually kind of big. This regulation explicitly violates the plain language and the congressional intent of the Federal education law that was passed in this body last year. You will all recall that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed in this Chamber with overwhelming bipartisan support last year. I think it got 83 votes. The act prohibits the Secretary of Education from prescribing ``any aspect or parameter of a teacher, a principal, or other school leader evaluation system within a State or local education agency'' or ``indicators or specific measures of teacher, principal, or other school leader effectiveness or quality.'' There is nothing ambiguous about this language. In addition, the Higher Education Act is clear that the levels of performance used by a State to assess teacher training programs ``shall be determined solely by the State.'' This rule overrides State authority over literally tens of thousands of discipline-specific teacher preparation programs across the Nation, burdening States with a federally defined and expensive mandate. Under this regulation, States would be required to create elaborate new data systems that would link K-12 teacher data to data on evaluations of teachers and administrators in particular schools and then on to the data back into the teacher preparation programs. This regulation's goal would be to measure the success of teacher preparation based largely on teachers' students' subsequent test scores, and it would all need to be backlinked in the data. This is data that is not currently gathered. Rube Goldberg is smiling somewhere because this sounds like a bureaucrat's dream, a paperwork trail monitoring all the strengths and weaknesses of some vast machine spitting out layers and layers of new data over which Washington's experts could then postulate and tinker. Again, I have no doubt the bureaucrats who wrote these 700 eye-glazing pages--pages about rules, about data to be gathered that States are not currently gathering--I have no doubt the people who wrote this mean well. I also have no doubt the people who are going to defend this rule as somehow commonsensical--then why is it 700 pages--also mean well, but those good intentions don't change the fact that what they have actually done in this rule--what they have actually done--is build a much larger requirement set of paper trails, demanding further burdens on our teachers, on our principals, and on the professors who are teaching teachers, and then require all of them to report back through new or expanded bureaucracies at the State level, though the States have not chosen to gather this data, and then pass this data on to a bureaucracy a couple of blocks from here. These Rubik's Cubes of rules and data collection are not being done today, and supposedly we are going to make teacher preparation programs better by all of the specificity that comes from this rule. The fact that these regulations will likely cost States millions of dollars to implement simply adds insult to injury. Let's be honest. Education is not some vast complex machine that just needs a little bit more tinkering from Washington-level intervention before it will be at utopia. It isn't true, and this rule is not an effective way to actually help the teachers who care so much that they are investing their lives in our kids. Nebraska's parents and educators and locally elected school boards are better equipped and better positioned to tackle the most important educational challenges. They are better equipped and they are better intentioned, even than the smartest, the nicest, and the most well-meaning experts in Washington, DC. If you disagree, again, I humbly challenge you to go and try and read this rule to elementary and secondary school teachers in your State and to those who are running the programs that train them. Read the 695 pages to them and then report back to us that they actually share your view that the really big problem in American education is not enough 700- page rules from educational bureaucrats from DC. Good intentions are not enough. Federal intervention and reforms should never make problems worse, and that is what this rule would do. I urge my colleagues to reject this rule and to rededicate ourselves to the duties that really and fundamentally are ours, to the duties the Federal Government is exclusively and monopolistically empowered to carry out because it isn't this. We are not competent to displace the expertise of the district and the State level, and we should not be trying to regulate teacher training programs from Washington, DC. We are not competent to do this. Thank you for your consideration. I yield the floor.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, if I could just begin with a hearty ``amen'' to the great words of my senior Senator, it felt like old home week there for a moment, with the quote about the Nebraska sky. My kids--I have one of them with me almost every week in DC. We commute, and I bring somebody with me. Another two of them are almost surely going to be exploring along the Platte River later this afternoon, as happens almost every day. As for the comments about the 1986 campaign between Kay Orr and Helen Boosalis, it was the first time in America that two women had run for Governor of any State. I worked for Kay, the Republican Governor; it was the first campaign I had ever worked on as a 14-year-old. And then, most fundamentally, were her great words about the Homestead Act and the settling of America. I am a fifth generation Nebraskan and descended from homesteaders in the exact counties that the Senator was talking about engaged in Jefferson County. Our State on its 150th anniversary, looks back on a history built by grit from homesteaders, as Senator Fischer mentioned, to a football team at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln. Today, we celebrate all of those things that make Nebraska special: hard work, resolve, and love and care for our neighbors. Millions of men and women settled Nebraska when our State was still known as the Great American Desert. The Homestead Act made land ownership accessible to anyone--to widows, to former slaves, to immigrants. People of totally different backgrounds could legally own 160 acres of American land, and as long as they worked and lived on that land for 5 years, they would get the deed. Your care of the land is what mattered, not your background, not your status, not your family name, but your willingness to work and to contribute and to feed the world as our State still does today. Today, Nebraska is the breadbasket of the world, exporting more than $6 billion a year of agricultural products. We have cared about the land for this last century and a half, but we care even more about our neighbors. Two towns tell that story well. During World War II, North Platte launched a hospitality initiative that reached 6 million American troops as they would head for Pacific and European theaters in World War II. Folks in the town saw trains stop in North Platte every day and decided that they would cheer those servicemen who were on their way to the war to fight for our freedom. On Christmas Day in 1941, a young woman named Rae Wilson, a 26-year- old saleswoman, founded the North Platte Canteen. For 4 years, volunteers would meet each train--full of troops and passing through North Platte--with candy, with fruit, with smiles, with hugs, and with encouragement, thanking those men for how they were going to fight to defend the freedoms that made places like Nebraska and the rest of this Nation great. Some soldiers would go on to become POWs, including the first train of men that went through North Platte on Christmas Day in 1941. They had been sent off by these women of North Platte with food and with encouragement for their fight. Some never returned home. Who knows how much the kindness of those women meant to people from all of the States as they passed through Nebraska on the way to their deployments. In recent years, that same generosity has shown up in Pilger, NE. In June of 2014, twin tornadoes ripped through this small Nebraska town, killing two and leveling the entire town--destroying 78 buildings. Only in the two corners of the town were structures left standing. Some people might not consider a town of 352 people a top priority, but those folks are not from Nebraska. From all across our State, thousands of volunteers just began driving to this town where tornadoes had destroyed people's livelihoods and their homes, bringing meals and sorting through rubble with people who had been strangers until the volunteers arrived and became family. Young and old, Nebraskans from all across our State pitched in 2\1/2\ summers ago. One retired teacher would drive 180 miles every day round trip to serve in this community, helping people dig out of the rubble. One little girl sent $70 in from her lemonade stand. Pilger became the town known as the town too tough to die. When we are not coming together to help our neighbors, we are usually coming together to celebrate Husker football. Our team represents something much bigger than just a typical collegiate sports team. It is about toughness, and it is about community. The Bugeaters, as the Nebraska Cornhuskers were first known in the 1890s, started with a volunteer coach and now boast many Heisman Trophy winners, five national titles, and a sellout streak that dates to October of 1962. For those of you who think there are football teams in your States-- and I say this with all due respect to the Presiding Officer, who comes from a State that has passable football--and for those of you who think you are from States where football is taken seriously, there has not been a seat available to a game in Nebraska since October of 1962. Nebraska has had, by far, the biggest winning streak--the winningest team--over the course of the last half century in American college football. Nebraskans know and love this team, not just because of the prowess on the field but because Nebraska football is the undisputed champion of Academic All-Americans in the country, having a 43-award lead over the second closest team in the history of Academic All-American Awards and American life. That is Penn State, not North Carolina, that is in second place, I say to the Presiding Officer. We live, we breathe, and we love our football team. After each Husker win, church attendance goes up, and crime goes down. Literally, for generations, half of the boys in Nebraska grew up wanting to play quarterback for Tom Osborne in the option offense. Why only half, you ask? It is because the other half wanted to play Blackshirts defensive football to smack the snot out of whoever was going to line up against the Huskers on a given Saturday. Success on the field is great, but the real reason Nebraskans are so proud of this team is that the Cornhuskers embody the hard work, resolve, teamwork, passion, and sportsmanship of the Nebraska people. While these are the trademarks and hallmarks of our football, they are really the hallmarks of our community associations--of Nebraska's pioneers, of our farmers, our ranchers, our teachers, our small business men and women, our churches, and our Rotary clubs. Do you know what? We could not be any more proud of that heritage. On this 150th anniversary, I join my senior Senator in saying, please, come visit, and ``Go Big Red.'' I yield the floor.

Mr. SASSE

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

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I say thank you to my colleague for yielding to me a little bit out of line. I think one thing we don't do nearly a good enough job at around here--and not just in Washington, DC, but in schools across America--is reflect on the basic civics we have inherited and the constitutional structure of checks and balances and why we have a limited government. I think Judge Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court and, frankly, more narrowly, the media cycles of today, give us a special opportunity to pause and to do a little bit of civics again. Judge Gorsuch is tough, smart, fairminded, independent, and he is a person who has taken an oath of office to a Constitution of limits. That is exactly the sort of thing we should be affirming and celebrating around here. I think that everyone on both sides of the aisle in this body should be celebrating Judge Gorsuch and what he believes about a constitutional system that has limits. And defending your own branch--the Founders envisioned a world where these three branches would be jealous of their own prerogatives--defending your own branch is not to attack another branch. As I read the media reports this morning of who said what to whom and who shouted at whom and who argued about what, what if we just paused and reflected again on what it means to believe in a constitution that has three separate but equal branches that are supposed to check and balance one another? After seeing some media reports this morning, I looked and I happened to have on my desk the breast-pocket card that was in my suit 2 days ago when I met with the judge, and I asked him about the comments coming from the White House criticizing a so-called judge. I wish to share with this body some of the comments the judge made to me when I asked him what he thought about the criticism of the so-called judge, because we don't have so-called judges, we don't have so-called Presidents, and we don't have so-called Senators; we have people from three branches who have taken an oath to a constitution. So here is some of what the judge told me when I asked him what he thought about those comments. He got a little bit emotional, and he said that any attack or any criticism of his brothers and sisters of the robe is an attack or a criticism on everybody wearing the robe as a judge. I think that is something this body should be pretty excited to hear someone who has been nominated to the High Court say. He said that it is incredibly disheartening to hear things that might undermine the credibility and the independence of the judiciary. He said that it is completely legitimate for all of us to vigorously debate individual opinions. We should argue about opinions. We can argue as citizens about cases. We can argue in this legislative branch or the executive branch can argue about the merits of particular opinions and yet we want to affirm the three branches. So he said it is disheartening for us to do anything that would undermine that. He then pointed me back to his comments at the White House the night he was nominated, and so I went back and looked at his comments, and the very first people he thanked when he had been nominated to the Court were--he said: I want to celebrate the judges of America who are the ``unsung heroes of the rule of law'' in this country. He called the judges ``unsung heroes of the rule of law.'' He said: An independent judiciary has got to be tough. It is not my job as a nominee to the Court and it is not the job of any other judge to comment on particular cases, and it is not the job of judges to play politics or to hold press conferences talking about politics, but we can recognize that historically the other two branches are often wary of times when the Court asserts its prerogatives. He said: For instance, Thomas Jefferson didn't like Marbury v. Madison, and it was completely legitimate for President Jefferson to criticize and argue about the merits of the Marbury v. Madison decision even as we do the important civics work of reaffirming these three separate but equal branches. Frankly, I think that everybody in this body ought to be celebrating the nomination of a guy who is out there affirming three separate but equal branches and the independence of the judiciary. We should want to see the executive branch checked, and, frankly, if we really love America, as I know people in this body do, we should want to see our own powers limited because it is fundamentally American to be skeptical of the consolidation of power. Our Founders divided power and checked and balanced each of the other branches because they were skeptical of what people in power might ultimately do. Sadly, there are some on the other side of the aisle today--and I think many are going to give him a fair shake, but there are some on the other side of the aisle who decided they want to reflexively attack Judge Gorsuch. So it is like the Keystone Kops trying to run around and figure out which story you want to label him with. I hear some people saying: Well, Gorsuch was nominated by this President and a bunch of people don't like this President; therefore, he couldn't possibly be independent, he would be a puppet. There are other people saying in these private meetings allegedly Gorsuch has rented a plane and taken out a skywriting script and he is out there saying ``I hate Donald Trump. I hate Donald Trump.'' That is nonsense. Neither of those things is true. He is not a puppet, and he is not out there attacking the President of the United States. He is meeting with us, trying to explain his view of an independent judiciary. He is trying to affirm the same constitutional oath of office that all of us in this body have taken. I think it is high-time in this body that we get beyond reflexive partisanship of ``Republicans are for Republicans if they have the same label'' and ``Democrats are against Republicans'' and vice versa. Our job fundamentally in this body is an oath that we have taken to three separate but equal branches. I think what we are hearing in these private meetings with Judge Gorsuch and what I am sure he is going to say when he speaks for himself publicly before the Judiciary Committee--what we are hearing from him is a guy who believes in three separate but equal branches and is skeptical of the consolidation of power because he understands why America has limited government. That is the kind of person we should be celebrating having been nominated to the Court.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Madam President, I would like to thank the Senator from Washington State and the Senator from Michigan for allowing me to sneak in here quickly. I thank the Senator from Utah for his comments.

Mr. SASSE. I yield to the chairman of the committee.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, in just a few minutes we are going to vote on a bill that probably will not get a lot of attention in Washington. No cable news shows are going to give it breaking alerts, headlines. Roundtables of pundits will not be gathering to scream about it, and partisans are not going to score the bill. It is a straightforward bill with a straightforward purpose--to ensure that the Government Accountability Office can tap into the data at the Department of Health and Human Services. But in this case, looks can be deceiving. The GAO Oversight and Access Act of 2017, which I introduced together with Senator Tester 1 year ago, represents a significant victory for taxpayers. Its impact won't be felt tomorrow in Washington, but over many years to come, taxpayers from Nebraska and across the country will see how passing this legislation played a role in forcing Congress to address some of the biggest problems that our government faces. Let's step back for a moment and understand why. What is the problem? The Federal Government has a very serious budget problem. This isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention. It is not even something about which Democrats and Republicans disagree. We may not often agree on solutions, but we can and should agree to clearly identify the problems that the government and, therefore, our people face. Some of the problems are very big--so big, in fact, that it is hard to even wrap our minds around how large the numbers are, like the fact that last year this government spent $587 billion more than all it collected in taxes. Consider how big $587 billion is. National defense is the first and fundamental reason that the Federal Government exists. Last year we spent $595 billion on all of our national security or in the entire defense budget. When Ronald Reagan was sworn into office, the entire Federal budget was $590 billion. Now that is what we are borrowing annually. Or look at it this way. Historically, the amount we borrowed last year was bigger than every Federal budget for the first 160 years of the Nation--combined. That is, if you added up every dollar that the government spent from 1789 through 1950, it would still be less than the $587 billion that we overspent and therefore borrowed just last year. The former number got us through the Civil War, two world wars, and the Great Depression. Some of our problems are actually relatively small, but they ultimately add up to something big. Just look at some of the stuff Senator Flake dug up in this year's ``Wastebook'' report or what Senator Lankford put in his report this year entitled ``Federal Fumbles.'' The Commerce Department gave $1.7 million to the National Comedy Museum to resurrect dead comedians using holograms. Also, $70,000 of our taxpayers' money went to a Minnesota theater to put together an opera of Steven King's ``The Shining.'' And $17,000 was spent for people to wear fat suits to learn sensitivity to those with weight problems. These things are tiny individually, but when you put them together, they add up to a lot of our budget. Expert after expert testifies before our committees that this is unsustainable. We all know this cannot go on forever. At some point, the government's borrowing and overspending ways will catch up with us and we will have a Greek-style debt crisis. Congress needs to begin acting now to fix the government's structural problems--chiefly in the entitlement programs, for those are the spending categories whose trajectories dwarf all others. All of this gets to the central problem that the bill we are considering this afternoon was designed to solve--namely, that Congress is flying blind when it comes to overseeing huge portions of our budget, and therefore we don't have the information we need to fix these problems. The portion in particular I have in mind is the means-tested entitlement programs and the tax credits program. These include Medicaid; the earned-income tax credit, or EITC; the Supplemental Security Income--or disability--Program; food stamps; and Pell grants. All of these were designed to assist our low-income friends and neighbors. All of them together absorb a significant part of today's Federal budget. As of right now, $1 in every $6 we spend is on only 10 means-tested programs and tax credits like the ones just listed, according to the CBO, but because of an anomaly in the law, Congress has been blocked from getting the best information that is available about how these programs are actually working or not working. What do I mean by that? For years, the Government Accountability Office--the GAO, the agency that is supposed to be the taxpayers' watchdog because it is supposed to hunt down waste and expose abuses--has been trying to gain access to a database at the Department of Health and Human Services called the National Directory of New Hires. The new hires database was created in 1996 to help enforce child support payments, and in order to do that, it collected some basic information--basically, who has a job, where they work, whom they work for, and how much they make. The GAO's interest in this data should be pretty obvious. If it could compare the information in the database to the information in the means-tested programs, it could easily spot fraud, waste, and mismanagement. For instance, if a program's rules say that to qualify for benefits, a person needs to earn less than a certain amount of income annually, GAO would be able to use the database to see if the program is actually operating as designed and then issue reports to Congress. This is exactly the kind of thing that the GAO does across all other Federal programs and that Congress routinely uses the GAO for--to take their recommendations to figure out how we should reform programs that are failing. Only in this case, HHS has blocked the GAO from accessing the database. Again, these are the biggest categories of Federal spending. The place the GAO has not been able to do its work is in the places where we are spending the most money. It is classic Washington--bureaucracy blocking oversight for taxpayers. It is not always malicious, but this is definitely wrong. HHS has argued that when Congress created the new hires database, it didn't expressly give the GAO permission to look at this data, and so its hands are tied. GAO countered that Congress had previously given blanket permission to the GAO to access all Federal records many years prior. Many in Congress believed that the law was clear and that GAO is entitled to this entitlement data under the law, but HHS has refused to budge, and the argument stalemated. The result has been the status quo, with GAO repeatedly requesting data and HHS steadfastly refusing to grant them access to the data, which means they have refused to grant us access to the data. The GAO Access and Oversight Act of 2017 was introduced to settle this legal dispute between GAO and HHS once and for all in GAO's favor or, better, in the taxpayers' favor. In short, today's bill ensures that the GAO will have full access to the data in the national directory. By doing so, it will ensure for the first time that GAO has a key tool it needs to oversee some of the government's largest spending categories. This bill does two additional things as well. No. 1, it clarifies that GAO does have standing in court to fight for Federal records the next time a Federal agency tries to deny the GAO--and therefore us-- access to that data; and No. 2, it requires the GAO to let all relevant congressional committees know when it issues reports in their jurisdiction. We are now on the doorstep of hopefully passing this legislation today, which has rightly gotten a lot of support in Congress. When it passes the Senate tonight, it will head straight to the President's desk for figure. Last year, it passed the House by a vote of 403 to 0, and the only reason it failed to pass the Senate was because of an anonymous hold. In response, the House of Representatives took up this legislation as one of its first pieces of business and sent it over to the Senate 2 weeks ago, on January 4, moving just as quickly. It is a pleasure that the Presiding Officer today happens to be the chairman of the relevant committee that moved so quickly. Chairman Johnson and his new ranking member, Claire McCaskill, immediately took up this legislation and moved it through the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, for both the chairman--the Presiding Officer today--and Senator McCaskill, the champions of oversight of the GAO. I thank the Presiding Officer, the chairman of the committee, for his leadership. I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill tonight. It is appropriate that one of the first bills of this new Congress will be one to strengthen the authority of the GAO because by strengthening the powers of the GAO, what we are really doing is strengthening the Congress. There has been lots of talk around here on both sides of the aisle about the needs to reclaim Congress's article I power. Across the 240 years of this Nation--or 226 years since the Constitution; 227 as I do the math here in my head--the Congress is at a fairly weak point in history, and we should be strengthening the article I branch of the Constitution. One obvious important way to strengthen the powers of the Congress and therefore the accountability that we all have to the American people is by doing better oversight. Conducting hard-hitting but fair oversight of the executive branch agencies is how we protect the separation of powers, and it is how we guard the taxpayers' funds, how we guard the wallet of the people. It is the Congress's job to write the laws and to control the purse strings, and it is the President's job to faithfully execute the laws. Good oversight gives the Congress the information we need to do our job and to ensure that the executive agencies are doing theirs. There is no better friend of the Congress in this regard than the Government Accountability Office. GAO is not simply another agency of a big government; the GAO is a part of the legislative branch, and it works hard to give Congress world-class insights into the operations of the other two branches. GAO is thorough, independent, and respected for its judgments by people of either party and no party at all. I am deeply proud to see that Senator Tester has joined us on the floor, for he and I were the original sponsors of this bill. It is a pleasure that tonight we will be giving the GAO the tools it needs for oversight and therefore for our oversight. It would only be natural, at the start of a new administration and a change of party in the executive branch, for Democrats to become more interested in oversight and Republicans to become less so. May that not be the case. I am hopeful that oversight will remain a top priority for Members on both sides of the aisle. None of us came here to be partisan cheerleaders. We came here to exercise the functions of this office on behalf of the people in our States and across this Nation. It is therefore encouraging tonight, even as a new administration is about to begin in 3 days, that Congress will be asserting its constitutional right to oversight with a big bipartisan vote. I want to thank my partner on the bill, Jon Tester of Montana, who will speak next. When we first heard about this issue together during briefings and committee hearings, we immediately realized that something was wrong, that the GAO had been handcuffed and not able to access this data, and we committed to each other to make sure something was done about it. I would also like to name the other original cosponsors of this bill, including Ron Johnson, Claire McCaskill, Tom Carper, Mike Enzi, Brian Schatz, Mike Lee, Tammy Baldwin, David Perdue, Joni Ernst, Jim Risch, Steve Daines, Tammy Duckworth, John McCain, Thom Tillis, Todd Young, Rob Portman, and James Lankford. Finally, I wish to thank our House partners, including Representative Buddy Carter, Chairman Jason Chaffetz, and Ranking Member Elijah Cummings. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all remaining debate time on H.R. 72 be yielded back.

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

Mr. SASSE

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

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I had not intended to speak today. I was presiding in the chair, but I simply want to take one minute to associate myself with the comments of the Senator from Virginia, Mr. Kaine, who just spoke about our war against ISIS. I think two points he said are worth underscoring for us in this body: No. 1, we are obviously at war with ISIS. We should acknowledge that we are at war with ISIS. No. 2, why is it important that we do this? It is important for the troops who are at war for us to acknowledge the reality of the fact that we are at war. It is important for their families. It is important for debate and deliberation in this body and in the country more broadly. And, frankly, it is important for the future of this body to honor a constitutional intent that distinguishes between Article I, the legislature, and Article II, the Executive. In the American system, in Madison and the other Founders' genius, they recognized that many foreign wars have not made sense in human history because Executives get wrapped up in war without broader deliberation about the consequences of their actions. To be clear, we should absolutely be at war with ISIS, and we are at war with ISIS. But in the American constitutional system, it is the obligation of the 535 of us who serve in the Congress--and particularly the 100 who serve in the Senate--to represent our people and to have this debate before the people about the fact that we are at war with ISIS. Then, the Commander in Chief, as Chief Executive, should prosecute that war in a way that the American people know has the sanction and the validation of both branches and of all the people across 50 States. This is not the action of one President acting unilaterally. It is a bad precedent to set for us to continue to drift and to remain at war now 15 years post the authorization that was against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack, now using that old authorization to conduct a war, now on a second continent--now in Africa as well--but without any current discussion or authorization. The use of military force is something that should be deliberated about in this body. I again want to associate myself with the comments of the Senator from Virginia that, given that we are at war with ISIS, we should formally be declaring war against ISIS.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise today to address the recently released new report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights entitled ``Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Nondiscrimination Principles with Civil Liberties.'' The Commission on Civil Rights has a glorious and profound history in our Nation. Founded in 1957, the Commission initially had the grand cause of ending the horror and the tragedy of Jim Crow laws in our Nation. Sadly, however, the Commission's focus has recently strayed, and its new report poses profound threats to the historic American understanding of our First Amendment. In the Commission's just released report, the majority reveals a disturbingly low view of our first freedoms. It actually puts the term ``religious liberty'' in scare quotes, and it says that religious liberty must now be subservient to other values. Here is a snapshot of the majority's position from this new report, in their own words: Progress toward social justice depends upon the enactment of, and vigorous enforcement of, status-based nondiscrimination laws. Limited claims for religious liberty are allowed only when religious liberty comes into direct conflict with nondiscrimination precepts. The central finding which the Commission made in this regard is: Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights. Additionally, the Commission's Chair, Martin Castro noted: The phrases ``religious liberty'' and ``religious freedom'' will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance. But are the phrases ``religious liberty'' and ``religious freedom'' simply hypocritical code words? Are they shields for phobias, intolerances, and power struggles? Of course, they are not. Religious liberty is far more beautiful, far more profound, and far more human than that. Our national identity is actually based on this very premise. The American founding was unbelievably bold. Our Founders were making the somewhat arrogant claim, almost, that almost everyone in the history of the world had actually been wrong about the nature of government and about the nature of human rights. Our country's Founders believed that God created people with dignity and that we have our rights via nature. Government is our shared project to secure those rights. Government does not come first. Government is not the author or the source of our rights, and this conviction matters for today's conversations. In fact, this conviction is our Constitution. No King, no Congress, no Senate, no Commission gives our people their rights, for government is not the author or source of rights. Government is a tool to secure our rights. We have rights because we are people, created with dignity. Government is that shared project to secure those rights that we have because we are people created with dignity. So we the people are the ones who actually give the government limited authorities. It is not the government that is condescending to grant us some rights. Gail Heriot, who is a member of the Commission, offered a compelling statement and a healthy rebuttal to the majority's very low view of religious freedom. Thankfully, Ms. Heriot indicated her opposition to the runaway chairman's bizarre dismissal of religious freedom. She considered asking him to withdraw it, but then she decided against it, and here is her reason why. She decided: It might be better for Christians, people of faith generally, and advocates of limited government to know and understand where they stand with him-- Where they stand with this chairman. Ms. Heriot notes--and I am going to quote her here at length: The conflicts that can arise between religious conscience and the secular law are many and varied. Some of the nation's best legal minds have written on how the federal and state governments should resolve those conflicts. But no one has ever come up with a systematic framework for doing so--at least not one that all Americans agree on--and perhaps no one ever will. Instead, we have been left to resolve these issues that arise on a more case-by-case basis. While she does not aim to create that framework in her remarks, she continues by saying: The bigger and more complex government becomes, the more conflicts between religious conscience and the duty to comply with law we can expect. Back when the Federal Government didn't heavily subsidize both public and private higher education, when it didn't heavily regulate employment relationships, when it didn't have the leading role in financing and delivering healthcare, we didn't need to worry nearly so much about the ways in which conflicts with religious conscience and the law arise. Nobody thought about whether the Sisters of Charity should be given a religious exemption from the ObamaCare contraceptive mandate, because there was no Obamacare contraceptive mandate. The Roman Catholic Church didn't need the so-called Ministerial Exemption to Title VII in order to limit ordinations to men (and to Roman Catholics), because there was no Title VII. What she is talking about here is about the ways that expanding government tends to crowd out civil society and mediating institutions. She is talking about the ways that power drives out persuasion. She is talking about the ways that law crowds out neighborliness. She continues: The second [ . . . ] comment I will make is this: While the targeted religious accommodations approach may sometimes be a good idea, it is not always the best strategy for people of faith. Targeted religious accommodations make it possible for ever-expanding government bureaucracies to divide and to conquer. They remove the faith-based objections to their expansive ambitions, thus allowing them to ignore objections that are not based on faith. The bureaucratic juggernaut rolls on. People of faith should not allow themselves to become just another special interest group that needs to be appeased before the next government expansion is allowed to proceed. Here, she is talking people of faith. They have an interest in ensuring the health of the many institutions of our civil society that act as counterweights to the state--including not just the Church itself, but also the family, the free press, small business and others. They have an interest in ordered liberty in all its manifestations. A nation in which religious liberty is the only protected freedom is a nation that soon will be without religious liberty as well. Are people of faith simply another special interest group that should be appeased? I suggest--along with Ms. Heriot and, frankly, far more importantly, with all of the Founders of this Nation--they are not. People of faith and people of no faith at all, people of conscience, are simply exercising their humanity, and they do not need the government's permission to do so. The Commission's report is titled ``Peaceful Coexistence.'' Who wants to disagree with a title like that? But this profession of peaceful coexistence must never quietly euthanize religious liberty just because Washington lawyers and bureaucrats find it convenient and orderly to do so. It must never be used to chip away at our most fundamental freedom, for the First Amendment is a cluster of freedoms: freedom of religion, the press, assembly, and speech. They all must go together. It must never undermine the essence of what it means to be human. It must never erode the American creed, which should be uniting us. We can and we should disagree peaceably. We should argue and debate and seek to persuade. We should jealously together be seeking to defend every right of conscience and self-expression. In closing, I ask my colleagues from both parties--for this should not be a partisan issue, as the First Amendment is not the domain of any political party--to consider the dangerous implications of this new report. To my progressive friends, I invite you to become liberals again in your understanding of religious liberty and its merits. To my conservative friends, let's cheerfully celebrate all Americans' freedoms. Let's work to kindly dismantle the pernicious myth that somehow your freedoms are merely a cover for fear or hate or some other phobia. These freedoms are too important to relinquish. They are the essence of what we share together as Americans. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SASSE

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

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for as much time as I may consume.

Mr. SASSE. Madam President, yesterday, James Comey, the FBI Director, announced that his agency will not recommend that the Department of Justice bring Federal criminal charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding her use of a set of off-the-books, undisclosed, unsecured email servers, not only for her own personal correspondence but also for her official duties, including highly sensitive material related to foreign intelligence and related to terrorist targeting. Director Comey's rationale for systematically and devastatingly recounting Secretary Clinton's many violations of the law and yet recommending against a prosecution is being hotly debated both outside and inside the FBI, as it should be. I rise in this body today, as a matter of oversight, to speak to a slightly different matter than the prosecutorial discretion and decision. The debate about why the crimes are not being prosecuted in this case should not blind us to a broader, debasing problem in our civic life today. Simply put, lying matters. Public trust matters. Integrity matters. And woe to us as a nation if we decide to pretend this isn't so. This issue is not about political points or about Presidential politics. It is about whether the people can trust their representatives, those of us who are supposed to be serving them in government for a limited time. I am going to read today a series of direct quotes from Secretary Clinton regarding this investigation, and then I will also read a series of direct quotes from Director Comey's statement yesterday, as well as from the State Department's official inspector general report on this issue. I will not provide a running commentary. I will, instead, simply recount the words and the assertions of Secretary Clinton, and I will hold them up to the light of what the FBI and the State Department investigations have found. Sadly, this will be damning enough. When the story broke about the Secretary's use of a personal email account and set of undisclosed servers, she called a press conference at the United Nations on March 10 last year, and she emphatically and without qualification declared this: I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. Period, full stop. Yesterday, Director Comey said: That is not true. 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information. Later, Secretary Clinton adjusted her defense to say: ``I did not send nor receive information that was marked classified at the time that it was sent or received.'' Yesterday, Director Comey directly addressed and directly dismissed this defense, noting that while only a small number of the emails containing classified information bore the markings indicating the presence of classified information, ``even if information is not marked `classified' in an e-mail, participants who know--or should know--that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.'' Throughout this controversy, Secretary Clinton has maintained: ``I [have] fully complied with every rule I was governed by.'' She said: I have fully complied with every rule I was governed by. The inspector general of her own State Department has concluded exactly the opposite. Sending emails from a personal account to other employees at their Department Accounts is not an appropriate method of preserving any such emails that would constitute a Federal record. Therefore, Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the office of the Secretary. At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act. Regarding those subsequently surrendered emails, Mrs. Clinton has said: After I left office, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work-related emails from our personal accounts. I responded right away and provided all my emails that could have possibly been work-related. Yesterday, Director Comey explicitly rejected this claim, noting not only that several thousand emails were missing but, also, that some of the emails she withheld were in fact classified. Director Comey said: The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e- mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were [initially] returned by Secretary Clinton to [the] State [Department] in 2014. . . . With respect to the thousands of emails we found that were not among those produced to [the] State [Department], agencies have concluded that three of those were [also] classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level. Lest we be confused, here is Director Comey's summary of the situation: Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these [classified] matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. We could go on. There is more about the foreign adversaries--on which all of us in this body get our classified briefs--that we know were and are today trying to hack sensitive U.S. Government classified material. What I have presented here is not an opinion. This is not political talking point or spin. All we have done here is to recount some of the specific defenses, claims, and excuses Secretary Clinton has offered regarding her use of a set of unsecured, undisclosed off-the-books email servers and then contrasted those claims with how both the FBI's and the State Department's inspectors general have proved those claims to be clearly and knowingly false. If any of Secretary Clinton's defenders in this body would like to come to the floor to dispute any of the FBI's assertions, I would welcome that conversation. These are serious matters, and they deserve our serious attention. As elected officials, we have been entrusted for a time with the security of the Nation and with the trust of the people. Quite apart from the specific questions and debates about whether Secretary Clinton is going to be convicted for her crimes, we must grapple with the reality that the public trust, the rule of law, and the security of our Nation have been badly injured by her actions. In the coming months, the next time that a career military or intelligence officer leaks an important secret that is a legally defined classified matter that relates to the security of our Nation and the security of our Nation's spies, who are putting their lives at risk today to defend our freedoms, one of two things is going to happen: Either that individual will not be held accountable because yesterday the decision was made to set a new, lower standard about our Nation's security secrets, and we will therefore become weaker, or, in the alternative, the decision will be made to hold that person accountable, either by prosecution or by firing. In that moment, that individual and his or her peers and his or her family will rightly ask this question: Why is the standard different for me than for the politically powerful? Why is the standard different for me, a career intelligence officer or a career soldier, than for the former Secretary of State? This question is about the rise of a two-tiered system of justice, one for the common man and one for the ruling political elites. If we in this body allow such a two-tiered system to solidify, we will fail in our duties, both to safeguard the Nation and for the people to believe in representative government and in equality before the law. This stuff matters. Lying matters. The dumbing down and the debasing of expectations about public trust matter. Honor matters, and woe to us as a nation if we decide to forget this obvious truth of republican government.

Mr. SASSE

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

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I sprinted to the floor when I saw the Senator from Delaware speaking. I have high regard for the Senator from Delaware. I think he is a man of integrity who has served his country well, both in the Navy and in this body. I have traveled with the man. We have explored the Texas-Mexico border before. I think very highly of him. I wanted to come to the floor and ask, in light of the comments he just made about Secretary Clinton, if he has any view about what should happen the next time, when a career intelligence or military officer leaks classified information. I am curious as to what should happen next. And I welcome a conversation with any of the defenders of the Secretary of State who want to come to the floor and engage in this issue. As I see it, one of two things happens the next time a classified document is leaked in our intelligence community. Either we are going to not prosecute or not pursue the individual who leaks a document that compromises national security and compromises potentially the life of one of the spies who is out there serving in defense of freedom--and we are potentially not going to pursue or prosecute that individual because yesterday a decision was made inside the executive branch of the United States Government to lower the standards that govern how we protect classified information in this country. That will be a sad day because it will mean we are a weaker nation because we decided to lower those standards, not in this body, not by debate, not by passing a law, but a decision will have been made to lower the standards by which the U.S. national security secrets are protected. Or conversely, a decision will have been made to prosecute and pursue that individual for having leaked secrets, at which point that individual, his or her spouse and their family and his or her peers are going to ask the question, which is, Why is there a different standard for me, the career military officer or the career intelligence officer, than there is for the politically connected in this country? As I see it, we are in danger of doing one of two things: We are either going to make the United States less secure by lowering the standards that are written in statute about how we govern classified information in this country, or we are going to create a two-tier system of justice by which the powerful and the politically connected are held to a different bar than the people who serve us in the military and the intelligence community. Again, I have great respect for the senior Senator from Delaware, but I listened to his comments. I was in a different meeting, and I saw that he was speaking. I unmuted my TV and listened to his comments, and I would welcome him to come back to the floor and engage me and explain which way he thinks we should go next because one of those two things is going to happen the next time a classified document is leaked. Either we are going to not pursue that person and we are going to have lowered the standards for protecting our Nation's secrets, or we are going to pursue that person, which means they will be held to a different standard, a higher standard, than the Secretary of State. I don't understand that. I don't understand why anybody in this body would think either of those two outcomes is a good thing. We do many, many things around here. A small subset of them are really important. Lots of them aren't very important. This is a critically important matter. This body and this Congress exist for the purpose of fulfilling our article I obligations under the Constitution. The American system of government is about limited government because we know, as Madison said, that we need government in the world because men aren't angels, and we need divided government; we need checks and balances in our government. We need three branches of government because those of us who govern are not angels. We distinguish in our Constitution between a legislative, executive, and a judicial branch, and this body--the legislative branch--is supposed to be the body that passes the laws because the people are supposed to be in charge, and they can hire and fire those of us who serve here. Laws should be made in this body, not in the executive branch. The executive branch's obligations are to faithfully execute the laws that are passed in this body. If we are going to change the standards by which our Nation's secrets are protected, by which classified information is governed, we should do that in a deliberative process here. We should pass a law in the House and in the Senate so that if the voters--if the 320 million Americans, the ``we the people'' who are supposed to be in charge, disagree about the decisions that are made in this body, they are supposed to be able to fire us. The people of America don't have any way to fire somebody inside an executive branch agency. Deliberation about the laws and the standards that govern our national security should be done here, and the laws should be made here. For those who want to defend Secretary Clinton, I am very curious if they would explain to us which way they want it to go the next time a classified secret is leaked because either we are going to have standards or we are not going to have standards. If we are not going to have standards, that is going to make our Nation weaker. If we are going to have standards, they should apply equally to everyone because we believe in equality under the law in this country. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on July 6, 2016, at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on July 6, 2016, at 2 p.m., to conduct a hearing entitled, ``ISIS Online: Countering Terrorist Radicalization and Recruitment on the Internet and Social Media.''

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise to express my concern about troubling new developments in Russia. Russia's Parliament, the Federal Assembly, has just approved so-called antiterrorism legislation that actually criminalizes free speech and that attacks religious liberty. If President Putin signs this legislation into law in the coming weeks, it will be illegal for Christians to share their faith outside of the church building, as if faith is constrained by the four walls of a structure and belief by a single day of the week on the calendar. In some ways, sadly, this isn't a surprise. There is a lot that is wrong with Russia. We are witnessing a rising authoritarianism in a declining State--a rising authoritarianism in a declining State. Moscow routinely tramples on the rights of the press, tramples on assembly, speech, on dissent, and on national sovereignty. Ask the families of murdered journalists. Ask the student groups facing intimidation. Ask the political dissidents who fear imprisonment. Ask the Ukrainian people who fear being fully overrun. Why is this happening? Because Putin and his cronies think they can make Russia great again by hoarding wealth, by abusing power, and by crushing any and all dissent and opposition. They strike the pose of a strong man, but this is not real strength. True strength is rooted in virtue: selflessness and sacrifice on behalf of the weak and the oppressed. Mr. Putin is driven by cheap imitation and intimidation, more akin to bullying; vice masquerading as virtue. We know Russia's offenses are many and egregious. At the same time, Americans well understand it is not our national calling, nor is it within our power, to attempt to right every wrong in a broken world, but we should be clear about what is happening, as well as the fact that there is no easy fix. It is naive to hope Russia can be reformed with a reset button or with promises of future flexibility. Instead, we need to begin telling the truth about an increasingly aggressive actor on the global stage. Again, let me be explicit. The United States does not have a solemn obligation to try to make the entire world free, but we absolutely do have an obligation to speak on behalf of those who are made speechless in the dark corners of this globe. This Russian law would be an affront to free people everywhere, at home and abroad, who believe the rights of conscience--the rights of free speech and the freedom of religion and the freedom of assembly-- are pre-political. These freedoms do not ebb and flow with history. These freedoms do not rise and fall with the political fortunes of a despot. Governments do not give us these rights and governments cannot take these rights away. These rights of free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly belong to every man, woman, and child because all of us are image-bearers of our Creator. I am speaking tonight because this new Russian legislation is emblematic of a growing destructive nationalism and of a thirst for power that cannot be ignored. Putin has a desire to squeeze down on civil society, on other venues for discussion and debate, and on other institutions outside of politics where human dignity can and should be expressed. He does this and he desires this not because he is strong but because he is weak. We in this body, without regard to political party and representing all 50 States, must be sober and clear-eyed about Russia. We must become more sober and clearer-eyed about its intimidations and about its hostilities and about its dangerous trajectory. We have a duty to be telling the truth early about where this may be headed. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nominations en bloc: Calendar Nos. 473, 596, 601, 602, 603, 651, with no other executive business in order.

Mr. SASSE

Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on June 29, 2016, at 10 a.m., in room SR-253 of the Russell Senate Office Building.