Chris Van Hollen

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you, Mr. President. I see Senator Menendez from New Jersey has arrived. He is a cosponsor, together with Senator Cantwell and myself, on this amendment, and I want to thank Senator Cantwell for her leadership. She has covered a lot of important points. The main one is, from the beginning of our Federal Tax Code in 1913, we have established a principle in the United States to avoid double taxation. It makes no sense that any citizens of this country send a dollar of tax to their State governments to help schools or roads in their State, and then they are turned around and taxed on that same dollar by the Federal Government, but that is exactly what this Republican tax plan is doing. Now, weeks and weeks ago, the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, and the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, made these public statements about how these Republican tax bills weren't going to raise taxes on anybody. They both had to publicly reverse those statements because, in order to provide huge tax breaks to the biggest corporations of this country, this bill will require millions and millions of middle-class families to increase their taxes, and a main vehicle for doing that is by removing the deduction for those citizens. I am just going to give you some quick numbers: 100 million Americans today use the deduction for State and local taxes. In fact, half of the families in my State of Maryland use it. Thirty-eight percent of taxpayers making between $50,000 and $75,000 claim the State and local deduction. That is 7.6 million households. Fifty-six percent of taxpayers who make under $100,000 claim the State and local deduction, and 86 percent of taxpayers making under $200,000 claim the State and local deduction. It is wrong to double tax those families in order to provide a huge tax break for big corporations. Just to add insult to injury, the corporations in our State still get to deduct their State and local taxes. We just don't let the people in our State do the same thing. Let's adopt this amendment.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, may I inquire how much time remains on the unanimous consent agreement for this amendment?

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I intend to offer the following motions to H.R. 1, and I ask unanimous consent that they be printed in the Record.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I intend to offer the following motion to H.R. 1, and I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record. The motion is supported by Senators Carper and Warner.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Now, to add insult to injury, this is not the only part of this bill that actually tips the playing field in favor of our economic competitors overseas and against the American worker and against the American taxpayer. If you look at the corporate tax cuts in this bill, they are permanent. They go on forever. Year after year, corporations will get that tax cut in the United States of America. Whereas, if you are an individual household in America, millions of middle-class taxpayers will see an immediate increase in their taxes. Some will see a small cut in their taxes for a period of time, but in the long run, those individual tax cuts go away, and the corporate tax cuts go on forever. Of course, the theory behind this is trickle-down economics; right? You are going to give the very wealthy and big corporations the tax cut, and the benefits of that are going to trickle down and lift everybody up. I think we know that this theory has run aground and run into the wall of reality many times over. Most recently, in the early 2000s, we had the Bush tax cut. It was the same theory--to cut taxes for the superwealthy and somehow the benefits were going to trickle down and lift everybody up. I will tell you who it lifted up. The wealthy did even better. The other thing that went up is our deficit and debt, but everybody else was either running in place or falling behind. That was our most recent experiment in trickle down. We also have an immediate present example of why this theory of giving big tax cuts to corporations and the idea that it is going to raise wages is just dead wrong. As we sit here tonight, American corporations are making record profits. That is a great thing. But guess what. Wages are flat. So by increasing the after-tax profits of those corporations, they are not going to use that extra money to raise wages. They are not doing it today. They are not doing it today. The stock market will go up, and stockholders will definitely have greater value, because you are a corporation. The day after this tax bill gets passed, if it passes, your after-tax profits just went up. The stock market is doing great. The problem is, most Americans--the overwhelming amount of Americans--don't benefit from that rising stock market. We know the people who benefit most are the folks at the very top. Here is the thing that I think many people will be surprised by. A very large group of those stockholders are not even American citizens. They are foreign stockholders--stockholders who have these investments in American corporations. In fact, 35 percent of the stock in these corporations are foreign shares--35 percent of the value of that stock. So I can tell you that they are going to be clicking the champagne glasses in capitals around the world because those very wealthy foreigners are going to get a big tax cut. In fact, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that the value of the tax cut to foreign stockholders just in the year 2019 will be over $30 billion. That is in 1 year for foreign stockholders. In that same year, in 2019, taxes will go up by over $27 billion on American citizens. There is great news for the American public. Some $27 billion are transferred from American households into the pockets of foreign stockholders--what a great deal for the American public. They are going to be thrilled to see that their hard-earned dollars are going to increase the bank accounts of foreign stockholders. This is the kind of information that is beginning to come out as people get a chance to look more at the consequences of this bill. This is the exact reason that Republicans are trying to rush this through the Senate. I can tell you, when the American public sees that their taxes are going up to pay for foreign stockholders, I think all of us agree that they aren't going to like it. The problem is this is also part of a pattern. The corporate tax cuts go on forever, and those foreign stockholders, every year--this is in 2019--keep getting a big windfall, a big bonanza. But if you are an American taxpayer, you are on the short end of the stick because millions of American middle-class families will see their taxes go up right away. As I said, others may see a small tax cut originally, but it will fizzle out. So here is the overall impact. In 2019, you are going to see 13 million American families who earn less than $200,000 a year pay higher taxes under this Republican bill--13 million families. It gets worse from there because the benefits that some people will get in the short term begin to fizzle out and then get snuffed out altogether at the end of 10 years. By the year 2025, it is going to go from 13 million middle-class American families to 19 million middle-class families who are going to be paying higher taxes. By the way, at the same time, the Republican bill will give a tax cut of an average of $40,000 a year to people who make more than $1 million a year. It gets even worse for families in and after the year 2025 because all of the individual tax cuts expire. Tax cuts for the foreign stockholders keep going on. They go on forever. By 2027, the Republican plan will raise taxes on 87 million American families. Now, we actually just had some information come out. It was just released to the public this evening. This is from the Joint Committee on Taxation. These are the folks who are the professionals who look at the impact of the tax bill. They analyze it, and they let people know the facts. Here is what they said. When this bill runs its course in the year 2027--here is the bottom line--23 percent of American households are going to see their taxes go up, and 16 percent will see their taxes go down. So more American households will see their taxes go up than go down. Some 61 percent, they estimate, see virtually no change at all. Again, these are families, not corporations. The corporations, including those foreign stockholders, keep seeing the benefits. Here is the other thing the Joint Committee on Taxation is telling us. Of the people who get a cut, the largest share of any one group are people who make $1 million and up. In fact, it says of those in that category, that 57 percent of the households will get a tax cut. Those are the millionaires. If you look at middle-income folks, there are much smaller percentages in those categories. I just have to ask my colleagues how it is that you try to sell a plan as a middle-class tax cut when, at the end of the day, more Americans are going to see their taxes go up than go down. I think the American people are going to be more and more surprised if this bill passes as to what is in it. So we have a chance to actually step back right now. We have a chance to step back and actually take a good look at the bill, and we can figure out which of these consequences are intended and which of these consequences are unintended. There is time to fix some of these issues. The last point I wish to make is that in addition to middle-class families--millions of them who are going to have to pay more to pay for the big corporate tax cut--we are also going to see a number of other groups of Americans who are going to be hit hard. We know that millions of people who get their health insurance through the exchanges are going to see their premiums go up to pay for big tax cuts for corporations. We know that even after all of that--after those Americans have to pay more in premiums and after millions of middle- class families are going to have to pay more--we still have a $1.5 trillion debt. I am just going to ask my Republican colleagues, with whom I have worked for many years and with whom I have agreed that we need to find a bipartisan way to reduce our deficits and debt rather than increase our deficits and debt, what their plan is. Here is the secret--not really a secret, actually. I invite everybody to look at the budget that passed the Senate and the House of Representatives, because it tells us right there in the budget what the plan is to reduce some of that debt that will be increased because of tax cuts. The proposal is right there: A $1 trillion cut to Medicaid over 10 years, a $473 billion cut to Medicare over 10 years, and cuts to the whole category of our budget we use to invest in education. So the bottom line is that this bill is going to provide whopping tax cuts to corporations. It is going to have the effect of encouraging and incentivizing more of those corporations to move jobs, plants, and equipment overseas, and it is going to ask almost everybody else in the country to pick up the tab. That is not the kind of tax reform the American people bargained for. I urge my colleagues to take a step back, to work together on a bipartisan basis, and to come up with a plan that actually works for the country. I hope that can happen. I yield the floor.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, let me start by thanking the Senator from Massachusetts for always telling it like it is because what we have before us in the Senate is going to do grave harm to our country, not just next year and the year after but for many years to come. We still have an opportunity to stop that from happening through our votes tomorrow. Let me also say at the outset that we need to enact tax reform in the United States of America. We need to simplify. We need to streamline. We need to reform our Tax Code. We need to get rid of all of those tax loopholes that had been put in our Tax Code by powerful special interests that have been able to hire high-priced lobbyists and get something in our Tax Code, not because it is good public policy, not because it is good for the majority of Americans but because it is good for some group of special interests. We need real tax reform. That is not what the bill in front of us does. What this bill does is take a Tax Code that is already stacked in favor of the most powerful and the most wealthy and rig it even more in favor of the most powerful and the most wealthy, and that is hard to do. You have to work at doing that. Our Republican colleagues have succeeded in taking something that was already stacked in favor of those groups and making it even worse. That is why we see this effort to jam this bill through the Senate in just a few weeks because our Republican colleagues know the more the American public sees this bill, the more they will hate this bill, and the more they will realize it is going to mean their taxes are going up, in many cases, and harm to the American economy. We debated the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the Senate, not for a long time but at least over a couple of months' period. What happened is, as that debate went on, more and more people around the country engaged. All the nurses, all the doctors, and all the hospitals--I mean, rural hospitals, suburban hospitals, urban hospitals--said that is bad for our healthcare. This Senate, at the end of the day, did the right thing. Unfortunately, the lesson learned was not to get the input from the American public but try to rush something through before people can figure out exactly what is in it, and that is what is happening in the Senate today and tomorrow. One example of the harm this bill will do hasn't gotten a lot of attention. I want to talk about what this bill does in its changes to how we tax U.S. corporations that have operations overseas. These are big multinational corporations that have operations in the United States but also have the ability to move their plant and equipment overseas and hire people overseas instead of hiring Americans here at home. There is a provision in this Senate Republican bill that is going to dramatically increase the incentives for U.S. multinational corporations to move operations and jobs overseas, and here is why. Under this bill, American corporations that are doing business in the United States will pay a 20-percent corporate tax rate. It reduces the corporate tax rate down to 20 percent, but it also says something else. If you are an American corporation and you move your operations overseas, the profits you make on your overseas operations pay zero percent U.S. tax rate. Immediately, you have an incentive to move your business from Baltimore City--or from any other city in this country or place in this country--to another place that has a lower tax rate. For example, Ireland has a 12.5-percent tax rate. If you move your business to Ireland, you are going to be paying 12.5 percent on your profits instead of the 20 percent you are paying here. If you move to Hungary, you are going to pay 9 percent on the profits you earn in Hungary; whereas, you would have paid 20 percent on your profits if you keep those operations in the United States. So immediately you have an incentive to move those operations overseas. Even if you move those operations to a country that has a higher tax rate than, say, Ireland or Hungary, there are easy ways to put those profits you earn in a place like the UK or Japan and put them in lower tax areas like the Cayman Islands or Bermuda. Right off the bat, this creates a perverse additional incentive to put American jobs overseas. So our Republican colleagues say: OK. Not to worry. We have a fix for this issue. We are going to create this minimum U.S. tax on large profits of overseas operations. In other words, if you are a U.S. corporation, you move to Ireland, you can make a certain amount of money there, but if you go over a certain amount, we are going to put a minimum American tax on top of the tax you pay in Ireland. This is a problem when you rush through a bill like this. The problem is, the cure is worse than the disease. Here is why. Look at this chart. First thing you say is, there is a lower tax rate in Ireland than in Baltimore City so I am going to move some of my operations overseas--my plant and equipment. In fact, I am going to move $10 million of investment overseas. Now, in Ireland, I am going to be paying 12.5 percent on my profits, versus 20 percent here in the United States. That is a pretty good move. Now let's see if this minimum tax has any impact and what the impact would be. Well, what the Republican tax bill says is that if your earnings overseas exceed 10 percent of your investment in tangible property--what is tangible property? The plant, equipment, your factory. So if you spend $10 million and move your plant, equipment, and factory overseas, you are going to be able to make a 10-percent profit there with no additional U.S. tax. But if you earn more than that--let's say you earn $1,200,000--instead of a 10-percent return, which would have been $1 million, aha, now this minimum tax applies but just to that excess profit. So you are now going to pay the lower tax rate in Ireland on your first million, but you are going to pay 10 percent on the $200,000. So you are going to pay $20,000 in U.S. taxes. What if you don't want to pay even that? Here is what is so outrageous about this bill. I don't know if it is intentional or unintentional. If I am a U.S. corporation, the way I fix this problem is I move another $10 million worth of plant and equipment out of Maryland into Ireland. So now I have got my $10 million investment that I moved from Baltimore to Ireland, and I am going to move another one. Now, as long as I keep my overall returns to 10 percent, I am not going to pay that excess minimum tax. So if my first company has a 12-percent return and the second one has an 8-percent return, together they have a 10-percent return. So I end up, by moving more plant and equipment from the State of Maryland to Ireland, that I don't even pay that minimum U.S. tax. In fact, every time I get close to having to pay that minimum U.S. tax, I can solve my problem by moving more American jobs overseas. That is insane. I hope our colleagues will take a look at this, because this is going to do great damage to the American economy. You don't have to take my word for it. You have a lot of economists who have taken a look at this provision. I am just going to read from one. His name is Edward Kleinbard. He was the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation. We all know they are the professionals. They are the nonpartisan professionals who analyze these bills. Here is what he had to say: ``The administration's tax cut proposal is coupled with a territorial tax system, which permanently exempts foreign income from taxation; this will further tilt the playing field in favor of foreign, rather than U.S., investment.'' I ask unanimous consent that the other quotations from the economists be printed in the Record.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, today I am introducing the Chesapeake Bay Farm Bill Enhancements Act of 2017 to accelerate our efforts to restore the health of one of America's greatest natural treasures--the Chesapeake Bay. This legislation will strengthen our Bay clean-up program by increasing and better targeting resources under the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), which is administered by the Department of Agriculture (USDA). I have long advocated for more effective protection, preservation, and restoration of the Chesapeake Bay. During the development of the Farm Bill of 2008, I worked with my colleagues to adopt the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Initiative, which provided assistance to farmers to help them prevent the excessive runoff of nutrients and sediments into the Bay and its tributaries. As a result of that initiative, about $50 million was invested annually in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. In the 2014 Farm Bill, the RCPP was established to expand the successful concept of the Chesapeake Bay Initiative to our vital watersheds in the country. The goal of RCPP is to encourage stakeholders to partner with agricultural producers to increase the restoration and sustainable use of soil, water, wildlife and related natural resources on regional or watershed scales. Mr. President, while very successful nationally, the overall investment in Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts through the RCPP has been reduced relative to investments that were made under the stand- alone Chesapeake Bay Watershed Initiative. That is why today I am introducing the Chesapeake Bay Farm Bill Enhancements Act to make refinements to the RCPP in order to improve conservation efforts in the Chesapeake Bay--and other vital watersheds--through providing additional funding, bolstering the role of critical conservation areas, and improving technical assistance. On funding, this bill will triple the amount of mandatory funding for RCPP available per fiscal year from $100 million to $300 million. The bill also allows in-kind support to count towards a partner's matching contribution to a project. The Chesapeake Bay has already been designated as a Critical Conservation Area under the RCPP. However, my bill will make refinements to the requirements for partnership agreements awarded within Critical Conservation Areas that recognize key strengths of the Chesapeake Bay region. For example, the bill will strengthen the definitions of a critical conservation area to include critical conservation conditions that would improve water quality and water quantity. Furthermore, the bill adds a prioritization for partnership agreement applications that implement the project consistent with multi-State watershed restoration plans and bring together a diverse array of stakeholders into a project. I have heard from many organizations in my state and others states in the Bay watershed that there is a significant need for better technical assistance to better implement the RCPP. Therefore, my bill authorizes the USDA to advance reasonable amounts of funding to eligible partners for technical assistance. Also, the bill allows the USDA to provide written feedback to applicants throughout the application process on how the proposals can be improved. Mr. President, I am pleased to be joined in introducing the bill by Senator Cardin, a long-time supporter of the Chesapeake Bay. My other Bay state colleagues, Senators Capito, Kaine, Casey, Manchin, Warner, Carper, Coons and Gillibrand are also original cosponsors of the Chesapeake Bay Farm Bill Enhancements Act. My former colleague Congressman Bobby Scott is introducing a companion measure in the House of Representatives. Furthermore, I am grateful that this bill has the support of Maryland Governor Hogan, 4 other Governors within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, the Mayor of the District of Columbia, and the Chesapeake Bay Commission. This bill is also supported by over 70 organizations such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and Choose Clean Water. Together, I look forward to working together to see the inclusion of this important legislation in the next Farm Bill.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims commemorates the millions of people killed and injured on the world's roads. It is also a day to thank emergency services for their role in saving lives; to reflect on the impact of road deaths on families and communities; and to draw attention to the need for improved legislation, awareness, infrastructure, technology, and post-crash responses to save more families from the tragedy of losing a loved one. The theme of this year's World Day of Remembrance is ``2020 Target: Reduce Road Fatalities and Serious Injuries by 50%.'' It refers to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3.6 which calls on governments and their stakeholders, including NGOs and private citizens, to address the personal, medical, and financial burden that road deaths and injuries cause; 1.25 million people die from road crashes every year, and tens of millions are seriously injured. Road traffic crashes are the No. 1 killer of young people aged 15 to 29 and the eighth leading cause of death among all people worldwide. Rochelle Sobel, president of the Association for Safe International Road Travel, said, ``The World Day of Remembrance is an important opportunity to stand together with the global community to commemorate road victims and call for an end to the crisis on our roads. No one should have to go through the needless, preventable loss of a child, a brother, a mother, a friend, killed in a road traffic crash. This year's theme to reduce the number of deaths by 50% by 2020, reminds us of the need to drive responsibly, educate our children, and advocate with our governments to implement and enforce policies that will protect road users and prevent more families from suffering the pain of losing a loved one on the road.''

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, today I am introducing the Chesapeake Bay Farm Bill Enhancements Act of 2017 to accelerate our efforts to restore the health of one of America's greatest natural treasures--the Chesapeake Bay. This legislation will strengthen our Bay clean-up program by increasing and better targeting resources under the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), which is administered by the Department of Agriculture (USDA). I have long advocated for more effective protection, preservation, and restoration of the Chesapeake Bay. During the development of the Farm Bill of 2008, I worked with my colleagues to adopt the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Initiative, which provided assistance to farmers to help them prevent the excessive runoff of nutrients and sediments into the Bay and its tributaries. As a result of that initiative, about $50 million was invested annually in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. In the 2014 Farm Bill, the RCPP was established to expand the successful concept of the Chesapeake Bay Initiative to our vital watersheds in the country. The goal of RCPP is to encourage stakeholders to partner with agricultural producers to increase the restoration and sustainable use of soil, water, wildlife and related natural resources on regional or watershed scales. Mr. President, while very successful nationally, the overall investment in Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts through the RCPP has been reduced relative to investments that were made under the stand- alone Chesapeake Bay Watershed Initiative. That is why today I am introducing the Chesapeake Bay Farm Bill Enhancements Act to make refinements to the RCPP in order to improve conservation efforts in the Chesapeake Bay--and other vital watersheds--through providing additional funding, bolstering the role of critical conservation areas, and improving technical assistance. On funding, this bill will triple the amount of mandatory funding for RCPP available per fiscal year from $100 million to $300 million. The bill also allows in-kind support to count towards a partner's matching contribution to a project. The Chesapeake Bay has already been designated as a Critical Conservation Area under the RCPP. However, my bill will make refinements to the requirements for partnership agreements awarded within Critical Conservation Areas that recognize key strengths of the Chesapeake Bay region. For example, the bill will strengthen the definitions of a critical conservation area to include critical conservation conditions that would improve water quality and water quantity. Furthermore, the bill adds a prioritization for partnership agreement applications that implement the project consistent with multi-State watershed restoration plans and bring together a diverse array of stakeholders into a project. I have heard from many organizations in my state and others states in the Bay watershed that there is a significant need for better technical assistance to better implement the RCPP. Therefore, my bill authorizes the USDA to advance reasonable amounts of funding to eligible partners for technical assistance. Also, the bill allows the USDA to provide written feedback to applicants throughout the application process on how the proposals can be improved. Mr. President, I am pleased to be joined in introducing the bill by Senator Cardin, a long-time supporter of the Chesapeake Bay. My other Bay state colleagues, Senators Capito, Kaine, Casey, Manchin, Warner, Carper, Coons and Gillibrand are also original cosponsors of the Chesapeake Bay Farm Bill Enhancements Act. My former colleague Congressman Bobby Scott is introducing a companion measure in the House of Representatives. Furthermore, I am grateful that this bill has the support of Maryland Governor Hogan, 4 other Governors within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, the Mayor of the District of Columbia, and the Chesapeake Bay Commission. This bill is also supported by over 70 organizations such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and Choose Clean Water. Together, I look forward to working together to see the inclusion of this important legislation in the next Farm Bill.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, we are having a chance now to take a look at the House and Senate Republican tax plans. Both of these plans were cooked up largely in secret, and as more information comes out, we see more and more how much damage they are going to do to our country. The plans have many features that overlap, and one of those overlapping features is that both of them provide a massive tax giveaway to big corporations and powerful special interests. The Wall Street Journal, in an article just a little while back that was looking at the House plan, talked about a provision that is also in the Senate plan. They said that, at a 20-percent corporate tax rate, banks stand to be among the biggest winners from tax reform according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. The five biggest diversified U.S. banks alone might have had tax savings of $11.5 billion in 2016 at that rate. In other words, if that 20 percent rate had been in place back in 2016, those big banks--the biggest banks--would have seen that huge windfall, that huge additional profit. A recent analysis from Bloomberg Law estimates that banks could see a 12-percent drop in their effective tax rates and an 18-percent increase in their profits. This is at a time that the biggest banks in the United States--not the community banks, but the biggest banks in this country--are already making huge profits, and this just provides them with an extra tax windfall that is going to be paid by millions of middle-class taxpayers and paid by increasing our national debt. Of course, as the national debt goes up, people will come around and say: OK, let's also pay for them by cutting Medicare and Medicaid. In fact, that is right there in the Senate Republican budget. So the bottom line is that both the House and the Senate Republican tax plans are big giveaways to big corporations, paid for by many other Americans. Now, this is not the only way the Trump administration is working to provide big giveaways to the biggest banks. We remember back during the financial crisis and the meltdown that taxpayers had to be brought in to save big financial institutions in order to protect the larger economy. It was a terribly difficult decision people had to make to protect the economy, and at that time we said: Never again are we going to allow the big banks on Wall Street to gamble in a way that leaves taxpayers--all of our constituents--on the hook. They can take risks, but they shouldn't be taking risks with taxpayer money. That was the whole purpose of the Wall Street reforms. Now comes the Trump administration, and in addition to a tax plan that wants to provide big corporate breaks to the biggest banks, they want to take down a lot of the guardrails that prevent banks from taking big risks that taxpayers will end up paying for. One of the ways they are trying to bring down those guardrails is by appointing people to very important positions within the government who oversee the big banks but who have a history of very cozy relationships with those big banks, so that they can bring down the guardrails which, once again, will expose taxpayers to the risks of gambling on Wall Street. Mr. President, that brings me to the nomination that is before the Senate today, the nomination of Joseph Otting to be the next Comptroller of the Currency. With so much going on right now, I wish to take one moment to step back and talk about what the Comptroller does, because the Comptroller of the Currency plays a critical role in ensuring the stability of our national banking system. It is there to make sure that our banks don't blow up our financial system in the kind of way we saw happen in 2008 and the years leading up to that. The OCC has been an independent agency since the Civil War. The Comptroller has to be confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate, and the reason that process was put in place was to make sure we preserved the agency's independence and safeguarded our financial system from the whims of the executive branch. You don't want somebody at the head of the OCC who is simply the lackey for the administration--whatever administration might be in power. Now, the OCC is responsible for the supervision of more than 1,400 national banks and Federal savings associations and about 50 Federal branches and agencies of foreign banks in the United States. These institutions together comprise nearly two-thirds of the assets of the commercial banking system. They require prudent, smart, reasonable regulation to ensure that they comply with the laws that Congress has passed to prevent another financial crisis--to prevent another financial crisis in which it was not Wall Street executives who, at the end of the day, were left holding the bag, but it was the American people who had to pay the bill and who took it on the chin in the form of a collapsing economy and lost jobs and wages. Yet we see this President and the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Mnuchin, continuing down the path to lower those guardrails and expose taxpayers to greater risk. One of the things they need to do that is to have somebody at the head of OCC who is not going to be an independent person but somebody who is willing to do the bidding of the Secretary of the Treasury and the President of the United States. As I said, normally the OCC leader is supposed to go through the confirmation process to preserve that independence, but under the Trump administration, they wanted to get going right away in lowering the guardrails and giving big banks more running room even if that put taxpayers at risk. So rather than offer a Senate nominee early in the year, the President and Secretary Mnuchin used an underhanded tactic to install a person by the name of Keith Noreika as Comptroller. By using this procedure, they sidestepped the Senate confirmation process and, by the way, also allowed Mr. Noreika to sidestep the Trump administration's ethics pledge and ethics requirements. So that is who is there right now--Mr. Noreika--and he has spent most of his career, prior to taking that position, telling big banks how they can avoid regulations that are designed to protect taxpayers and protect the economy. In fact, if you look at the ethics forms that he did file, he had to recuse himself from virtually all the major banks that the OCC regulates. His work in the private sector created an unprecedented series of conflicts of interests far more than any other person in that position and underscoring the need for someone to have to go through the Senate confirmation process, rather than trying to short-circuit that process with underhanded tactics. I was very concerned about the use of this runaround and asked the Secretary's inspector general to initiate an investigation into the means and manner of that appointment, because what happened was that Mr. Noreika was designated what is called ``a special government employee,'' or an SGE. When you use that mechanism, you are only supposed to have the person serve in that position for 130 days of the year. It is a very unusual type of appointment and almost never used when it comes to the head of an agency. In fact, this may be close to the first time. Well, that 130-day deadline, if you count by calendar days, expired in September. Yet now we have a new interpretation of the law, which is a wild stretch, saying: Well, it is not calendar days. We are going to count it as business days. But the whole point here is that this mechanism--this underhanded mechanism--has been used to allow this new person, Mr. Noreika, at the OCC. In that period of time, by looking at what he has done, we can see he wasn't installed there just to be a caretaker. He has been very active in those early months in working very hard to lower many of the protections we have put in place for taxpayers and for our financial system. He was in the middle of the effort to repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's mandatory arbitration rule, to roll back the OCC's Community Reinvestment Act supervisory guidance, and to eliminate the deposit advance guidance rule, which is a rule that makes it more difficult for national banks to provide payday loans at outrageous rates that are unaffordable to the people who take them out. Since Mr. Noreika has been at the OCC, the OCC has been involved in helping one of his former clients circumvent Federal guidance intended to prevent banks from shopping around for hands-off regulators who will not scrutinize their activities--in other words, forum shopping for bank regulators. Just this morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that on November 7 the Bank of Tokyo converted the license of its New York State branch from a State license to a Federal license. So why did they do that? Why did they do that at this time? Well, this decision to change regulators came in the middle of an ongoing investigation by the New York Department of Financial Services into that bank's lack of scrutiny of its clients, some of whom are suspected of evading U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea. Now, the OCC's licensing manual says that it draws heavily on information received from the Office's current U.S. supervisor and other confidential and supervisory information available to the OCC when considering the application from a financial institution that wants to switch from State supervision to Federal supervision. That courtesy and that guideline were not applied in this case. That information and that notice were not provided to the New York Department of Financial Services, and the OCC has refused to act in response to this effort by the financial institution to evade oversight. As a result, the Bank of Tokyo--which is a former client of the current head of the OCC, Mr. Noreika--is now going to be supervised by his office. It appears to have successfully dodged an active investigation into its clients' potential evasion of U.S. sanctions on foreign adversaries--in this case, North Korea and Iran. So that is the person who was installed by the Trump administration during these first months, from the beginning of the year until now, using this underhanded method. Finally, we now have the nomination put forward for the person who will permanently be proposed to head up the OCC, Joseph Otting. In Mr. Otting, we have another example of somebody whose entire career has been spent working with banks and other major financial institutions to try to evade important consumer protections and taxpayer protections. In fact, Mr. Otting and his bank were able to profit very handsomely from the mortgage crisis. The CEO of OneWest during part of that crisis was the person who is now Secretary of the Treasury, Stephen Mnuchin. He was the head of OneWest during the foreclosure crisis. During that time, OneWest had what many have called a foreclosure machine in place. Mr. Otting, who is going to be the head of the OCC--and whom we would hope would be more independent, as required by the charter of the OCC-- was there working for the Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, at OneWest. Mr. Otting was there working at OneWest when the bank foreclosed on nearly 40,000 Americans. OneWest received more than $1 billion in taxpayer money to cover OneWest's losses. Those are exactly the kind of losses we are trying to avoid in the aftermath of the crisis; that we are trying to avoid by adopting the Wall Street reform bill Dodd-Frank so taxpayers--our constituents-- aren't left holding the bag for decisions made by people like Mr. Otting or Mr. Mnuchin. According to one media summary, OneWest Bank ``rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.'' In the reverse mortgage business, OneWest-controlled firm Financial Freedom engaged in practices that led to more than 16,000 foreclosures, a far greater number than would be expected based on the company's market share. Elderly individuals who had recently suffered the death of a spouse were victimized. In one case, Financial Freedom attempted to evict a 90-year-old woman from her home over a 27-cent error on her insurance payment. In another case, a New York State Supreme Court judge called OneWest's foreclosure practices ``harsh, repugnant, shocking, and repulsive.'' Yet the person who has now been nominated to lead the OCC--Office of the Comptroller of the Currency--a person who is supposed to be looking out for consumers' and taxpayers' interests and providing for a sound banking system that doesn't melt down our economy, is Mr. Otting. He was the person who was in the middle of these OneWest foreclosure transactions. I hope this body will not support that nomination.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

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

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

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

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, as we all know, President Trump is now in China on an important trip, where his top priority is obtaining China's cooperation in confronting North Korea's nuclear weapons program. While we should continue to seek China's cooperation in applying economic and other pressures on North Korea, we also need to send a very clear and strong message to banks in China and throughout the world that there will be a price to pay for lack of cooperation. That is why I am pleased that yesterday, before President Trump arrived in China, the Senate Banking Committee, on a unanimous basis, passed a bill to impose and enforce mandatory sanctions against banks and financial firms in China or anywhere else in the world that help to prop up the regime of Kim Jong Un. The bill is named the Otto Warmbier Banking Restrictions Involving North Korea Act, or the BRINK Act, for short. I introduced this bill with Senator Toomey earlier this year, after North Korea engaged in its threatening and provocative missile launches. I want to thank Senator Toomey for his partnership in developing the BRINK Act. I want to thank Mr. Crapo, chairman of the Banking Committee, and Ranking Member Brown for their leadership in addressing the North Korean threat and working to pass this bill out of the Banking Committee with unanimous support. I want to thank all of the members of the Banking Committee for their bipartisan effort on this matter. I also want to thank the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Corker, and the Ranking Member, Senator Cardin, for their bipartisan leadership in confronting the threat of North Korea, and also the leadership of the East Asia Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Senators Gardner and Markey. They have been consistent in their efforts to address the North Korean threat and to seek a peaceful resolution of this crisis. Back in August, I had the opportunity to visit South Korea, Japan, and China, as part of a bipartisan delegation that was led by Senator Markey. We had the opportunity to travel not only to the DMZ zone between South and North Korea but also to visit the city of Dandong, which is a Chinese city on the border between China and North Korea, along the Yalu River. That is where a lot of the cross-border trade and transactions between North Korea and China take place. The threat posed by North Korea to the United States and our allies is very real. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford, testified in September that North Korea has the capability to strike the United States' mainland with an intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korea has ramped up the pace of its ballistic missile tests, firing two ballistic missiles over Japan in recent months. In September North Korea conducted its sixth test of a nuclear weapon--the largest yet. The question is this: How do we deal with this threat? Way back when it came to foreign policy and national security issues, President Teddy Roosevelt counseled that we should ``speak softly and carry a big stick.'' President Trump and all of us would be wise to heed that advice. Bluster and overheated rhetoric not only will not work, but they raise the risk of miscalculation and war with North Korea. It is much better to steadily and dramatically ratchet up the pressure on North Korea to come to the negotiating table with the goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. That strategy has to include lots of elements, but an indispensable tool is putting much greater pressure on Pyongyang. Despite what many people think, North Korea is not sanctioned out. It is not as if we already applied and enforced maximum economic pressure on North Korea. In fact, our existing sanctions regime against North Korea is much weaker than the sanctions regime we had in place against Iran in the lead-up to the Iran nuclear deal. That is because the United States and others have not seriously gone after the foreign banks and firms that support the North Korean leadership and its cronies. The reality is that North Korea's economy is not as weak or isolated as many believe. Its annual GDP is estimated to be $40 billion, and China accounts for almost 90 percent of North Korea's trade. The United Nations has repeatedly found that North Korea evades the existing international sanctions effort and maintains access to the international financial system, primarily through a comprehensive network of Chinese-based front companies. North Korea relies heavily on this network to directly support its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. We have no time to waste. We must sever Kim Jong Un's economic lifeline. That is why Senator Toomey and I have introduced the BRINK Act and why it received such strong support. The BRINK Act targets this illicit financial network by imposing mandatory sanctions on those doing business with North Korea. It sends a clear and unequivocal message to foreign banks and foreign firms: You can do business with North Korea or you can do business with the United States, but you cannot do business with both. That is the choice we placed before other countries with respect to Iran, and it helped to generate the pressure to bring Iran to the negotiating table. If you trade with North Korea, you will not have any access to the U.S. markets. This, as I indicated, is the choice that we ultimately gave to Iran back in 2010, and the BRINK Act is modeled after the sanctions laws that we applied in the case of Iran that brought them ultimately to the negotiating table. Our goal is to cut off North Korea's remaining access to the international financial system, deprive Kim Jong Un of the resources needed for his regime's survival, and create the leverage necessary for serious negotiations. Some critics of this approach argue that China may lash out at the United States or respond in kind. The gravity of the situation compels us to act regardless of Beijing's reaction in these circumstances. Simply asking China for its cooperation is not enough. It has to be backed up by a clear message and law from the United States that there are severe penalties for those who do not cooperate and do not abide by the sanctions. That is what this bill is all about. It is also important to note that when secondary sanctions on Iran were put into place, the Chinese Government issued a tepid public protest, and then privately directed its sanctioned banks to stop working with Iran. In other words, after some quiet protest, they complied with that secondary sanctions regime on Iran. Moreover, Beijing claimed just this September that it is directing its banks to freeze any North Korean accounts--a directive which, if true, is long overdue. But it will be hard for China to say that we shouldn't take this action if it is an action they already said they directed their banks to take. This makes it clear that it will be in China's economic interests to fully enforce the sanctions on North Korea. I am clear-eyed about the challenges we face in bringing North Korea to the negotiating table. Previous Democratic and Republican administrations have failed to end North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, and because of this, some argue that Kim Jong Un will never give up his nuclear program. To those critics, my response is simply that we have not exhausted all of our options on North Korea. There is incredible leakage right now in the sanctions regime, and that leakage is what the BRINK Act is designed to address and to close the loopholes and put teeth into the sanctions. The choice between accepting a nuclear North Korea or launching some kind of preventive war is a false one. I strongly believe that this aggressive secondary sanctions regime, as part of an overall coherent strategy backed by our allies and the threat of force, is our best remaining chance of achieving a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. Right now, we face no more urgent task than achieving a peaceful resolution on the North Korean nuclear crisis. We need clear thinking. We need courage. We need common sense on the choices before us. At stake is not just the security of those in the region but, ultimately, of the United States. It is incumbent on all of us to ensure that the pursuit of peace prevails in this effort. I ask my colleagues in the Senate to follow the lead of the Banking Committee in giving this a unanimous bipartisan vote in the Senate so we can get this to the House as soon as possible and have it signed into law, so that when we ask other nations for cooperation, they know that failing to cooperate with us is not an option, or if they do take that course, they will face severe economic consequences. So I hope the Senate will take this up without delay and that we can pass it and get it to the President's desk.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I rise today to strongly oppose the legislation that has emerged from the House of Representatives that pretends to provide tax relief to middle-class Americans, but if you take a look at it and you look at the analyses that have already come out, what it really is, is another big tax giveaway to millionaires, billionaires, and big, multinational corporations. I believe we should do tax reform. We should take our Tax Code and clean up a lot of the junk that has gotten into our Tax Code that is not there for good public policy reasons and is there because someone had a high-powered lobbyist. We need to clean up our Tax Code, we need to reform our Tax Code, and we need to do it in a way that helps the middle class and doesn't add more big breaks for big corporations. Unfortunately, this Republican plan does the opposite of tax reform. What it does is doubles down on big tax breaks for big corporations and the superwealthy. There is a headline today based on the analysis. The New York Times looked at it. ``Republican Plan Would Raise Taxes on Millions'' of middle-class families. I can tell you that is very true in my State of Maryland. In fact, it is going to be true in States throughout the United States of America. We are going to see millions of middle-class families paying more under this plan. In fact, this analysis that is discussed in the Times found that 45 percent of middle-class families will see a tax increase under this plan once it is fully implemented. That means that families making between roughly $50,000 a year and $160,000 a year--about half of them are going to end up paying higher taxes under the Republican plan. Here is one of the double standards that you see continuing throughout the Republican tax plan: Big corporations not only get big tax cuts--$1.5 trillion--but they are going to go on forever. In middle-class families, many people will see an immediate tax increase. Others will initially see a little tax cut. But for individuals and families, it is the great disappearing tax cut--a little sweetener to make the bill look good in the early years, but the bill takes away all those tax cuts for middle-class families, on average, and then actually increases the burden on a family of four making $59,000 under the plan. For corporations, a $1.5 trillion tax cut over 10 years--permanent. For folks in the middle, many will see an immediate tax increase, and the tax increase will stay in place. Others will see a little tax decrease, but as the years go by, many of those are going to see their taxes go up. It is a major corporate tax cut financed in large part by millions of middle-class families paying higher taxes. Just to give a sense of how well the folks at the very top will do, there is a headline from the Wall Street Journal--this is not a Democratic-leaning newspaper--``Banks Sidestep a Big Tax-Plan Pitfall.'' Right here in the second paragraph of the Wall Street Journal article, it says this: At a 20-percent corporate tax rate, banks stand to be among the biggest winners from tax reform. That is according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. The five biggest diversified banks alone might have had tax savings of $11.5 billion in 2016 at that rate--the biggest sum for any subindustry group tracked by S&P. The biggest banks do just great under this Republican plan. Middle-class families are left paying the bill. If you look at this on the individual side, the top 1 percent wealthiest Americans in this country are going to get an average tax cut of $65,000--that is per person, on average. If you are in that top 1 percent, an average family will get a $65,000 tax cut. That means that 48 percent of the benefit of all the tax cuts in this Republican plan goes to the top 1 percent. Let me say that again and just flip it around. The top 1 percent wealthiest households are going to get 48 percent of the dollar benefit of this tax cut. That doesn't sound like a plan focused on improving the situation of middle-class taxpayers. They are the ones who are going to have to finance many of those tax cuts for the very wealthy and big corporations. I know our Republican colleagues recognize what a vulnerability this is because our colleague, Senate majority leader Mr. McConnell, said about the tax bill in an interview last Saturday: ``At the end of the day, nobody in the middle class is going to get a tax increase.'' To understand what that means, he is saying that not a single middle-class household out there in the country is going to see their taxes go up. Well, I don't know what tax plan he is talking about, but it is certainly one that hasn't seen the light of day yet because the bill that has come out of the House will raise taxes on millions of middle- class families, and that is a fact. Just the other day, in an interview on FOX News, Speaker Ryan said: ``We are making sure every middle income taxpayer is a winner here.'' Every middle-class taxpayer is a winner here. Well, that is certainly not true of the plan that was just marked up in the Ways and Means Committee of the House because there are a whole lot of families in the middle class who are big losers under the Republican plan--in fact, millions of them around the country. I don't know what plan they are talking about. I am looking forward to seeing the Republican plan that doesn't raise taxes on any middle- class family in the United States. That should be our policy. We should not be increasing the burden on middle-class families in order to finance a $1.5 trillion tax cut for big, multinational corporations, but that is the way it is right now. Homeowners are going to be especially hard hit under this Republican plan because a lot fewer homeowners will utilize the mortgage interest deduction, and the Republican plan also slashes the deduction for State and local taxes. In fact, they eliminate your option to deduct State and local income taxes. The result is going to be that a lot of middle- class homeowners are going to pay a lot more. That is why the Realtors oppose this bill. These are the folks in our neighborhoods who are buying and selling homes. They are folks who have their ears to the ground in our communities. Here is what the president of the National Association of Realtors said about this bill: It ``threatens home values and takes money straight from the pockets of homeowners.'' In fact, they had a study done by PricewaterhouseCoopers that said that if you are a homeowner and your income is between $50,000 and $200,000, adjusted gross income, you will see an average tax increase. They also predicted that home values across the board could drop by 10 percent, and it is not clear when they would recover their value. The National Association of Home Builders is also opposed to this legislation because of the impact it will have on home ownership and the prices and value of people's homes around the country. They said: The House Republican tax reform plan abandons middle-class taxpayers in favor of high-income Americans and wealthy corporations. The bill eviscerates existing housing tax benefits by drastically reducing the number of homeowners who can take advantage of mortgage interest and property tax incentives. I think all of us know that this is not some left-leaning group. We are talking about the National Association of Home Builders finding that the Republican plan abandons middle-class taxpayers in favor of high-income Americans and wealthy corporations. That is their finding based on their analysis of the bill. Here is the catch. It is that double standard again. Just as I said earlier, you have the tax cuts for big corporations going on forever, but there is much less tax relief for some middle-income taxpayers, and it takes effect early but then phases out. You also have a situation where, if you are a big corporation, you get to deduct all of your State and local taxes. In fact, if you are a multinational corporation and you are in China, you get to deduct taxes you pay to the Government of China. But if you are a household in Maryland or any of our States, you don't get to deduct the taxes you pay to your State and local governments. So you are paying taxes twice on that dollar--once to the State government and again to Uncle Sam out of the same dollar. Fitch Ratings looked at this and concluded that it will put dramatic strains on State and local budgets since people in those States are not going to be able to take those tax deductions. Either you are going to see dramatic cuts to school funding or healthcare, or you are going to see State and local governments raise the property taxes in those States. So you get hit coming and going if you are a middle-class homeowner. This also damages our economic development efforts in many parts of our country. It repeals the new markets tax credit. While it doesn't get rid of what President Trump said was a huge giveaway, the hedge fund loopholes--I can't remember how many times during the Presidential campaign Candidate Trump talked about how the hedge fund tax break was a total giveaway. That is not eliminated in this Republican bill. They keep the big hedge fund loopholes, but here is what they get rid of. They get rid of the ability of people with high medical expenses to deduct those expenses from their taxes. They even take away the additional standard deduction that currently applies to taxpayers who are at least 65 years of age or who are blind. There are many folks who are in that category who are also going to see their taxes go up. Seniors are going to see their taxes go up, which is why the AARP has raised the alarm about that provision and others. While they keep the big hedge fund loopholes, they get rid of the ability of families who adopt children to take a tax credit to help cover the costs of adoption. They get rid of provisions of the Tax Code that help students and teachers and schools. If you are a teacher who has been spending money to buy textbooks and other materials for your class, you used to be able to deduct the costs of what you are buying to help your kids. They take that away in the same bill that they give big corporations a big $1.5 trillion tax break. If you are a student who has been struggling to afford college bills, you no longer get to deduct the interest on your student loans. If you are an employer who is currently receiving an incentive to employ veterans who have served our country, sorry, that is gone too. So I want to get this straight. You are going to take away the ability of people with high medical expenses to take a deduction. You are going to take away the ability of college graduates to take a deduction so that their expenses are more affordable. You are going to take away the ability of people to get the adoption tax credit. And you are going to take away incentives for people to hire our veterans. But you are going to keep the hedge fund loophole and you are going to give a $1.5 trillion tax cut to big corporations. That is what this bill is all about. Finally--and I am going to talk about this at greater length some other time--look at the international tax provisions in this Republican bill and how they are structured. I really urge my colleagues to take a look at this. They actually increase the incentives for U.S.-based businesses and companies to move their operations overseas. That is for two reasons. No. 1 is that when you reduce the international tax rates--when you say, essentially, that a U.S. corporation that moves its jobs overseas now just pays the tax in that country and has no U.S. tax obligation; we, under this bill, are at 20 percent--you still have an incentive, obviously, to move your operations to a very low tax place like the Cayman Islands. But, then, there is an effort to address that issue in this bill. The problem is the effort to address that provision doesn't work at all. Here is the current situation: A lot of corporations try to park what are known as their intangible assets in the Cayman Islands or other tax havens. These are things like the value of patents. You make a great discovery, and you get a patent from the U.S. Patent Office, and you make royalties off of that patent. Then, you have a lot of good lawyers, and essentially you park that patent in the Cayman Islands. That really has no tax obligations, so all the profits that derive from that patent are not subject to any tax--or maybe 1 or 2 percent tax. So in this Republican bill, there is an effort to try to address that issue--at least it pretends to address the issue--but the problem is that it doesn't. Here is what they say. They say: Well, we are going to catch you if you park your money in a place like the Cayman Islands because we are going to have a tax of 10 percent--a foreign high-return tax is what they call it. The way they determine whether you are making an excess profit is you look at your tangible assets in that country and you determine whether the profit you have made is over 8 percent. That is the way it approximately adds up under this bill. But here is the problem: It is an average international minimum tax, not a per-country minimum tax. So let me tell my colleagues what a company that wants to reduce its tax obligation does. They move their company offshore. They take a company, say in Baltimore, MD, that is worth $100 million, and they are making a $5 million profit today here in the United States and they will be taxed at 20 percent, and then they have this profit from the Cayman Islands at $2 million. Under that previous provision I talked about--this effort in the Republican bill to protect against what they call high-return tax areas--they would normally have captured some of the income generated from profits in the Cayman Islands. But when I move my company from Baltimore to, say, the United Kingdom, I actually then escape having to pay that tax on my monies in the tax haven. So the bottom line is that this Republican bill, because it has this average 10 percent minimum tax provision, is going to encourage American businesses and companies to move overseas. If that is not what the intention is, I urge my Republican colleagues to fix this right away. It hasn't been talked about much. There have been a couple articles recently about it. Gene Sperling, Kim Clausing, and others have gone through the economics of this, and it would make the situation a lot worse compared even to today in terms of these incentives. The bottom line is, in addition to this being a $1.5 trillion tax break for big, multinational corporations, paid for and financed by folks in the middle--which, even after you see the middle-class families pay more, results in a $1.5 trillion addition to the debt, but even after all of that--after the big tax giveaway to big corporations, it has an incentive to add insult to injury for them to move their businesses and factories offshore. I hope we will take a big step back and stop rushing a bill through as a matter of political imperative. We need to get this right. We should have hearings. We should have folks from all different walks of life and folks who will be impacted by this bill in many different ways come and testify to Congress about this bill. Then, let's get together on a bipartisan basis and actually do something that works for the American people, not something that is going to clobber the middle class and provide this huge windfall tax break to big multinational corporations, while encouraging them to suck jobs and factories from the United States overseas. We need to start again on this. I urge my colleagues to do that. I yield the floor.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I see my friend and colleague from Pennsylvania on the floor. We have worked together on a number of things over the years, including now, working together to impose and really enforce sanctions against North Korea, putting together a bill modeled after the Iran sanctions bill so we are serious about working to get China and others to come to the table. I thank my colleague for his work on that. Where we disagree strongly is on the bill that has emerged from the House of Representatives, the so-called tax reform bill. The Senator from Pennsylvania said people should be excited to see it. I can assure you, if you are a millionaire or billionaire, you are going to be really excited about the bill that is coming out of the House and supported by President Trump. I want to talk a little bit about tax reform because we need tax reform in America. We need to simplify our Tax Code. It has been gummed up over many years with special tax breaks that are there not because they make good sense for the American people but because somebody was able to hire a high-priced lobbyist to give them a break the rest of the country does not enjoy. We need to simplify our Tax Code, and we need to reform our Tax Code. Unfortunately, what we are seeing come from Republicans today, supported by the Trump administration, doesn't do that. In fact, what it will do is provide full-time employment for tax accountants around the country because it creates all sorts of special provisions for powerful, special interests. It will dramatically cut taxes for big multinational corporations and for millionaires and billionaires, and everybody else is going to be left to pick up the bill in one way or another. Now we know why this has been cooked up behind closed doors for so long. People knew it would have a lot of turbulence when it emerged. Secondly, we know why there is such a desperate effort to ram this huge tax proposal through the House and the Senate--because people don't want the American people to figure out exactly what is in it because when they do, they are going to see it is bad for everybody but the folks who are at the very top or who are very powerful. The good news is that people have scrambled to begin to look at this. In fact, certain groups like Realtors--we all have Realtors in all our neighborhoods. They are often very connected to our community. They know exactly what is going on. So they have been monitoring this Republican tax plan and raising concerns about it. In fact, they said just a few days ago that because there was this effort ``to speed tax legislation through the House by Thanksgiving and get it to Mr. Trump by the end of the year, `we didn't feel like we could wait,''' said the representatives from the National Association of Realtors. So they began to do an analysis of the impact, and here is what they had to say today when they caught a glimpse of what was actually in the Republican Trump bill. They said that they are reviewing the details, but at first glance it appears to ``confirm many of our biggest concerns'' about the plan. ``Eliminating or nullifying the tax incentives for homeownership puts home values and middle class homeowners at risk.'' We will be hearing more from them, but they commissioned a study that was done by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which concluded that if you have adjusted gross income between $50,000 and $200,000 and you are a homeowner, on average, you are going to see your taxes go up. They also concluded that home values around the country would fall by 10 percent--not sure when they would begin to recover, but they would fall by 10 percent. Home values would go down, and taxes for middle-class homeowners would go up. Homebuilders, who are a really important part of our economy, are already against this strongly. They have made it clear that this would hurt new homebuilding around the country, which, as we know, is an important driver in our economy. Even NFIB, the National Federation of Independent Business, took a look at the bill and said: ``[It] leaves too many small businesses behind.'' I will tell you exactly who this helps. This helps big, multinational corporations. When you drop the tax rate to 20 percent, they get a $2 trillion tax windfall. I would be happy to talk to my colleagues about corporate tax reform that doesn't blow up the deficit, but this proposal is a $2 trillion giveaway to big, multinational corporations under the theory that somehow, when you give a big tax break to a multinational corporation, it is actually going to increase the wages of their workers. Well, we know that just isn't so. We know it from independent analysts. The nonpartisan, professional Congressional Research Service has looked at the claims of the proponents of this bill and said: No, this isn't going to be a big boost to workers; it is going to be a big boost to the owners of the corporations. If you don't like nonpartisan analysis--and you know we have a new whole machinery of fake news around here and around this country--why don't we listen to the CEOs themselves? Here is what Reuters reported in a headline: ``CEOs suggest Trump tax cut may lift investors more than jobs.'' That is what the CEOs say. Do you know what? We know from our own experience and our own observations that is absolutely true. Let's look at the real world. We have seen record increases in corporate profits over the last many years--record increases. Did that extra money, did those bigger profits go to higher wages for American workers? They did not. They have been flat. They have been stagnant. We have had a growing gap between rising corporate profits and the wages of people who work for those corporations. So now we are going to give those same multinational corporations another $2 trillion windfall and think it is going to somehow trickle down to the workers? It just is not the case. That is not how they are using their profits. The owners of those corporations will pocket the overwhelming lion's share for themselves. We know that because that is what they have been doing already, and giving them another $2 trillion isn't going to change that pattern. To add insult to injury, not only is this going to be a tax windfall for big corporations that have record profits right now, but because of the way this is designed with respect to the international Tax Code, it is going to create incentives for American corporations to move from Baltimore, MD, overseas or from any other place in the United States overseas. I am not just talking about moving their profits to tax shelters, which you see happen today. You know they park their profits in the Cayman Islands, and they park their intellectual property in low-tax havens. Because of the way they have designed this--a 10 percent average international rate--they are actually encouraging American businesses and corporations to move their operations and their jobs overseas. Let's look at another part of the plan. We keep hearing from our colleagues that this is going to help folks in the middle class. Let's look at the estate tax. If you are an American couple today and your estate is less than $11 million, you don't pay one penny in Federal estate tax--not one. Somehow it became an imperative of the Republicans, who put together this plan, to give a tax break to people with estates of over $11 million. So, first, they lift that cap from $11 million to somewhere like $20, $22 million, and then they get rid of it altogether. That doesn't help a single American household with an estate that is less than $11 million. We are talking about 2 out of every 1,000 American households that will benefit. That apparently was a big priority of the Trump administration and the Republicans, who put together this plan. So who is going to pay for it? Who is going to pay for the $2 trillion tax cut for big multinational corporations? Who is going to pay for the windfall tax break for big, big estates? Everybody else. That is why the Realtors are against it. That is why the homebuilders are against it. That is why others are already against it, along with lots of other groups. Middle-class taxpayers are going to have to pick up the tab. Do you know what they do in this bill, this Republican bill? They eliminate the ability of Americans to deduct their State and local taxes. Except for property taxes, all of those State and local taxes are now going to be paid on twice. You are going to pay your State and local government, and then out of that same dollar, you are going to pay your Federal tax. That is double taxation. Here is the irony. If you are a corporation in one of those States, you get to deduct your State and local taxes in whatever State it may be. If you are a corporation, you get to take that deduction. If you are workers, if you are homeowners, no, you don't get to take that deduction. You are going to pay more. Here is the really ironic thing. After they provide these big tax breaks to multinational corporations and millionaires and billionaires and raise taxes on millions of middle-class families, they are still leaving this country with a $1.5 trillion debt. It is written right into the budget. I served as the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee for a long time. Speaker Ryan used to be the chairman of that committee. He talked at length about the dangers of rising national debt. Do you know what? This is a serious issue. I used to think my Republican colleagues were serious about it, but now we discover they were only using that as a lever to justify their cause for cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, cutting Social Security, cutting education: Oh, the debt is really high; we have to cut all these things. But tax cuts for big corporations and millionaires and billionaires, let's add that to the national credit card. That is $1.5 trillion to be paid for by everybody else--our kids and grandkids. Do you know what will happen? We will pass this tax cut for the special interests and powerful Americans, and then all of a sudden, I assure you, our Republican friends will rediscover their concern about the national debt. They will rediscover it once they get through with this windfall tax cut, and then they will want to come around and cut Medicare and Medicaid and education. Do you know how we know that? They have already told us. In the budget that passed this Senate and the House, they called for cutting Medicare by almost $500 billion--$473 billion to be exact--cutting Medicaid by a trillion dollars, cutting education investments very deeply, cutting our investments in national infrastructure. So we know that once they blow up the debt by another $1.5 trillion, they are going to come right back and say to seniors on Medicare or Americans who rely on Medicaid or our kids whose education we want to invest in: Sorry, now we have that national debt we just created. Let's come back and cut everything else. I really hope that everyone will take a step back. We should not rush through something that will do great damage to the country and great damage to the middle class just because of someone's political imperative to get something--anything--done. The reality is that while we do need tax reform, we don't want to mess things up even worse than they are today. I would welcome the opportunity to work on a bipartisan basis for genuine tax reform and simplification of the Tax Code, but I will not support any effort that hikes our national debt by $1.5 trillion in order to give big tax breaks to multinational corporations and millionaires and billionaires. We can do a whole lot better. We should do better. Thank you.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President. I agree with my colleague from Georgia that we need to simplify our Tax Code. We need real tax reform. We have seen a lot of junk built up in the Tax Code over many years, put there by special interests that seek special deals for themselves--deals that are not enjoyed by the American public. We should do tax reform. What we should not do is increase our national debt and our national deficits, and we all know that the budget plan that passed this Senate--and just recently passed the House--has written right into it an increase in the national debt of $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. In other words, it is engineered right into that bill. So I hope our colleagues who really do care about reducing our national debt will make sure that, as we discuss this tax proposal, we do not increase our national debt. We should, of course, eliminate unnecessary and wasteful expenditures, but we should not have a tax proposal that increases our debt by $1.5 trillion and possibly more. As it appears now, that would primarily be done to provide big tax breaks to very wealthy people and big corporations, at the expense of everybody and everything else in the country. But we will have a fuller debate starting tomorrow when the House Ways and Means Committee unveils its proposal.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, today I wish to recognize and congratulate Rev. Dr. Jonathan L. Weaver, pastor of the Greater Mt. Nebo African Methodist Episcopal Church, on his 30th pastoral anniversary. Since 1988, Reverend Weaver has served with vision and distinction and has dedicated himself to empowering his parishioners and people throughout our community. Reverend Weaver is an outstanding example of what it means to be engaged in a community. Under his leadership, the Greater Mt. Nebo African Methodist Episcopal Church has initiated numerous innovative programs on critical issues, including domestic violence prevention, economic empowerment, and anti-hunger. In addition, Reverend Weaver's sense of community transcends the borders of the United States. He has led mission trips to Africa, engaging in medical mission projects in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Reverend Weaver currently serves as national president of the Collective Empowerment Group, Inc., CEG, an ecumenical association comprised of nearly 500 churches across the country. CEG engages in economic empowerment initiatives focused on financial literacy, education, healthcare, homeownership preservation, and public safety through partnerships with banks and other businesses in their communities. In 2015, Reverend Weaver became board chairman of Industrial Bank, an organization that has been recognized for its contributions to the growth and development of the greater Washington, DC, metropolitan area since 1934. He holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, and an MBA from Harvard University. Reverend Weaver has been married to Pamela Weaver for 30 years and has two children, Jamie Davis and Megan Holland, and four grandchildren. Over the last 30 years, Reverend Weaver has personified the Greater Mt. Nebo African Methodist Episcopal Church's traditions of service and leadership. I ask my colleagues to join me in expressing our deepest gratitude and appreciation to Reverend Weaver for his 30 years of service to the Greater Mt. Nebo African Methodist Episcopal Church and to our community.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you, Mr. President. I want to start by thanking my friend and colleague from Rhode Island for pointing out why we have a jury system, a system of our peers who can listen to all sides of an argument in a fair way and render justice. What this resolution does is prohibits many consumers around the country from having the choice of going before a jury as part of a group of people who have been wronged. For months, the American people had been hearing stories of how big banks, big financial institutions, have engaged in various schemes that harmed consumers and cheated consumers out of millions and millions of dollars. The most notorious recently, of course, was the case of Wells Fargo, which opened up a lot of fake accounts--meaning they opened accounts without consumers asking them to open accounts--and then charged consumers for those accounts. It is a fact that Wells Fargo in many cases tried to use forced arbitration to prevent those people who had been wronged from getting access to justice, from being compensated for their harm. We also heard about the Equifax case. Equifax is a credit reporting agency. They collect gobs of information on all of us--on over 170 million Americans--without our permission. We don't say: Equifax, go out and dig up as much information about us as you can and put it on your computer system. They go out and do it. We all know that they were subjected to a massive hack and that very confidential, highly personal information on over 100 million Americans has now been compromised. One of the things Equifax did after that was they said to consumers: You know what, we know that your information may have been compromised because of this hack on our system, and we want to help protect you, but if you want our protection, you have to sign away your rights to be part of a class action lawsuit against us. That was their original plan and their original instinct. Well, there was a big public outcry about that, and they backed off. But the former CEO of Equifax, in a Banking Committee hearing just a few weeks ago, said they backed off in response to the public outcry, but if they had done business as usual, they would have prevented those consumers from getting compensation for wrongs through the court system. Even after we hear about Equifax and that scandal and the Wells Fargo banking scandal, we are here on the floor of the Senate not to help even the playing field for consumers but to take away a right that consumers now have to help even the playing field against these big banks and financial institutions. It is entirely backward. I want to read from the statement that was issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB, on July 10 of this year when they issued their new rule. Here was the headline: ``CFPB issues rule to ban companies from using arbitration clauses to deny groups of people their day in court.'' Simple as that. It went on to say that financial companies can no longer block consumers from joining together to sue over wrongdoing. It pointed out that companies use mandatory arbitration clauses to deny groups of people their day in court. They went on to say that many consumer financial products, like credit cards and bank accounts, have arbitration clauses in their contracts that prevent consumers from joining together to sue their bank or financial company for wrongdoing. That is right. We all know that in the fine print of a lot of credit card applications, in the fine print that consumers get from a lot of big financial institutions, and in the fine print of auto loans, they have buried these provisions that compel those consumers to give up their rights. This is not a question--I have heard conversations on the floor today--about whether arbitration in and of itself is a good or a bad way to resolve disputes. If I have been wronged or you have been wronged and you agree voluntarily to enter into an arbitration dispute mechanism, fine. Do it voluntarily. That is not what this is about. It is not what it is about at all. This is about forcing arbitration. We listened to the CEO of Wells Fargo. We listened to the former CEO of Equifax. They all say they value their consumers. They want to make sure they do right by their consumers, but it turns out they don't trust their consumers at all because they want to take away from those same consumers the right to seek justice through the court system if that is what those consumers choose to do. That is exactly why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau took the action it did to protect consumers and to make sure that they could not be compelled into arbitration. If they chose it after they had been wronged, that is their decision, but this is about mandatory arbitration and forcing consumers to give up their rights. We have heard a lot about the Washington swamp. This resolution to overturn this consumer protection provision is the Washington swamp at its muckiest and at its smelliest. Now, I have a letter I received today from the American Legion, people who have represented men and women who have served our country. Here is what it says. This is from the legislative director at the American Legion: Dear friends and colleagues, I write to reiterate the American Legion's strong support for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau arbitration rule in light of reports that the Senate could vote on the matter as early as this evening. The alarm bells went up at the American Legion and other places. You may recall that I emailed you about this on October 2. That email is below, but today I want to share a couple of additional points. Point No. 1 is in bold. A vote to overturn the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau arbitration rule is a vote against our military and veterans. That is from the American Legion. I want to read some of the other veterans organizations that are against this action that the Senate is headed toward tonight: Blue Star Families, Military Order of the Purple Heart, the National Guard Association of the United States, National Military Family Association, Reserve Officers Association, and the list goes on and on. They are joined by consumer protection groups. Here is what the American Legion said in their October letter to every Member of the Senate. It says that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule on arbitration agreements addresses the widespread harm of forced arbitration by restoring the ability of servicemembers, veterans, and other consumers to join together and seek relief in class action lawsuits when financial institutions break the law. The American Legion summed it up just perfectly here. They pointed out that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put forward a rule that said that veterans who have been wronged or cheated can join together to seek justice in the court system and that other consumer groups can as well. I have heard a lot of talk today about people saying: You know what, we actually passed this law a little while ago that would protect servicemembers and that would allow servicemembers to band together to seek justice. Well, I have two points. One is the American Legion and all of these veterans groups, they don't think that was good enough, and they are appalled at what the Senate is thinking about doing tonight. The second question is this. Yes, we should protect our veterans, but why shouldn't we also be protecting all of the other consumers around the United States of America? Why shouldn't they be able to seek justice? Why should they be compelled to go to arbitration when they would rather choose to go through the court system? We have heard fellow Members talk about why the deck is stacked against individuals. Just think about it. You get cheated by your bank. Maybe it is 100 bucks, or maybe it is 500 bucks. You get on the phone, and you know you are put on there forever. You are put on hold. You are put on hold, and you finally get through. You get somebody. Maybe they pass you to somebody else or maybe you get dropped in the process. But at the end of the day, in order for you to get your money back when they have been wronged, under this provision, the old provision, you would have to go to arbitration and you would have to shell out a lot of money, and the big banks know that. So what they fear is that all of us, as consumers who have been cheated, we have a chance to get together. It is a class action. It is when everyone who has been wronged can get together and actually have a little bit of power and leverage against a big bank, whether it is Wells Fargo or Equifax or whoever it may be. That is the whole idea of a class action. People get to band together, and that is what the American Legion is asking the Senate to do--to let veterans band together but also just to let American consumers band together to seek justice. I just want to share with the Senate a story about one of my Maryland constituents and what happened to one of my Maryland constituents because I think a lot of people can relate. This is a pretty extraordinary story, but they can relate to how one individual feels like when they are fighting against a big organization. This was a story that was reported on NPR, and the Maryland constituents' name is Michael Feifer. Here is what happened. One morning in February, Michael Feifer was heading off to his job in Maryland at a company that builds guitars. He walked to the spot where he parked his car. His car wasn't there, and so he called the police. He called the police. He said: I was livid. I thought someone stole my car. Well, somebody had made off with Feifer's car, but it wasn't a car thief. It was Wells Fargo Bank. The police informed him of this when he called them up, and Michael Feifer said: That is when I found out my car was repossessed. Now, he had no idea why Wells Fargo wanted to repossess his car. He says his payments were automatically taken out of his checking account--his car payments. So he called Wells Fargo, and he found out that the bank had put another insurance policy on his car. Lenders sometimes do this when a borrower doesn't have insurance. Wells Fargo calls it collateral protection insurance, CPI. Now, sometimes there is nothing wrong with that, but Wells Fargo imposed this insurance on nearly half a million people who already had bought insurance. They were already covered. Wells Fargo just decided to put another insurance plan on them and--guess what--started charging them for it. So that is why right after Feifer's car got repossessed, Wells Fargo told him that he had been marked delinquent for not paying his insurance. Now, this again was insurance he didn't want and he didn't need. Well, they said: Too bad, you owe us $1,500. Now, Michael Feifer then showed up at the bank with his bank statements and showed all the payments he had made for the vehicle. He showed proof of insurance showing that he never had a lapse in his insurance, and he says the people at the bank said: Well, you shouldn't owe anything; it is not your fault. He said: They were just as confused as I was. Well, then, he said the branch employees tried to be helpful. They called up the Wells Fargo department that dealt with the details of car repossessions to find out what was going on, and they kept putting them on hold. So this is the Wells Fargo department putting their own Wells Fargo's branch folks on hold. He was there 2\1/2\ hours, and then it turns out they told him to call back a couple of days later. Well, he called back a couple of days later, and they said there was no prior record of his calls to the bank. He said they were very rude to him. Then, while he was arguing with the bank, they said: We have repossessed your car. If you don't pay us 600 bucks, we are going to sell it off. So he paid them 600 bucks. Then he found out that he wasn't alone and that Wells Fargo had also engaged in this scheme to sell people car insurance as part of their car loans when they already had insurance. So this is a very simple issue. The issue is whether or not consumers who have been wronged by big banks or other financial institutions can choose to band together with others to seek justice. What the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did was to say that consumers have that right. They have the right to choose how to go about getting justice. What this Senate resolution does is to take that right away from consumers and says: If you want to seek justice, you can only go through forced arbitration, where we know the deck is stacked against the lonely consumer and stacked in favor of the big banks and the big financial institutions. Let's not do that. Let's vote down this resolution. Let's protect the consumer protections that are in place today.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I rise tonight to join my House colleagues, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and Congressman Andy Harris, to celebrate the passage of H.R. 2989, a bill to create a commission to honor Frederick Douglass in 2018, in the bicentennial of his birth. Frederick Douglass was enslaved at birth on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1818; yet he learned to read and write. He escaped from Maryland and moved to New York. In 1845, he published his first autobiography, ``The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave.'' He later escaped to Great Britain to avoid being returned to slavery. British Quakers paid for his freedom, which enabled him to return to United States, settling in Baltimore, MD, in 1847; yet he continued to be a strong abolitionist who campaigned against slavery and in favor of the right to vote throughout the east and midwest. In 1850, he oversaw the Underground Railroad in Rochester, NY. Douglass made four trips back to the place of his birth in Talbot County, MD. He reconciled with Captain Thomas Auld, who had enslaved him in the past. He made a pilgrimage to Tappers Corner in search of his grandmother's cabin and his birthplace. Moreover, he invested in the African-American community in Maryland through housing developments in his old neighborhood in Fells Point, now named Douglass Place, and at Highland Beach, a summer resort community outside of Annapolis. Among his many accomplishments, he served as an adviser to President Lincoln. Moreover, he received several appointments in the District of Columbia: legislative council, U.S. Marshal, and recorder of deeds. He was subsequently appointed Ambassador to Haiti from 1889 to 1891. Two hundred years after Douglass's birth provides an opportunity to reflect upon his legacy. He stated, ``We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.'' I look forward to working with my colleagues to commemorate his bicentennial by retracing his steps and promoting his guiding principles of freedom and justice for all.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I wish to start by commending the Senator from New Mexico for his leadership on many issues but today for being on the floor to protect this vital, beautiful American treasure, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I thank the Senator. I wish to speak about the budget as well. I hope everyone across the country will really pay attention to the debate we are having in the Senate over the next couple of days and over the coming weeks and months. There is no doubt that when we look at the budget that is going to come to the floor of this Senate, it is stacked overwhelmingly in favor of the wealthiest Americans and powerful special interests, and the benefits that will go to the folks at the very top are paid for, in one way or another, by everyone and everything else. I wish to be very clear. I think we need to reform our Tax Code. We need to simplify our Tax Code. We need to reduce the tax burden on middle- class families throughout the country. We should do that in a transparent, accountable, and bipartisan fashion, but make no mistake, unfortunately, what we have received so far from the Trump administration is something that has been cooked up behind closed doors, and the more we look at it, the worse it gets, from the perspective of making sure the American public is protected in this process. At the end of the day, it is just another warmed-over version of what we know of as trickle-down economics. What is trickle-down economics? It is the idea that if you give big tax breaks to the top 1 percent--the folks at the very top of the income scale, including big corporations--that somehow the benefits of that tax cut are going to trickle down through the economy and lift everybody up. The problem is, we already have a real-world example of how that whole theory failed, how it ran aground. We saw that in 2001 and in 2002 when we cut taxes in the United States. What went up? What went soaring up were the incomes of the top 1 percent. The other thing that went up were our deficits and national debt. Everybody else was left behind. So, yes, the yachts went up, but all the other boats kind of ran aground. If we look at this chart, we will see it has been part of a pattern over a long period of time, where the incomes of the top 1 percent-- that is this red line--have risen steadily. They bounce up and down, usually with respect to some fluctuations in the financial markets, but right after the 2001-2002 tax cuts, we saw aftertax incomes of the top 1 percent shoot up. Did it really help the economy? It didn't help the economy overcome the financial crisis. So we saw some of those incomes come down during the financial crisis. So when we look at the pattern, our tax policies and other policies have resulted in this huge and dramatic increase in the incomes of the top 1 percent, and everybody else has been kind of static. That is an average. Many of those American households are much worse off today than they were even 20 years ago, in terms of real income. So a lot of people are on a treadmill, with millions falling behind. Why in the world we would then adopt a tax plan that actually increases this inequity without improving the economy is just another windfall tax break to the top 1 percent. Let's just take a look first at the estate tax. It is a great example of how this Republican bill--this Trump bill--is stacked overwhelmingly in favor of the very wealthiest in the United States of America. Our Republican colleagues like to call this a death tax. There are 2.6 million deaths in the United States every year. Only about 5,000 American households pay the estate tax. This isn't a death tax; this is a tax to prevent the growth of dynasties in America. Teddy Roosevelt would be crawling in his grave as a Republican to hear about this Republican proposal because he thought America should be a place where we don't have an aristocracy, we don't have oligarchy. We don't just let people sit around and pass on billions of dollars--sure, we can pass on millions, but billions and billions of dollars--because, over time, what happens is that growing wealth inequality in the United States, instead of making sure people can sort of make it on their own in the country, which is what we thought America was all about. Just to illustrate the point, if you are a couple and you have an estate of lower than $11 million--if your estate as a couple is below $11 million--you don't pay a penny in Federal estate tax, not one penny. If you are an individual who has an estate below $5.6 million, you don't pay a penny in estate taxes. That is why only 5,000 households--the very wealthiest households in the country--are the only ones that pay it. In fact, when we look at this chart, we can see these two little red dots out of all of these squares are the only households that are impacted. So this Republican plan would give a $240 billion tax cut over 10 years to these wealthiest households in the United States of America. One day, Donald Trump's estate will benefit mightily from this, according to Bloomberg, and I think that is a trusted source around here. Yet we are going to give that $240 billion tax cut to the superwealthy and the rest of the country is going to have to pick up the bill. So who is going to pay for that bill and how? Well, it really happens in two ways. One way is tens of millions of middle-class taxpayers are going to get socked by this tax plan. The other way is, under this bill, it green-lights deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, so we are going to see increased burdens on folks who are on Medicare--seniors. I wish to talk for a minute about the increase in middle-class taxes under this Trump administration plan. First, under their plan, taxpayers will no longer be able to deduct their property taxes and their State and local taxes. We hear a lot from our Republican colleagues about double taxation when it comes to corporations. Yet their plan proposes a double taxation on tens of millions of middle-class taxpayers around the country. On that dollar, they pay their State and local taxes, and then they will be taxed on what they pay to their State and local governments and what they pay on property taxes. That is why this plan is opposed by the National Governors Association. It is why it is opposed by the United States Conference of Mayors. If we look at IRS data, we will find that 40 percent of taxpayers making between $50,000 and $75,000 of annual income--just that small band--take the deduction for State and local taxes, and they are going to increase their taxes under this plan. That is almost 8 million Americans right there. There is another provision in this Republican plan which says that the bigger your family is, the bigger the tax you are going to pay. If you have three, four, five kids, you are going to be paying more taxes than you are today because what they give with one hand on the standard deduction, they take away on the personal exemptions. Low-income seniors are going to see their taxes go up because the bottom rate is increased from 10 percent to 12 percent, and the deductions many seniors get, especially if they are disabled, are eliminated. They are going to see their taxes go up. Finally, I really hope Members will begin to focus on this. The National Association of Realtors hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to do an analysis of the Republican plan. This is from the National Association of Realtors: ``Homeowners with adjusted gross incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 will see an average tax increase of $815 a year.'' Because of the interaction of what you do with respect to the home mortgage deduction and the fact that it is not as big a benefit and the inability to deduct your local property taxes--and I want to read this very deliberately--``Home prices in the short run will fall by an overall average of 10.2 percent.'' Let me say that again: Home prices in the United States will fall by an average of 10.2 percent. That is by PricewaterhouseCoopers. They may recover at some point, they say, but if you are a senior and you have all of your savings in your house and the value of your house drops by 10 percent, you are in a world of hurt, and that is what the National Association of Realtors tells us this bill will do. That is on the tax side. That is not the only way seniors are going to be hit. Middle-income families are going to be hit on the tax side; their taxes are going to go up. But they will also be hit because, in order to pay for those estate tax breaks for the superwealthy--the 5,000 households in the country that each year benefit from that--this budget also green-lights cutting Medicare by $473 billion, and it green-lights cutting Medicaid by over $1 trillion. So not only does the middle-class take it through increased tax burdens--tens of millions of them--but folks on Medicare are going to see that program cut and a $1 trillion cut in Medicaid. We just went through a big debate here in the United States Senate, and a majority rejected the idea that we should cut Medicaid by $1 trillion, especially in the middle of an opioid epidemic and all the other health challenges we face around the country. Yet that is what this Republican budget green-lights. The bottom line is that they have big tax cuts for the superwealthy paid for by increasing the tax burden on tens of millions of middle- class Americans, paid for by cutting Medicare and Medicaid. Then, at the end of all of that, this budget is actually designed to increase the national debt by $1.5 trillion. It is written right into this budget bill. I served for many years on the House Budget Committee. I was the ranking Democrat. The chairman of that committee for many years was Paul Ryan, now Speaker of the House. Every year, Congressman Ryan--now Speaker Ryan--would come up with what he called the ``Path to Prosperity,'' a 59-page document, and it repeatedly referred to ``the crushing burden of debt.'' It was mentioned 12 times in that one budget document. I happen to believe that we need to be serious about reducing our long-term deficits and debt, and our Republican colleagues used to say they cared about that too. But this budget actually calls for a $1.5 trillion increase in our national debt. What happened to the fiscal conservatives? What happened to the budget hawks on the other side of the aisle? It turns out that when it comes to cutting Medicare and Medicaid, a lot of our Republican colleagues have been all in for that. But when it comes to tax cuts--tax cuts for the very wealthy--somehow deficits and debt don't matter anymore because this budget actually calls for a $1.5 trillion increase in the national debt. I really hope we will get to regular order. Let's have a full bipartisan discussion. The only time there has been successful tax reform is when it has been done in a bipartisan, transparent way. Yet what this bill is doing is setting up a vehicle to try and jam something through on a partisan basis, something that will help the most powerful and the most wealthy in this country at the expense of everyone else. Let's not go in that direction.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I do not believe Chairman Pai should have been confirmed to serve a full 5-year term as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, FCC. Since assuming the leadership role at the Commission, Chairman Pai has systematically advanced policies that advance corporate interests at the expense of American consumers. Chairman Pai's decision to open an NPRM that will eventually reverse the 2015 open internet order is an egregious example of his misplaced priorities. In 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit confirmed that the open internet order was a lawful exercise of the Commission's regulatory authority. Broadband service providers must provide fair and equal access to all users, regardless of socioeconomic status. Over 18 million Americans submitted comments urging the Commission to maintain regulations that impose transparency and prevent ISPs from throttling or discriminating against certain data. Numerous polls have shown that Americans, across the political spectrum, overwhelmingly support regulations that would prevent broadband companies from discriminating against certain data. Chairman Pai claims that the 2015 order caused a decrease in broadband investment, but the evidence suggests otherwise. I wrote to Chairman Pai about the evidence that he frequently cites to support his allegations of depressed investment--evidence, which I believe, is incomplete and inconclusive. As technology develops and consumers become even more dependent upon internet access, it is imperative that the FCC ensures that the internet is not divided between the have and the have-nots. I was also disappointed by Chairman Pai's support for Congress's actions to repeal the Federal Communications Commission's broadband privacy rules. These rules are especially important in light of recent data breaches. Every website we visit and every link we click leaves an unintended trail that tells a story about our lives. ISPs can collect information about our location, children, sensitive information, family status, financial information, Social Security Numbers, web browsing history, and even the content of communications. ISPs sell this highly sensitive and highly personal data to the highest bidder without consumer's consent or knowledge. The Commission's rules empowered consumers and gave them tools to protect their privacy though transparency, choice, and data security. In supporting the rule's repeal, Chairman Pai demonstrated that he does not believe that Americans should have control over their data. The rise of the internet of things, telehealth, and smart agriculture means that American consumers need an FCC that is on watch and committed to protecting their interests. I hope that Chairman Pai will reverse course and will stop putting the interests of big corporations ahead of the interests of American consumers.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, this week my constituent Caroline Burkhart of Baltimore, MD, is on a historic trip to Japan of remembrance and reconciliation. A guest of the Japanese Government, she will follow the journey of her father, Thomas F. Burkhart, who was a prisoner of war of imperial Japan 75 years ago. Her trip will include a visit to the site of the camp in which her father was held as a POW. At the start of WWII, Lieutenant Burkhart served in the Philippines with the Headquarters Company of the 45th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, an elite U.S. Army unit composed of American officers and Filipino enlisted men. After Japan's December 8, 1941, invasion of the Philippines, his battalion helped defend the withdrawal of American forces on Luzon to the Bataan Peninsula. Barely a month after being promoted to first lieutenant, on January 24, 1942, Lieutenant Burkhart earned a Silver Star for ``Gallantry in Action'' at the Battle of Abucay Hacienda, January 15 to 25, 1942, which maintained the first battle position on Bataan. Sick with malaria, Lieutenant Burkhart was in the open-air general hospital No. 1 near the tip of Bataan when Major General Edward King surrendered the peninsula to Japanese forces on April 9, 1942. Soon thereafter, the patients were taken by truck, boxcar, and foot up to Camp O'Donnell, an overcrowded, makeshift POW camp. In early June, the Japanese, fearing the deaths of the prisoners from the horrific conditions in the camp, began to release their Filipino POWs and transfer the others to a new facility at Cabanatuan. It is estimated that 1,550 Americans and 22,000 Filipinos died at Camp O'Donnell, the overwhelming majority within the first 8 weeks. On November 6, 1942, Lieutenant Burkhart was among 1,500 prisoners packed into the coal bunker of the unmarked ``hell ship'' Nagato Maru to Japan. It took three torturous weeks for the ship to make its way from the tropics to the cold of Northeast Asia. Lieutenant Burkhart, nearly blind from malnutrition, was used as a slave laborer for the construction company Toshima Group--today's Tobishima Corporation. He was soon moved to the Hiroshima No. 1-B Zentsuji POW Camp on the island of Shikoku. The enlisted men at Zentsuji were slave stevedores for Nippon Express Co.--Nippon Tsuun--at Sakaide Rail Yards and the Port of Takamatsu. As an officer, Lieutenant Burkhart worked in the camp garden. On June 23, 1945, he and 334 officers were transferred to POW Camp 11-B Rokuroshi, deep in the Japanese Alps. Food was scarce, conditions were overcrowded, and winter clothes were unavailable, leading many to fear that they would not survive the harsh winter. Lieutenant Burkhart was liberated from this camp in early September. Lieutenant Burkhart remained in the Army and had a distinguished career with the quartermaster corps, retiring in 1957 as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. Throughout his life, he was plagued by health problems most likely caused by the illnesses and hardships of being a POW. In 1972, at age 57, he passed away and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Thomas Burkhart's daughter Caroline has honored his memory by working tirelessly to preserve the history of the POW experience and to teach its lessons of American perseverance and grit. Ms. Burkhart is an active member of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society. In this year, the 75th anniversary of the fall of the Philippines, we appreciate the effort by Japan to reach out to Ms. Burkhart and the American POWs in the spirit of reconciliation and healing. I ask my colleagues to join me in wishing Caroline Burkhart a safe and meaningful journey and in expressing our gratitude and appreciation to Thomas F. Burkhart and all veterans of the war in the Pacific for their heroic service and sacrifice.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, the United States is facing an urgent nuclear crisis with North Korea. President Trump should not trigger another nuclear crisis with Iran. North Korea's nuclear program presents a clear and direct threat to the United States. Our top military official, General Dunford, testified last month that North Korea has the capability to strike the U.S. mainland with an intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korea has ramped up the pace of its ballistic missile tests, firing two ICBMs over Japan in recent months. Just last month, North Korea conducted its sixth test of a nuclear weapon, the largest yet. Meanwhile, President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are engaged in nuclear brinkmanship. Trump has threatened to ``totally destroy'' North Korea, has tweeted that North Korea ``might not be around much longer,'' and has rebuked his own Secretary of State for attempting to find a diplomatic solution. With each reckless pronouncement, Trump's threats could bring the United States closer to a war that would put at risk millions of lives, including tens of thousands of American soldiers. Confronted with the North Korean nuclear threat, President Trump is seeking to provoke another nuclear crisis, this time in the turbulent Middle East. He has repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the agreement that the United States and the international community forged to prohibit Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He has called the Iran deal an ``embarrassment,'' ``the worst deal ever,'' and has vowed to ``rip up'' the agreement. In making those threats, Trump is putting our security and credibility at risk. The Iran deal is working. It has verifiably shut off Iran's pathways to a nuclear bomb, imposed tough constraints on Iran's nuclear program, and subjected Iran to the most comprehensive inspection and monitoring regime ever negotiated. How do we know? We know from Donald Trump himself. Just 2 weeks ago, President Trump found Iran in compliance and waived nuclear-related sanctions on Iran. In fact, the Trump administration has twice certified Iran's compliance with the deal, acknowledging that adherence to the agreement is in the vital national security interests of the United States. Our State Department, our Defense Department, and our intelligence community have all assessed that Iran is in compliance with the nuclear agreement. Most importantly, President Trump has presented no evidence to Congress, as he is required to do by law, of any potential Iranian breach of the deal. In fact, the administration has yet to brief the Senate on its strategy for Iran, despite weekly requests from my colleagues. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Trump has suggested that he will refuse to certify Iran's compliance with the deal by October 15, the next deadline. This will effectively kick the deal's fate to Congress, which will then have 60 days to decide whether to reimpose the nuclear-related sanctions on Iran waived under the deal. Make no mistake: Trump's reasons for not certifying Iran's compliance are based on politics, not national security. He wants to tear up an agreement that has prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, simply because it was negotiated by a democratic administration. Trump has threatened to do this without offering any alternative plan to block Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. In the absence of any evidence of an Iranian violation, Trump and his team are manufacturing reasons not to certify the deal, citing issues not addressed in the nuclear agreement, such as Iran's sponsorship of regional terrorism, its ballistic missile tests, and its human rights violations. Iran is subject to sanctions for those malign activities. Since the Iran deal has been implemented, the United States had designated over 100 individuals and entities for sanctions. Congress passed a new law this July, that I cosponsored, sanctioning Iran for these aggressions. It is worth underscoring this point: Donald Trump has yet to issue instructions to his administration on how to implement that sanctions law. In short, the Iran deal has not prevented the United States from taking measures to hold Iran accountable for its destabilizing actions elsewhere. It has, however, prevented Iran from conducting those same actions with a nuclear weapon. That is where our focus should continue to be. A nuclear-armed Iran would be a far greater menace in the region than a nonnuclear Iran. The truth is, if the United States had tried to expand the nuclear agreement to also address Iran's ballistic missile tests and its regional terrorism, there would simply be no deal. Russia and China would not have agreed to its terms. Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was the only point on which all parties were united. Critics of the deal who argue otherwise are not being straight with the American people. In a world of alternative facts, that point is worth reiterating. No deal, including this one, contains everything we want. That is the nature of a negotiation. Unilaterally withdrawing from the agreement will not produce a better deal today. In fact, we have much less negotiating leverage today. The United States does not have the backing of our allies and partners around the world for withdrawal. Our partners have been crystal clear. They will not renegotiate the deal while it is working. Without that international backing, we have no leverage with Iran. This brings to bear another, equally important, point. This administration is already putting American credibility at risk; if we manufacture a specious excuse for abandoning the Iran agreement, our word will mean little. That will make it nearly impossible to negotiate a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis in North Korea, already an extremely challenging prospect. Put simply, our allies, partners, and adversaries would have no reason to trust the United States. That is why Secretary of Defense Mattis, when asked whether it was in the national security interest of the United States to stay in the Iran deal, said, ``Yes, Senator, I do.'' I want to end by outlining the choice we face right now. The choice we face right now is between a deal or no deal. It is between cutting off Iran's pathways to a bomb or allowing Iran to push forward with its nuclear weapons program. It is between maintaining U.S. leadership in the world or empowering our adversaries. It is a choice between diplomacy or heading down a path toward war. For these reasons, I urge President Trump to certify Iran's compliance with the nuclear agreement by October 15. If he fails to do so, I urge my colleagues in the Senate to preserve the deal.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I wish to pay tribute to a Marylander, John Gabriel ``Gabe'' Smith, whose courage not only broke barriers for himself but whose courage advanced the cause of the betterment of humanity. On October 14, he will be recognized at the Gonzaga High School homecoming by the Gonzaga Onyx, a group of African-American alumni of Gonzaga, due to his achievement of being the very first African- American to graduate from Washington, DC's Gonzaga College Preparatory High School with the class of 1954. He was born in the turbulent times of the early 40s in St. Mary's County, MD, where he and his two sisters grew up. His parents relied on hard work and diligence to pursue excellence and committed their children to a Catholic education and religious fellowship at St. Peter Claver, a church with a predominantly African-American parish in rural Ridge, MD. As an eighth grader, Gabe decided to serve as an altar boy; little did he know, it would change his life and place him in the annals of American history. He listened to Father McKenna describe the ways that people had traveled to find God and become a priest. Interested in pursuing this vocation, he asked Father McKenna how he, too, could achieve it and was surprised when Father McKenna told him that he would, at a minimum, need to know Latin. Unfortunately, there were no schools in St. Mary's or the surrounding areas that taught Latin, let alone the tools necessary to launch his vocation, so Father McKenna told him about a school in Washington, DC, where he could learn Latin and all the other requisites. That school was Gonzaga College High. Several years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 to end segregation, Archbishop O'Boyle ordered the integration of all Catholic schools and churches in the Archdiocese of Washington. Thus, in 1951, he entered the halls of Gonzaga. Fortunately, during his time at Gonzaga, his classmates stood with him in the face of adversity and strife when they walked outside the school walls. As a member of the Gonzaga Purple Eagle football team, he encountered additional support from Coach Joe Kozik who stood by him, along with his teammates. Whenever the Eagles would play an opponent that vehemently rejected the idea of teams with African-American players, Coach Kozik and his teammates always stuck together like a family to overcome hate and ignorance. In 1954, he completed his education at Gonzaga College High School as the first African-American graduate. Poised with his education and command of Latin, he entered Howard University and graduated with a degree in pharmacy, where he commanded his field for over 40 years, just retiring this past spring of 2017. He is now spending time with his wife and children. Gabe says that ``he had angels who helped him through and they continue to be with him today.'' He will forever leave an outstanding legacy for the State of Maryland and the halls of Gonzaga College High School. He was the first African American at Gonzaga, paving the way for over 1,100 esteemed African-American alumni to follow in his footsteps.