Thom Tillis

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, just to cool down the temperature, why don't we actually get back to what we tried to accomplish just a couple of days ago--a 4-week CR that funded our military, that funded our veterans, that funded CHIP for 6 years--and then get on to all the other things that we want to do. I, for one, have a lot of passion for coming up with a solution for the DACA population. It is not going to happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, but I believe it is going to happen. What I prefer to do is actually to get on to funding the government and then to get on to all of these other matters that are critically important to all of us.

Mr. TILLIS. I do.

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I am glad to hear that the Senator from Ohio and the Senator from Connecticut all want to get the government funded. I also think Wright-Patterson is a great military installation. I actually come from a State that is the home of the Global Response Force, the 82nd Airborne, down in Fort Bragg. When the President calls and they want to send somebody into harm's way, that is where they call first. It is also the home of 45 percent of all marines that serve in the Marine Corps. I worry a lot about the message we are sending our men and women in uniform when we can't get our act together here. Everybody in suits, everybody in the Senate, everybody here tonight is playing games with funding our government. My colleague just asked for a 1-day CR. That didn't happen. Now you are asking for a 3-day CR. How about this? Why don't we stay here until we get this done? Why don't we realize that, look, the daylight is not going to come until about 8 or 9 hours. We can get this done before 9 o'clock tomorrow morning. Instead of asking for these half measures--a 1-day CR, a 3-day CR--why don't we get in a room tonight and solve our problems? Why are we actually kicking the can down the road a little bit--1 day, 3 days? We were trying to get 1 month done. For that reason, Mr. President, I object.

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I ask that the Chair read rule XIX.

Mr. TILLIS. I yield.

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, like the Senator from Connecticut, I don't understand why we are here this weekend myself. I don't understand why a continuing resolution--all the provisions in it have the broad support of both sides of the aisle--has actually gotten us to a point where we are putting so many people in jeopardy of not getting the critical services they need. I don't understand that at all. I think a simple request of extending the government for 4 weeks and allowing the CHIP program to be authorized for 6 years makes a lot of sense while we work through the issues we have on the DACA challenge. It is something that I personally invested in. It is something that I am really working very hard to come up with a solution to. But instead of spending time on providing a solution to that problem, we are playing these sorts of games, and now we are talking about funding the government for 24 hours. That is not the way to actually conduct the business of the U.S. Senate. For that reason, I object.

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I reserve the right to object.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to enter into a colloquy with the Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I am pleased to see Senator Cornyn here. He has done an extraordinary job. As a matter of fact, it was Senator Cornyn who hosted the trip that I made down to the border that gave me an incredibly important perspective on the case for border security. I appreciate his leadership on this issue. I want to leave a final comment for the DACA population. Some people say: What is the crisis? We have until March 5. I understand that every single day you wake up, that day seems like today. I know we need to move more quickly. Quite honestly, we could have gotten this done a couple of months ago if people had engaged, recognized their differences, and accepted a compromise. We are doing everything we can to get done much sooner than March 5 because we understand that they are our teachers, our EMTs. There are 900 serving in the military. They are hard-working people. They are kids in school. There are hundreds of thousands of good people--in a proposal that we put together, over a million--that we want to welcome into this Nation because they are great citizens, they love this country, they are productive citizens, and I want them to know that we know that. I want them to know that there are dozens of Republicans prepared to vote on a compromise bill that is balanced, that brings border security and provides certainty to the DACA population. We are going to do everything we can every day that we are here to make sure that we deliver on that promise. Madam President, thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, we are here to talk a little bit about immigration reform and maybe a little bit about the looming government shutdown. I want to start with the government shutdown because it is intrinsically linked with some of the arguments that are being made by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. What we are trying to do is fairly simple. We are trying to fund our servicemembers. We are trying to fund our veterans. We want to get a long-term authorization for the CHIP program. The CHIP program actually expired last year, but there were sufficient funds on account to continue funding, but they are running out. In States like North Carolina and other States, this program is going to start being shut down if we don't get much needed resources. We are talking about a multiyear reauthorization for the plan and, of course, continuing to fund the National Institutes of Health, which is a critically important part of combating diseases, finding treatments, and cures. That is all we are trying do with this spending bill. The other thing we are trying to do is create a bridge for a month so we can get our colleagues on both sides of the aisle talking and hopefully get some certainty in terms of funding going into next year-- if it were up to me and I think up to Senator Lankford, for several years, but it would be good to get some long-term certainty in the funding process because right now these continuing resolutions are killing us. We are living paycheck to paycheck. It creates all kinds of inefficient processes. It is wasting taxpayer dollars. We have to at least start with funding the government tonight. At midnight tonight, if we don't act on a continuing resolution, then we will be shutting down the government. I, for one, am going to vote for the continuing resolution like I have every resolution for the last 3 years I have been here because I believe we need to pay our bills. I believe we need to fund our servicemembers. I believe the civilian employees should know they can come back to work on Monday, and we need to do a better job of actually getting together and coming up with centered solutions that gain enough support on both sides of the aisle to do that. Now I want to talk about why we are at the shutdown. We are mainly at the shutdown because some Members want to put all of our government funding at risk--all the funding I was talking about here at risk-- because we have not yet reached an agreement on immigration reform. Senator Lankford and I have spent a lot of time on this. In September of last year, we introduced the SUCCEED Act, which was an honest effort to get into the discussion on how we could come up with a long-term solution for the DACA population. We got together with Senator Durbin, Senator Graham, and a number of other Members to try and negotiate out our differences. We made some progress. Now I will bring you forward to a couple of weeks ago. We met with the President 2 weeks ago, on a Thursday. Republican Members--it included myself, Senator Lankford, and other Members, and we told the President we thought we were making progress. Senator Graham was in the meeting as well. But we thought to really get the deal done, we needed a bicameral, bipartisan meeting. The President thought it was a good idea, and he hosted the first meeting that following Tuesday. That meeting--actually, the majority of it, about 55 minutes of it--was televised. People could see the discussion going on. Actually, people saw a lot of good interchange. There were clearly gaps, but we thought we were making progress. What we agreed in that meeting was that there were four main pillars of this first phase of immigration reform. The idea of comprehensive immigration reform sounds good, except it has failed every time they attempted it. We decided we should start with a more focused effort to address some of the border security concerns and certainty for the DACA population. It sounded like a good idea, so we decided we would have the No. 2 leaders in the House and the Senate--the Democrats and Republicans, four people--get together the following day and develop a schedule so a subset of that group of a couple of dozen people who met with the President could get together and work out our differences. Senator Lankford and I knew going into it that in order to compromise, we were going to have to accept positions that were short of what we wanted, but that is the whole purpose of compromising. Nobody gets everything they want. We were looking forward to what we would hope would be a schedule coming out from the whips--the Democrats and the Republicans, the four who were in the meeting--and that never happened. What we instead found out was on Thursday, a subset of the group, without talking with any of us, decided to have a meeting with the President and see if they could offer their solution. That is what a lot of them have been talking about on the floor. They are saying: Our solution is ready to go. We can put it in the year-end spending bill. We have bipartisan support. We can let it go. Last night, I finally got the full text of their solution. I want to share it with you. There it is. It is a title. It is nothing. There are no specific provisions. There is not a bill filed. There is no evidence they have spoken with people to try to bridge the gaps. It is completely counter to what we agreed to do that Tuesday, a week or so ago. I am asking my colleagues to recognize that people like I and Senator Lankford care about the DACA population. We want to provide them with certainty. We also want to make sure we put balance into the proposal so we are not here again 10 years from now, so we can make sure we have something of enduring value. We don't want to do something quick, where maybe you play gotcha and you put some pressure on someone and you get a bill because those sorts of bills are always at risk of being reversed. We have already taken hits in our States. There are people who think we never should have had this discussion, but we care about the DACA population. We care about border security. We care about Homeland Security and a number of the things that have to go together so we provide a solution, but then we also make sure it is highly unlikely that Senators 10, 12, 15 years from now are in the same place. Before I turn it over to Senator Lankford, I want to talk a little bit about why border security should be argued on compassionate grounds. I was in Texas in February. I spent a week there with Senator Cornyn and some of the other Members. I was all along the border. I met with Border Patrol agents. Some of them had been shot at. They had stories about some of their colleagues who had been killed. I was in Laredo where they showed me the door of a helicopter that had just been shot through a couple of weeks earlier by someone across the Rio Grande in what they call Nuevo Laredo. It is a dangerous place down there. There is a compassionate basis for trying to keep our border security and CIS agents safe. There is also a compassionate case for knowing who is crossing the border and where they are. Why? Because 10,000 people have died crossing that border over the last 20 years. Almost 1,000 of them were kids or minors. That doesn't include the number who get killed or die long before they ever get to the southern border. The way it works is they have these human traffickers, or human smugglers, who charge thousands of dollars to get somebody across the border. Sometimes they get across; oftentimes they don't. It is a moneymaker. As a matter of fact, the cartels that run the different plazas--that is the geographies along the southern border. It is sort of like if you go through this plaza, you better be paying a toll or you are probably going to die. We have one example where 72 people were all murdered, one family--men, women, and children--because the person who was smuggling them apparently got crosswise with the cartel. So to send a message, they killed these people. They died because we didn't know they were there. We didn't know they crossed the border. We didn't have the situational awareness that we are trying to get done with the border security provisions that are in a compromise bill that we offered. I can also talk about the millions of doses of drugs that cross our border every week. Every week millions of doses of poison cross our border. We talk about the opioid epidemic, and we know a vast majority of the opioids--the heroin, the fentanyl, the variants of opioids that are coming across the border--are coming from south of the border, either by water or by land. If that is not a compelling case, a compassionate case, for American border security with what we are trying to do with immigration reform, I don't know what is. We are not talking about a wall. We are not talking about a 2,300-mile wall. I have been criticized for several years because I sit on the Judiciary Committee. We have had a number of hearings that would have never made sense. The President has been briefed by Border Patrol. He understands it is a series of structures, people, technology. Infrastructure is what border security call it. We are asking for the baseline funding and build it out over time--walls where it makes sense, fences and roads, reconnaissance, and just intelligence-gathering devices in some places. That is all we are asking for. There is a deal to be struck here very quickly, but you don't do it by going around a process that, 2 days before, you agreed to participate in. I thank Senator Lankford because Senator Lankford has done an extraordinary job. I also want to thank our staffs because they have done an amazing amount of work to really come up with something that had been well received, to a certain extent, by Senator Durbin and others. In fact, they embraced some of the provisions, but then things just broke down because all they wanted to talk about was the DACA component. They didn't want to talk about the other things that make it an enduring and impactful and compassionate solution for which, I think, we could easily get 60 votes. I would appreciate Senator Lankford's thoughts and comments on this. I yield the floor to Senator Lankford.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, most people who are watching TV or who are watching C-SPAN know we are at a very important place here. We are in a position wherein, at midnight tomorrow night, if Congress doesn't act, we will shut down the government. What does shutting down the government mean? It means a lot of things. It means there are going to be a number of employees who will be wondering when they will get their next paychecks or whether they will get repaid, depending upon whether we make a decision to pay them for time worked. It means people who need desperately needed services may be wondering whether they will be able to get those services, and--if, for no other reason, even if the money is there--is the distraction going to slow down badly needed services to a number of people who rely on the Federal Government as their safety net? It is going to mean our military will wonder whether America will really be behind them anymore because the games we are playing in the Senate are more important than the work they are doing to protect the Nation and to protect our allies. It is going to mean a lot of very negative things that should be avoided. I am going to talk a little bit about it. What I first want to do is to summarize what we are trying to do-- people like me who are going to support the continuing resolution. Now, to be honest with you, I hate the whole continuing resolution process. When I was younger, there was a time when our family was struggling. My father was doing construction work, and he literally had to borrow money to pay for the materials he needed to actually do the job so that he could pay the bills for the family. The way he did that and the way you still do it today, in struggling families, is that you get these 90-day notes. You go to a banker, you tell them you have a project to work on, and you prove to them that you can pay the money back in 90 days and then you pay them back. Well, that is how we are running the business of the most important Nation that has ever existed. A 1-month CR, a 3-month CR, or a 12-month CR is not the way you run the greatest Nation on the face of the planet. It has a number of problems with it, not the least of which is that you can't give the military any certainty to know what they can invest in for the next new generation weapon or defense system, because they simply don't know if the money will be there for them to make that investment. It means that we are getting far less production for our dollar, we are inefficient, and we are sending a message to the world that we are not serious about the long-term investment that we need to make for our safety and security. It also affects a number of other agencies, but I think this is very important in these times with all the heightened threats across the world. If we send a message that we are not here for the long term and we are not willing to make those long-term investments, that is a bad message to send. That is the problem with CRs versus what we call regular order--to sit down, negotiate appropriations, pass appropriations bills, and give the men and women in uniform, give the government employees, and give the people who rely on our safety net some certainty. That is our job. That is why I support a bill that Senator Heller is proposing. It is called the No Budget, No Pay Act. I think the Senate Members and the Members of the House should not get a paycheck when they fail to do their job. Doing their job means they pass appropriations bills, they pass a budget, and they actually do the job they swore they would do if they won a race for the Senate or the Congress. I hope that bill gets a debate on the floor. I look forward to supporting it when it does. Let's go back to the CR. The CR is simple. It is 4 weeks long. All it really does is to make sure that we have funding for our servicemembers. It makes sure we have funding for our veterans. It makes sure we have funding for the CHIP program. It actually authorizes it for several years. It gives certainty to States and to people who need support that it is going to be there. It also provides funding for small business loans and funding for the National Institutes of Health. It does a number of other things, but those are critically important. We have some Members who are trying to negotiate a deal for the DACA population. DACA is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It is a program that President Obama put into place in 2012. It is actually something that I have been working on since we filed the bill in August--and long before that--to try to get reasonably minded Members on both sides of the aisle to come up with a solution that makes sense. But now we have people who actually want to shut down the government because we haven't reached a bipartisan agreement that I think is not that far away. The problem that I have with that is that I think it is going to create a toxic environment in Washington, DC, that is not only going to provide all the uncertainty that I talked about on the prior slide, but it is even going to alienate people who are coming to the table trying to negotiate a bipartisan agreement. Now we are at a point where we are trying to figure out if we can fund the government either through a vote sometime tomorrow or if there will be a shutdown tomorrow night. I have only been here for about 3 years, and I have been in politics for 12 years. I find it interesting how things change overnight, how things that were untenable or awful just a couple of months or a couple of years ago are justified today based on the disagreement we have on the DACA deal, which I am convinced we will get done before the March 5 deadline, and I hope sooner than that because there are a lot of good kids who came to this Nation through no fault of their own, through a decision made by an adult, who deserve a path to citizenship, who deserve the respect of this Nation, and who should be welcome because there are a lot of good kids. I will keep working on a solution, but now we have people who want to distract us, not only to distract us from trying to negotiate a reasonable outcome for DACA but adding the distraction and creating the toxic environment that shutting down the government will cause. If we go back, what is amazing to me is that the very people who are now saying we should shut down the government made these kind of statements in the past. This is from former Speaker Pelosi in the House: ``Not too long ago it was an unthinkable tactic to use in a political debate.'' There is a long list of people. Senator Nelson: ``You don't hold the country hostage.'' But that is exactly what they are proposing today. Senator King: ``. . . the constant hostage-taking situation to get something in that process that you couldn't get through the normal process.'' It is a hard quote to read, but the point is that now they want to take hostages. Now they want to do exactly what they thought, not long ago, was inappropriate, unkind, unfair, and uncompassionate. Then we have Senator Heitkamp: ``It is really bullying behavior when the small minority does this.'' I think it will be a minority that will oppose funding the government. So now people who didn't like the bullying behavior are trying to rationalize that somehow that it is OK. The other issue we have here is that we have been getting close on a funding discussion, and we have been getting close on DACA. I don't know. I can't speak to you all directly, but if I were speaking to the pages, I would ask them whether or not they saw the ``Peanuts'' cartoon. There is a common theme that we talk about with Lucy and the football. The scene is where you are running down the field and you are about to kick the football, and just at about the time that you are going to do it, there is a group of people who want to pull the football away. That is what they are doing again. Honestly, it gets tiring to see us come so close, to have so many reasonably minded people. Guess what. There are unreasonable people. It is a bipartisan situation we have here. I have friends. They are friends of mine, but on certain issues they become unreasonable. They are not part of the solution. All of a sudden they create these coalitions, and they are the Lucy taking away the football from those of us who actually want to score, want to make progress, want to fund the Government, and want to provide a solution for the DACA population. Now we have another Lucy and the football scenario on both the spending bill and also the DACA bill. I also have to talk about the CHIP program. The CHIP program is something I wanted to reauthorize in September of last year. September of last year was the month before the program technically expired. However, there was sufficient money in reserves for the States to continue to run the programs. Those States are starting to run out of money, including States like mine, North Carolina. Now we have an opportunity to reauthorize for years, to provide certainty to this child population for years, and we are going to hold it hostage because we have an honest disagreement over things I think we can work out with the DACA Program. We have seen what people have said in the past. In fact, one of these Senators actually had a countdown on how many days we failed to reauthorize DACA. It may very well be that when we take the vote tonight, that very same Senator will vote against a multiyear reauthorization for the CHIP program. That doesn't make sense. It is irrational. It doesn't solve anything. It creates a bigger problem when it comes to the funding discussion and when it ultimately comes to a reasonable outcome for the DACA population. Finally, we can talk about the words of the Democratic leader. Again, it is amazing to me how things have changed. So did you believe what you were saying then? Or is who we see now and what position you are taking now who you really are? People need to come to the floor and let me know. Is this what you meant or is your new position what you meant? You can't have it both ways. In politics, people try to, but you need to say something and stick with it. They need to defend which is their real position. If those are their positions in the past, let's pass the spending bill, let's work hard to get DACA done, and let's stop this theater that is not helping anybody. All this is doing is making people who work and rely on government funding worry, and it is making people who rely on government funding and the DACA population even more worried. Every day they think they are 1 day closer to having an illegal status here. We see speeches on the floor about the Dreamers, the people who are doing well. Most of them are going to school, working, or serving in the military. I believe every single one of them. There are tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of more examples. That is why I am so motivated to come up with a solution. That is why I am so frustrated with those playing these games when we are so close. So let's talk about DACA. There is the so-called gang that is putting together a bill. Let me back up and talk about a meeting that I attended in the White House last Tuesday. In the prior meeting I attended the previous Thursday, Republicans met with the President. We said: Mr. President, the way for us to get to a solution is to call Democrats and Republicans into a room, Members of the House and Senate, have us air our differences and then agree to a timeline for negotiating a deal that we can bring to the American people and solve this problem. The President responded by calling a meeting on that Tuesday. Some people may have seen it. There was about 50 minutes of press coverage. Senator Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who just came in here, was a part of that meeting. We all felt great about it. We aired our differences. We knew there were differences we needed to bridge. We agreed to four different pillars that we would use as a basis for negotiation. Come up with something that the DACA population needs, something compassionate--something very similar or maybe something between the bill that Senator Lankford, Senator Hatch, and I proposed, the SUCCEED Act and the Dream Act--and bridge the differences. We were making progress. We also knew that we had to deal with things like the diversity lottery, border security, and what some of our colleagues call family reunification, which has been abused and needs to be fixed. Others call it chain migration. At the end of that meeting, we agreed that what we needed to do was to have the leaders, the whips of the House and the Senate--the Democrats and the Republicans--agree to a timeline and a schedule and then get together and work out our differences. I, for one, think those meetings should be open to the public because then the public would realize, I think, that we are not that far apart. Unfortunately, we are a week and a half later, and the parties have not even reached an agreement on a schedule to begin the negotiations. Now we have another group of people that say: We have something that is pretty close and we may file a bill, or you need to get on to the bill. Let me tell you the problem I have with that bill or the concept of the bill. No. 1, has it been introduced? No. So it is ``thoughtware.'' None of us can talk about the specific provisions because we don't have something we can score, look at, or understand the benefits and risks and issues associated with it and whether or not we can get the votes. The question is, Does the bill have the support of the President? Well, I think you saw what was vetted on Thursday, which was not a specific provision, and that meeting last week didn't go too well on several different levels. We don't have an agreement. The other question is, if you don't have an agreement with the President, you have to understand the process of the Congress. If the President were to veto the bill, and we are struggling to get 60 votes, now we would have to get 67 votes. Does anybody here honestly believe we will get 67 votes to withstand a veto override? So we have to get back to this one, to get the President behind it, because that is not going to happen. Even if that could happen, then we have to go to the House. It is not about a simple majority of the House Members. We have to think about a supermajority of House Members that would override a Presidential veto. Right now, based on the number of Members who are in the House--there are a couple of open seats--that is 288 votes. That isn't going to happen. That is not a very good scorecard. It is not a recipe for success. I am one of the ones who want checked boxes next to a bill that the President supports, that the Senate will get 60 votes on, and the House will get more than half, so that we can solve the problem for the DACA population. Things happen quickly here, and, hopefully, this is another example where they will. I hope my Republican colleagues recognize that voting against the funding bill is a bad idea. How do you work out of a shutdown? Almost certainly it will not end well. So I hope my Republican colleagues will vote for the spending bill, and I hope a majority or a good number of my Democratic colleagues will, so that we get the spending issue off the table. Then I hope that same group of people will come together and recognize that the gaps are not that hard to bridge for the DACA solution, that the border security measures are reasonable, that the changes in the elimination of the diversity lottery and a more reasonable way to allow merit-based immigration makes sense. We can deal with underrepresented countries to make absolutely certain that good hard-working people in those countries who want to come and live and work in America can do it. This is not a difficult thing to do. It is almost as if people are going in the backroom trying to figure out how to make this more difficult than it needs to be. I am telling and imploring the Members of the Senate, whether you are Republican or Democrat, vote for funding the Government. Vote for our soldiers. Vote for our veterans. Vote for the children who require these programs who are desperately in need of certainty. Then, quickly, get on DACA and vote for the Dreamers who need our support. Vote for border security so we can know who is coming across this border and we can make the Nation safer. These are commonsense, rational, and reasonable expectations, and if we lower the temperature here, if we treat people with respect, and if we actually not let the polar opposites impact what those of us in the center want to do, then we can avoid this crisis and we can do great things for millions of people. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, before the chairman leaves the Chamber, I wish to thank him for his leadership as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He has done an extraordinary job of bringing people together to really come up with a solution to this problem. This is a problem that has existed for years--almost two decades. The first DREAM Act was filed in 2001, I believe. It has been some 16 years, and they have failed to produce a result. Now, think that through. That was through President Bush, and it was through President Obama. It was actually at a time when, in 2009, not a single Republican vote would have been necessary to pass the DREAM Act. Yet my colleagues on the other side of the aisle could not produce a result. So we know we need to do something different. There are things in the Dream Act that we need to file and put into a bill. In fact, it was instructed into a bill that I and Senator Lankford and Senator Hatch filed called the SUCCEED Act. It is a way to provide certainty for the DACA population, but it also needs to be paired up with reasonable border security provisions so that we get the broad base of support we need for enduring policy here. There are some people who are talking about withdrawing from negotiations and trying to threaten a government shutdown to get something slammed into a year-end spending bill. But if you really care about the long-term certainty that we want to provide these young people who qualified under the DACA Program, the last thing you should do is to play politics and get something half baked into a provision that will always be a target of the next year-end spending bill. Why don't we do something crazy and actually sit down, check our Members on the Republican side and the Democratic side who have extreme views on this issue at the door, and solve the problem. I have taken a lot of criticism after filing the SUCCEED Act because I had a lot of people who said that I was soft on immigration. Well, I respectfully disagree with some of my friends who are themselves Republicans and conservatives, because I don't think they have it right. I think that the young men and women who qualify under the DACA Program, who were brought to this country through the actions of their parents, through no fault of their own, deserve a respectful, compassionate, physically sustainable solution, and certainty. I have been working on it, and I have been taking the criticism ever since I filed the bill. I even had a congressional district in North Carolina censure me, saying, ``shame on you,'' for actually coming up with something that made sense. One thing that I said, though, when we filed that bill, is that what we did in the SUCCEED Act had to be paired with reasonable, sustainable border security measures and interior enforcement measures--things that are important if we want to make sure that a decade from now, 15 years from now we are not back here again worried about a new DACA population that has come across the borders. I have had some people insisting that having a secure border is not compassionate, that it is unfair, but I would actually submit to my colleagues that not having a secure border is irresponsible. Talking about not being compassionate, allowing things to occur with an unsecured border--to me, having a secure border is a hallmark of compassion. That is a little bit of what I want to talk about. So let's stipulate to that. Working with Senator Durbin--and, incidentally, Senator Durbin and I have been talking about this issue for about a year and a half--I knew that we were going to be here with the DACA Program and that we needed to work on it. So I reached out to Senator Durbin and said that I am willing to try to come up with something that makes sense, but we have to be willing to accept something different from all of the random ideas and come with a compromise. We made progress in terms of how to deal with the DACA population, but some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are unwilling to talk about the reality that we should also put into place, and pair with what we do for the DACA population, border security and interior enforcement that makes sense. Back in February I spent about a week down along the southern border. I was on patrol boats on the Rio Grande. I was riding horseback in certain areas of the border. I was out in the interior area where enforcement actions are taking place every night. I spent a lot of time down there. One thing that struck me was some of the briefings that we received from border security. I am going to get to what I consider to be the most heartbreaking last. We want to talk about what is going on. We have people come to this floor--my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--and say: We must do something to address the opioid epidemic in this country. I agree. That is why I voted for the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. I spoke on the floor several times as a first step toward trying to get a handle on something that is poisoning almost 60,000 people a year-- killing them. They are dying from overdoses in this Nation. The reality is that the vast majority--and we will get to a slide in a minute--of those illicit drugs, including heroin and fentanyl and the other kinds of drugs that are extracted from opium and are killing people, are coming across the southern border. We simply don't have the resources at our land ports and in the areas where drug smugglers cross illegally to stop them. The consequence of that in a State like North Carolina is that more people are dying from drug overdoses today than are dying from automobile accidents--about 1,400 a year. It is even worse in a number of other States. We were at a land port in Laredo, and they were saying that on any given day, millions of doses are probably getting through because they are concealed. They are hidden in trucks. They don't have the capacity to inspect every vehicle. So they are coming across this border ostensibly legally--obviously, through the legal process of entry--but carrying illicit drugs, and we are only capturing a fraction of them. A part of what we are proposing in this bill is additional resources to interdict more of those drugs, to make it less likely that somebody could come across the border by use of a pickup truck or by using backpacks full of poison that will ultimately get into the blood streams of people who will ultimately die--many of them, tens of thousands a year. That is a case--a compassionate case--for border security. This is the number that I was talking about earlier: 15,469 deaths in 2016 alone related to heroin. A lot of these are coming across the border. But only about 1.5 percent of all of the drugs that are estimated to come across the border are being seized today. How do you actually increase this seizure rate? You put the resources and authorities in place so that the Border Patrol and Customs and immigration resources down on the border can actually find them, and arrest, charge, convict, and incarcerate the people who are poisoning the men and women and boys and girls in this country. There is also another thing, and this is something that when I was down on the Texas border just stuck with me. I was on a 7,500-acre ranch, which is really, really small in Texas terms. I was talking with the ranch owner, who said that over the last 10 years, they had actually recovered 100 bodies on this ranch alone. If you do the math, that means they are finding a person who has died trying to come to this country illegally about every six weeks on this small ranch. Over the past 20 years, we have had about 10,000 people die crossing the border, and about 1,000 of them are children. If we had a secure border, at least we would have the knowledge and the situational awareness to know where these people are so that they don't languish somewhere in the middle of nowhere after they cross the border or after they have paid somebody $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000, in some cases, to carry them across the border. Then, they leave them. They take them across the border and then tell them that Houston is just a few miles away. Well, Houston is an hour-and-a-half plane ride away from where they cross the border. So we need border security for the protection of people who are making the poor decision to come across. If we have a secure border, it is much less likely that any of them will ever attempt to do it, except for the legal ones. Then there is the other thing that is happening on the other side of the border. The 10,000 people who have died over 20 years are those whom we have identified--I am sure there are many more who we didn't--who were found on U.S. soil after crossing the border. One other thing I learned when I was down in Texas is about the criminal actions and the criminal gangs, basically--they call them plazas and cartels--that basically run every mile of the border. If you pass through one of those plazas and you don't pay the toll, you are likely going to die. In one case, there were 72 people who were murdered because the human smuggler failed to pay the plaza bosses the so-called toll when he was supposed to get them across the border. So they ordered the execution of men, women, and children just to send a message. This is one of the many examples that we have. So there is no question in my mind that of the 10,000 people who have died over the last 20 years on American soil, there were probably thousands or tens of thousands or more who have died in the hopes that they could get across the border. If we have a secure border and if we work on our immigration systems, we can get for those parents and people who want to come to this country legally an opportunity to get here without harming themselves or harming their children. If that is not a compassionate case for a secure border, I don't know what is. Now we are in the final stages of trying to negotiate a deal, and Chairman Grassley did a wonderful job of summarizing what we have proposed as a starting position for negotiation with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I hope they will be willing to come to the table and negotiate in good faith and recognize that their approach over the last 16 years has failed. They promised the Dreamers a solution, and they failed to deliver. They have failed to deliver under a Republican administration. They have failed to deliver under President Obama, when they had supermajorities. We are not going to let them fail this time. Giving the DACA population certainty, coming up with a solution that makes sense, getting a border that is secure, making sure that the poison that is coming across the border and killing tens of thousands of people a year is reduced, is, in my opinion, the scope that we need to negotiate to get to an agreement. If we have Senator Durbin, Senator Bennet, and others who have negotiated portions of the immigration issue open their eyes to the broader opportunity to come up with a balanced policy that addresses the concerns on both sides of the aisle, we can be the Congress and President Trump can be the President who actually solve this problem and, along the way, make it far less likely that it will be another problem for another Congress to solve 10 or 15 years from now and that, then, may take 10 or 15 years to solve. This will have an enduring impact. This will have a compassionate impact. This will provide certainty to the DACA population. This will allow me to go home and say: I did something meaningful to secure the border and protect our Nation. But we have to have people come together and negotiate in good faith. It needs to start this week, and we need to continue it until we come to terms. People need to be willing to compromise and accept something less than perfect, because everybody's perfect conceptions of what we should do here have all one thing in common: They have all been resounding failures. They have been unkept promises. Along the way, our homeland is not as secure as it can be, and people are dying in the process. Hard-working people who are eligible for the DACA Program are uncertain about their future. So, again, I want to thank Chairman Grassley for his hard work and his leadership and willingness to engage. I want to thank the President. I was with the President for an hour and a half last week, along with Chairman Grassley and others. We are going to be meeting again in the White House tomorrow. Hopefully, we will be joined by our Democratic colleagues who have been invited to the meeting, and we will negotiate something that makes sense. Now is the time for us to deliver. The empty promises of the past are insufficient. We need to provide an enduring solution, and an enduring solution is a fair solution for the DACA population and a responsible solution for border security. If we do that, I think we will look at this as something meaningful--something the Presiding Officer and I did when we came in here in 2015. We got tax reform. That is meaningful. We have been promising immigration reform forever. This is not all of it. We have more work to do. But this is a big first step, and it requires bipartisanship, compromise, and a genuine commitment to negotiate. I hope my Democratic colleagues will take the invitation seriously, come to the table, negotiate an agreement we can all be proud of, and we can give the certainty that we should give to the DACA population. I thank the chairman for the opportunity to speak on this and for his continued leadership on this issue.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I congratulate Andrew Murray on his investiture as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. Andrew graduated magna cum laude from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with a bachelor of science in political science and received his juris doctor from the University of North Carolina School of Law. Throughout his career, Andrew has dedicated himself to public service and leadership. Andrew enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1980 and retired in 2015, serving his country faithfully for 35 years. During his service, he earned a number of decorations, including the Coast Guard Meritorious Service Medal, three Coast Guard Commendation Medals, the Coast Guard Achievement Medal, and the Coast Guard 9/11 Service Medal. Andrew began his legal career at the Mecklenburg County District Attorney's Office as an assistant district attorney. Later, he worked in private practice before being elected to serve as the district attorney of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina's largest prosecutorial district. During his tenure as district attorney, he led the office with the utmost distinction and is highly respected for his leadership. I am proud that Andrew is willing to continue serving western North Carolina in a new role as U.S. Attorney. Western North Carolina is lucky to have such an experienced prosecutor and effective leader to command this important office. He is a dedicated public servant whose extensive prosecutorial experience and relationships with law enforcement will bolster the mission of the Department of Justice and promote public safety. Senator Burr and I proudly recommended Andrew to President Trump, and I know that he will lead the U.S. Attorney's Office with honor.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, when we pursue tax reform, invariably those impacted will voice concerns along the way. I know this from experience, having done tax reform in North Carolina. Everyone was for tax reform until it came to protecting their individualized interests. However, reform was not about protecting tax benefits for the rich or the like, as some of my colleagues have suggested--understandably, for political purposes. Tax reform is what we can do as a Congress to help spur economic growth. Without growth, we cannot solve our Nation's problems. Having an uncompetitive tax code hampers the ability of the middle class to grow and prosper. Through this process, we have fought to ensure that there are appropriate transition rules and protections for various strategic sectors in our economy, and I am proud of the work that both Chambers of Congress have done through the conference process. When we debated the Senate's tax reform package on the floor, some of my colleagues offered amendments on discrete issues, and I believe that, for many of these issues, we attempted to embrace, as a body, a process that defines problems and works to solve them. I also believe that the conference committee did a good job working with JCT and the Finance Committee to address issues, without jeopardizing the underlying tax reform measure. For other issues that were not able to be addressed in theconference report, I believe that legislating is an exercise of continued and systematic work. That means we need to come back next year in a reconciliation process and continue to improve upon this legislation. As an example of some of the work that we must still do, I do not believe that we should penalize companies for voluntary repatriation and believe that there should be targeted transition rules in place to consider those who have a history of voluntary repatriation and are not simply doing so late in the year as tax reform became a realistic possibility. That said, I understand that some things are not always achievable, and it is tough to treat some companies differently than others when everyone is making sacrifices. Another area that I think needs to be worked on in future iterations of tax reform are tailored transition rules for different strategic sectors like the energy sector, manufacturing sector, and other industries that have foreign tax credits stranded overseas. Additionally, as we evaluate how the tax treatment for passthrough entities unfolds, we need to ensure that we are appropriately regulating and taxing capital deployers so that we are fully realizing their potential contributions to economic growth. In its totality, I was happy to see that there was common ground found on issues such as: how JCT scores and evaluates insurance reserves; how the limitations on business interest deductibility affects different sectors, particularly those that rely heavily on debt to operate; ensuring that there is continued parity for pass through entities in the new territorial system by preserving appropriate export incentives in the Tax Code; and many others that are so important to State and local economies. When I did tax reform in North Carolina as the speaker of the North Carolina State House, I received many of the same criticisms that I have received as we have gone through this current reform process. Our hard work paid off in North Carolina, and I believe that it will pay off for America--as a global competitor and for all Americans. Thank you. I look forward to supporting this conference report, and I look forward to working with my colleagues in the future as we continue our collective pursuit to make America the most competitive it can be and as we continue to help America achieve its economic potential.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, the tax cuts we passed last week--whether they are in North Carolina or North Dakota, working families are going to benefit from them. Over the course of the next days and weeks that we negotiate with the House on a final package that will go to the President, we are going to hear all kinds of interesting claims made on the Senate floor. I was presiding, Mr. President, before you relieved me from the Chair, and I heard one of the speeches we are going to hear several times--we passed this tax bill so that we can actually now cut support for people who need the government safety net. That sounds absurd. It sounds absurd on several levels. No. 1, it is not a very kind thing to do. No. 2, it is not a very wise thing do. Let me put in another claim. I can try to put them together. They are saying that we are passing a tax increase on working families in America. What they forget is the dot, dot, dot--maybe 7 or 8 years from now if we decide to raise taxes. Highly unlikely. But in the here and now and next year, after this tax bill gets passed, working families are going to get a tax cut. How on Earth can you look at a standard deduction doubling--we are going from $6,000 to $12,000 per individual and $24,000 per family. What does the standard deduction mean? Some people may not understand it. It is pretty simple. That standard deduction means that money isn't going to get taxed. So we are increasing the number of people who will not pay taxes. One of the brackets we haven't talked about, and I think we should, is the number of people who go to a zero tax bracket under the Senate plan and, to a large extent, under the House plan. Then we talk about the child tax credit. Now let's talk about a working mother, a single mom with a child. The first $12,000 isn't going to be taxed, and then another $2,000 per child would not be taxed before you would even be subject to tax. That is the reality of this plan. It is not an increase in taxes. Those who oppose this plan are trying to talk about a hypothetical possibility 7 or 8 years from now that I don't believe is going to happen. One of the reasons why I believe it is highly unlikely to happen is because we are going to have economic growth from this tax plan. The way you get economic growth--you also have to recognize that in the United States, we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. When people are trying to set up shop today, they don't have to necessarily set up shop in the United States to do business in the United States; they go to the lowest cost jurisdiction. I don't fault a business for doing that. When I am confronted with maybe the desire to set up a business in, say, North Carolina or somewhere else in the United States, if it is going to cost me substantially more, of course I am going to make the business decision to go where I have the most resources necessary to produce the product or service that I want to provide. By cutting corporate taxes and by cutting what we call the passthrough tax, which is handling all businesses, whether they are a C corporation or a passthrough entity--I won't get into the details, but they are the two different ways businesses set up to pay their taxes. By lowering that tax burden on businesses, we are going to see economic growth. After the tax cuts are put into place, we are immediately going to see a reduction in the tax burden for working families. That is going to be from the increases in deductions and the lowering of the tax burden. Over time, we are going to see additional money going into the pockets of working families, because I firmly believe that through economic activity, we are going to see an upward increase in wages. We are going to see median incomes go up. We are going to see people lifted out of poverty. The reason I believe that is because we have done it in North Carolina. We were roundly criticized--the same way people did on this floor--when I was serving in the State legislature, and we delivered on a promise we made if we got a majority in the State of North Carolina. We went on to decrease the tax burden on businesses and decrease the tax burden on individuals, and we have seen our income to the State go up--more money, more resources in the State to do good things for people in North Carolina. One of the good things we do is continue to lower the tax burden because our economy is growing at rates it has not seen in decades in North Carolina. That is what is going to happen in the United States. It also provides us with resources to help those who truly need help. The other argument that suddenly we are going to pay for this tax cut by harming people on Medicare and Medicaid is absurd. All of us here have mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, maybe brothers and sisters who rely on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security as their primary source of income. How anybody can come to this floor and say that I am going to tell my 85-year-old mother--Mom, I am sorry if you are watching this because I know you hate it when I mention your age--who relies on Medicare and relies on Social Security that we are going to come to this Chamber and betray that trust and break that promise that we made to them is absurd. Are we talking about things we can do so I can make a promise to these pages when they get old someday--I know it is hard for you to imagine you are going to get old someday, but you will. What we are talking about is making sure that we can fulfill that promise for the generations who have not yet relied on Medicare and Social Security. If we don't act, we are going to harm the very people whom other people in this Chamber profess to be helping. We have a fiscal crisis out there that we have to deal with, but it has no connection to what we are trying to do with tax reform. People say we passed the tax reform bill so that we can harm other people and pay for the tax cuts through cuts to our entitlement programs or safety net programs. It is not happening. We justified this tax package based on what we believe to be economic growth. This tax bill will be funded through economic growth. This tax bill will be funded by more people making higher wages, more businesses being successful and hiring other people, and the United States being more competitive on the global stage. That is how we pay for this tax package. Again, I speak from a bit of experience because we did tax reform over the last 5 years in North Carolina. It wasn't perfect. That is why we came back and made some changes after we realized there were some unintended consequences, which is the last thing I will talk about. We are now going into what they call conference. Today, what you are observing is a period of time that we have to pass through in the Chamber before we can vote to go to conference. When we go to conference, it means that the House and the Senate will get together and we will try to work out our differences. One of the things we have to do is work out some things that we have identified that may be unintended consequences of the bill, to make sure that we minimize any negative impact that wasn't thought through until we can begin to work through some of the models. That is going to happen. I think the conferencing process will produce a better bill. But more than anything else, we need to recognize that it is time to deliver on a promise we made to the American people. We need to be the Congress that, for the first time in over 30 years, actually delivers on the promise of reducing the tax burden and getting the economy back on track--the way it hasn't been for quite some time. That is why I am proud to have voted for the tax plan. That is why I will be proud to vote for the plan that goes to the President's desk. That is why I will be proud to stand in this Chamber, just a couple of years from now, and demonstrate that the courage we are displaying by moving forward with this bill is going to produce a result for the American people that benefits every single person all across the socioeconomic spectrum. I appreciate the opportunity to tell the American people again: Don't necessarily believe everything that is going to be said in this Chamber in the next couple of days or couple of weeks. American people, don't be afraid when you hear that one or the other party is working hard so we can harm people who rely on our safety net. Don't believe it. It is not true. Don't believe that we have decided that it was a great political strategy to raise taxes 7 years from now. Don't believe that it is an immediate tax increase, because that is empirically untrue. Believe that we are doing everything we can to fulfill our promise, and believe that, if we do this, everybody in the United States is going to benefit. We are going to be a stronger nation. We are going to be a more competitive Nation, and we are going to have a point in time in Congress when we actually came here and did what we said we were going to do. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I want to thank Chairman Grassley for his leadership on this issue and for his willingness to sit down and talk to a diverse group of people who think we have a problem that we should solve and that we must solve. Senator Grassley just did such a good job of describing some of the technical aspects of the SECURE Act and the BRIDGE Act and other legislation that actually came together to create the SECURE Act. I want to back up and talk a little bit about what we are actually trying to do here. There are two key components to this bill and to efforts that have gone before the point at which we have introduced this bill that I think are very important. The first one is the DACA Program. That is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The DACA Program is something that was implemented in 2012 by President Obama. What President Obama sought to do was to provide some certainty for young adults and children who were brought across the border--not through their own decisions but through the decisions of their parents or a guardian to cross the border illegally--and find themselves illegally present in the United States. Today, they are still protected because they are still protected under DACA, but the President announced on September 5 that on March 5 that program would end. Now, you can imagine that there are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who are uncertain about their future status in this country. It is a problem we need to solve. The other side of the equation is something that is also equally important to me and to a number of people in this body. It has to do with our border security and interior enforcement. Back in late winter, I spent a week down on the southern border. I went to the Rio Grande Sector and the West Texas Sector. I spoke with a lot of people at the land ports that hundreds of thousands of people cross every day. We listened to their concerns about things we need to do to better secure the border. There are two debates in Congress right now. I don't actually embrace either of the two extremes. There is the one extreme that says build a big, beautiful wall that is 2,000 miles long. It is impractical and not necessary. There is the other extreme that says we don't need borders; we need bridges. That is impractical and unsafe. What we need is a solution to border security so that we know who is in this country and so that we have an orderly way to move between countries for someone who is in our country who wants to come to work or visit the United States and return back in a legal fashion. The other thing we have to look at in border security that I think is oftentimes overlooked is the humanitarian crisis with an unsecure border. There is one of the numbers that stuck with me. There were so many that we covered when we were down with border security, but this stuck with me--actually, two numbers. This one is most heartbreaking: Over a 20-year period, 10,000 people have died crossing the border unsuccessfully. Ten thousand bodies have been recovered as a result of crossing the border and not finding their way to a safe place. About 1,000 of them were children. Unless we have the people, technology, and infrastructure on the border to know who is trying to cross, we can't protect them. Even if it means we are going to take them into custody and potentially deport them, at least they will be alive. Another statistic was very important to me, too. It was in a discussion I had with border security agents down in Laredo, one of the big land ports where people cross every day. I am not going to get into a lot of the details, except to say that they confiscate about 400,000 doses of methamphetamine about every 48 hours in this one land port. That is where they confiscate it. By most estimates, it is only a minor percentage of all of the illegal drugs crossing the border. So we obviously need more people, technology, and infrastructure to be able to capture people who are crossing the border in various trucks and cars. They are finding ways to hide these drugs that are poisoning our Nation's youth and, really, people of all ages. So there is a reason for border security. There is a reason to invest in people, technology, and infrastructure. There is a reason for us to have a productive discussion about how we can provide a compassionate, sustainable solution to the children and young adults who came to this country through not their decision but the decisions of their adult guardians. That is what this bill, the SECURE Act, is setting forth. We are trying to get a productive discussion going with Democrats and Republicans who will come together and recognize that a balanced bill provides for border security, provides a sustainable solution for the DACA population, and get it done before March 5. There are some people that want to, I think, play a little bit of brinkmanship. They have already set in their mind how they want this bill to look. What worries me about a bill where you use timing, maybe a year-end budget agreement, or some other device to get the bill done, is that that doesn't necessarily produce a bipartisan outcome that you can be sure of is always going to be on the books. Those types of bills--those types of quick ``gotcha'' sort of actions--are oftentimes the bills somebody will try to come back to and repeal or revise. We want a sustainable solution. We want a solution that is going to work and give certainty to this DACA population for the rest of their lives. I think the provisions of the BRIDGE Act that are now in the SUCCEED Act do that. I want to thank Senator Lankford. Senator Lankford and I filed another bill. We are full of acronyms here. I don't know, but sometimes they say we are full of other things, but we are full of acronyms. The SUCCEED Act is another bill, and I think that many of its provisions will be considered as we go through the negotiation process to get a bill to the President's desk. The bill that we sponsored is the called SUCCEED Act. It is the Solution for Undocumented Children through Careers, Employment, Education, and Defending our Nation Act. It is a lot like the BRIDGE Act, in that we go to the DACA population, and we know something about the DACA population that I think is oftentimes overlooked. It is a great group of people. There are a little bit less than 2 million. Many of them are working hard, going to school, and serving in our military. They deserve an opportunity and to be provided a way to be able to recognize they are legally present in this country. That is what I think we are going to accomplish with this SECURE Act. This is what I hope my Democrat colleagues will do, those who actually endorse the BRIDGE Act. There are many of them. Senator Grassley ran through the list. I will not do it again. Let's sit down and solve this problem. Let's accept that there are people at the far left who are going to stand on one issue at the expense of letting March 5 pass and have the DACA population at risk. Let's also tell the people at the far right who want nothing less than full deportation, that that is not going to happen. Let the people in the center who want to come up with a sustainable, respectful, compassionate solution that is paired up with solid border security measures and interior enforcement, provide a solution for this population. I think my colleagues who have worked together in the working group that Chairman Grassley has led are committed to working with Democrats to come up with a reasonable solution. I know that I am. I know my colleague, Senator Lankford, is. I hope that everybody will sit down and recognize that, at the end of the day, this is for our Nation's security and the security and the certainty of the DACA population. If we set out about accomplishing those two goals, then I think we will be very successful. Then we can start building on that dialogue for so many other things we need to talk about when it comes to interior enforcement and immigration reform. I yield the floor.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, regular order.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Thank you, Mr. President. I thank the Presiding Officer for his comments just before mine, and thank him for presiding so that I can step down and speak briefly. I wasn't sure if I was going to speak. I don't have any notes. But I was inspired by some of the comments that were made by the Senator from Vermont as I was presiding. We heard--actually, for those who are visiting the DC area, if you don't get an opportunity to go to any of the wonderful theaters we have here, such as the Kennedy Center, don't worry because you are seeing a lot of theater down here on the Senate floor. Anybody who would suggest that we are going to come back and cut my mother's Medicare and my mother's Social Security and that of the mothers and brothers and sisters of other people who are depending on that for their livelihood is somewhat involved in political theater. Some of you were here and probably heard the challenge to have a Republican come down here on the floor and say: Bernie, you are wrong. Well, the distinguished Senator from Vermont is wrong. This bill is about actually providing freedom and tax relief to working families and reducing the tax burden on businesses so that the economy will grow and we will have the resources to pay our bills. I can understand that maybe it is not intentional theater on the part of some of these folks; it may just be because they simply have never done it before. But if you have ever lived in North Carolina or if you have lived in North Carolina since 2011, you know that we did. I have seen this theater before--from the dais as speaker of the house in the State of North Carolina when we were one of the highest-- the sixth highest tax State in the Nation, with one of the slowest growing economies. We were having a problem paying our Medicaid bills. We were having a problem paying our bills. We had a $2.5 billion structural deficit. I heard the theater on the floor: If you cut taxes, you are going to drive up the deficit. If you cut taxes, you are going to cut Medicaid. If you cut taxes, you are going to cut social services. I heard it all. Everybody accused us of that. I hit the gavel, and I ratified the bill for tax reform. Guess what happened. We went from being the sixth most taxed State that today is in the top ten best taxed. We went from one of the worst performing State economies to now one of the best performing State economies. We have reduced the number of people in poverty, and statistically--I mean, we can prove it to you. We do the counts. The number of people who have been lifted out of poverty has increased over the last 3 years. Median incomes have gone up. Job creation has gone up. Our gross domestic product has gone up over the past 5 or 6 years by $80 billion. We were at about $400 billion, and now we are at $480 billion. So let me tell you how we are going to pay for these tax cuts. We are not going to pay for them by cutting Medicare for seniors. We are going to pay for them through the economic activity that will absolutely occur if we have the courage to fulfill the promise that we made last year to the American people. We are going to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses. We are going to get our tax policy consistent and competitive with nations that are eating our lunch on locating business expansion and having businesses come offshore--away from the United States to more preferable tax jurisdictions, and we are going to change people's lives. I am motivated to support this plan because I have been in a position of leadership where I had great people in my caucus who had the courage to fulfill a promise that I made if I became speaker of the house. Now we are at a point in time to do the same thing for America that we did for North Carolina. If we do it, it is going to be extraordinary. Let me reduce it down to an answer I gave to a little boy yesterday. I think he was in fourth grade. I had a Skype video conference with an English as a second language class in an elementary school down in North Carolina. One of the little boys asked me a great question, and it is a question that has never been asked of me. I have been in politics only for about 12 years. But he said: What piece of legislation are you most proud of? What is the thing you are most proud of since you have been in the legislature? I thought about it. It was a tough question because I can think of many things I have done. But then I went back to this little boy in the classroom, and I said: You know what, buddy, it was something I did back when I was speaker of the North Carolina House. By the way, if any politician tells you ``I did this,'' they are invariably not telling you the truth because you don't get anything done unless the team commits to it. So I, along with a lot of people in North Carolina, decided that your parents could not afford to pay the bills. They were having a difficult time paying the utility bills, their rent, and their groceries, paying for food. So we decided we were going to do something to make sure that government gave your parents more money to make sure you could go to school, to make sure they could pay their bills, to make sure they could have a better paying job. And, buddy, that is the thing I am most proud of. The thing I am most proud of was tax reform that produced results that are indisputable. I have seen the theater before, and it didn't work out too well because it proved to be fiction in North Carolina. If we have the courage over the next couple of days to take that same vote here, we are going to see the same results for those working families and those job employers in the United States. So I hope all of the Members of this body recognize that we are not going to fund the tax cuts on the backs of people who need the help the most. That is absurd. It is unfair. It is theater. We are going to take care of them, and we are going to take care of everyone else who is relying on us, this caucus, to fulfill the promise we made, get the economy back on track, and start winning more than losing against our international competition. I am completely convinced that the bill that is going to be before us over the end of this week is going to do just that. Thank you, Mr. President. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia and my colleague from Colorado for their comments--and the future comments of some of my colleagues who are in the class of 2014. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to talk a little bit about facts and fiction and some of the things we will observe here. In fact, I think probably the Kennedy Center is the only place you can go to see a bigger theatrical performance than what you are going to see on this floor over the next couple of weeks, because they are simply not consistent with what we are trying to do here, and I want to talk a little bit about it. Let's start with some of the fiction. I was just presiding before I came off the dais about 30 minutes ago, and I heard a 30-minute speech from someone who said that they haven't seen the bill, said that it had been passed in the dark of night, that it is not being discussed in committee. But then they went on to have a 30-minute description of why the bill is bad How could you not have seen something and have such a definitive position on the provisions of the bill? To me, it is just curious. Here is something that is even more curious. There are so many Members--many of them friends--on the other side of the aisle who are simply making a false claim that we are somehow going to raise taxes on working families, the middle class. Why would that make sense? What on Earth would the voters of the United States and my voters in North Carolina do to me next year if I came out and declared victory because I raised taxes on middle-income and working families? It doesn't make sense, and it has been proven to be false. The Washington Post has a rating system they use. They call it the Pinocchio system. One Pinocchio means you are probably stretching the truth a little bit; four Pinocchios means there is not a shred of truth in what you are saying. These claims about raising taxes on working families and middle-income families earned four Pinocchios; they are fiction. What we are trying to do is provide a tax break to the people who need it the most--to the people who are trying to pay their bills, struggling to go to school, actually struggling just to pay the rent. That is what this tax bill is about. This tax cut is about getting the economy back on track so that we can also drive up wages. Not only do we want to provide you with more money in your pocketbook and in your wallet at the end of the month by reducing your tax burden, but we also want to make it more likely that you are going to make more money, you are going to get a better job, and you are going to have more income at the end of this process. I firmly believe that it will work. Let's talk about the facts of this plan. The facts are that we have to have tax relief. We have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. There is no way the greatest economy that has ever existed should be one of the least welcoming and least hospitable to job growth. That is why we have to reduce the corporate tax rate. We also have to reduce the tax rate on small businesses. Eighty percent of all jobs created in North Carolina are created by small businesses. The people whom the gentleman from Colorado referred to as ``the rich people'' are small business owners who actually file their taxes through their individual income. So perhaps they have a fair amount of revenue, but a lot of it has to go to pay for the business, and a little bit is left behind for them and their families and their employees. We have to reduce the tax burden on small businesses so that they can create more jobs and, hopefully, some day, become very large businesses--hopefully, corporations--creating more and more jobs and more opportunities for more workers. At the end of the day, the middle-income tax break is going to be somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000 a year. It will vary a little bit from State to State, but that is a lot of money in these very difficult times. More important than that are the opportunities that will be created through economic growth. That is what I will leave you with. I have seen this happen. First, I have seen the false claims before. They were waged against me when I was the speaker of the house in North Carolina, and we had the courage in the middle of a fiscal crisis to cut taxes and grow jobs. We had all the liberal media, and we had some of my good friends on the other side of the aisle whom I agreed with on many other issues but who disagreed with us on tax reform. But in North Carolina, no one is complaining about the tax reform results. In fact, we have one of the fastest growing State economies in the United States today, after being in the fourth quartile just 5 or 6 years ago. We have seen our median incomes go up, and we have seen a number of people lifted out of poverty at high levels. I know it works. It is not easy, but it is a promise we made to the American people last year, and it is a promise we are going to keep--this Congress is going to keep--in the coming weeks. When we do this, then we can start working on an economy that can pay down the debt and make sure that these young people who are pages here and the young people here in the gallery right now--you may not know this, but you owe about $70,000, on average, to the Federal Government. That is your share of the national debt. I don't want you to have to pay it back. I want an economy that is growing, that can ultimately resolve our debt problem. But you can do it only by producing growth, you can do it only by becoming economically competitive, and you can do it only by lifting the tax burden on businesses and working families so that money can flow back through the private economy and out of the coffers in Washington. I thank my colleagues for their hard work on this bill. I look forward to voting for the bill. I know it is going to produce a result because I have seen it produce a result in my experience as speaker of the house. It will work for America. It will be one of the great things we are going to do in this Congress. At this point, again, I thank my colleagues. I am going to pass it off to the Senator from Louisiana, Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all postcloture time be yielded back.

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

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

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I appreciate the kind words of Senator Hoeven and his affinity toward veterans. I am here to talk about our veterans as well. I come at it from three different perceptions. I chair the Military Personnel Subcommittee in the Senate Armed Services Committee. We are trying to work on things to make sure that when somebody goes out of Active Duty into veteran status, we make it as productive as it can be, making sure they enter back fully into the workforce, the education opportunities, and all the kinds of opportunities that are afforded them as a result of serving in our armed services. I also want to take a minute to talk about the person who served but never wore a uniform, and that is the husband or the wife or the children whom, on this Veterans Day, we should also thank. A lot of times, when I have an opportunity--I live in Charlotte, NC, where we have nearly 800,000 veterans. It is one of the largest populations of any one State--I make a point to get to the airport a little bit early so I can go up to the USO and just spend a moment meeting with people who are there transitioning from Active Duty and veterans to thank them for their service. Oftentimes, I will thank a man or woman, and they will say: I didn't serve; my husband or my wife did. I will say: By virtue of your being a military spouse, you served, as did your children. On this Veterans Day, let's make sure we expand those thank-yous to include everybody who is affected when somebody is deployed in a dangerous place or even serving in peacetime. It is a great sacrifice, and it is one we should always show our gratitude for. As I said, in North Carolina, we have about 800,000 veterans. We also have one of the highest military concentrations of any State. It is the home of the Global Response Force at Fort Bragg, with over 65,000 men and women serving and 38 generals. You go down closer to the coast and you get to Jacksonville, NC, where we have Camp Lejeune. There is a debate over the pronunciation so I will pronounce it both ways, but there we have nearly 45 percent of the Marine Corps. Many people don't realize that. Stationed out of North Carolina, we could go to Seymour Johnson, we could go to New River, or go to Cherry Point and see these men and women serving every day--and the ones who served before them who are now part of our veteran population. We should thank them all for their current service or their past service. I say to the Presiding Officer, the Senator from Arkansas, I want to thank you for your service because you served bravely in combat positions before entering the Senate. That is another amazing thing about the veterans. They continue to serve. If you go to a coffee shop, you may see a huddle of veterans around somebody who is organizing the event. That is probably a veteran making sure veterans are speaking with each other and working through some of the challenges some of them have when they are put in very difficult situations or, if you go into a community center, you will almost always see a veteran there continuing to serve, even after they ended their Active-Duty service. On Veterans Day, we should make it a point to go to every person we know who is a veteran and thank them. We should make sure that everybody we see in uniform--I will be at the airport probably Thursday evening or Friday. I will make it a point to go to every single person I see in uniform and thank them for their service. We owe that to them for all they do for us. I think, on the one hand, we need to think about veterans, especially on Veterans Day, but as Senator Hoeven said, we need to think about them every day. As a Senator, the way we do that is not just by thinking but by doing. What more can I do in my capacity on the Veterans' Affairs Committee or in my capacity on the Senate Armed Services Committee to make service easier and safer? After they move out of Active status to veteran status, what more can we do for them? There are a lot of things we can do; one is to make sure they get an opportunity to have a job that, in many cases, will leverage the skills they learned when they were in the military into private sector jobs. Mr. President, you and I sponsored a bill--the VALOR Act--that will be brought up before the Senate that helps to actually expedite the process of having those who have served in the military to get hired. It makes it easier for employers to put them in apprenticeship positions, where maybe they leverage some of the skills they learned while on Active Duty but get them in good-paying jobs to support themselves and their families. There are a number of other things we have to do for others who are veterans that I think are particularly important. When we talk about post-traumatic stress or talk about traumatic brain injury, those are, in some cases, invisible wounds of war. We need to make sure and understand why it is that nearly every day 20 veterans take their lives through suicide. To what extent could that be something we just simply didn't know about that veteran? Why are they disproportionately more likely to do it? Many of them, incidentally--the veterans today who have this disproportionately high amount of suicide incidents--are veterans from the Vietnam war. We need to figure out how to reach back to that population--a significant number of whom never seek VA medical services--to provide them with the resources they need to work through these sorts of challenges. We need to make sure healthcare is available across the map. We need to recognize that challenge in North Carolina is vastly different than the same challenge in, say, South Dakota. We have a State population of 10 million people--almost approaching 1 million veterans. When you include the spouses and families, it is well above it. We need to make sure they are getting healthcare and services where it is most convenient for them. I think some of that will be providing them with a choice to go to the doctor who makes the most sense for them. A lot of it will be providing a brick-and-mortar presence of the VA so they can be among other people who are actually dealing with the same sorts of circumstances, and they are actually being served by--about half the population in our veterans hospitals and our healthcare centers are veterans themselves. This is a very important part of the broader solution we need to provide to our veterans as we continue to build a relationship with them for the rest of their lives. We will never finish all the work we should do. We will keep on making installments into a debt we can never repay, but what we need to do on November 11 is support our veterans by showing our gratitude and our thanks for their service. On this Veterans Day, make an extra effort to thank a veteran. Thank a veteran spouse. Thank the child of a veteran for their service to this great Nation. We will never be able to fully repay the debt we owe them, but we can make a lot of installments as individual citizens and as Members of this Congress. As long as I am in the Senate, that is what I intend to do. I say to the Presiding Officer, thank you, again, for your service, and thank you to all the men and women who served before. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. TILLIS

Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I fully associate myself with the comments just made by the Senator from the great State of Alaska. We have to get to work here.