Ron Wyden

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, today I wish to honor a longtime public servant and regional director of the northwest region of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in my State, Mr. Stanley Speaks. Stan has served the tribes of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest well since 1982. His distinguished career with the Federal Government spanned more than 59 years and has resulted in highly recognized and extraordinary accomplishments that stem from his established knowledge, experience, and management leadership. Stan graduated from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK, and later obtained a master's degree in education administration. By 1959, he had begun his long career with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He served as the regional director in western Oklahoma and Kansas and came to the northwest region in 1982. There he served 14 agencies, 3 irrigation projects, and oversaw a trust land base of 6.3 million acres, covering five Northwest States. Stan also had the fiduciary trust responsibility to 45 Northwest Tribes with a membership totaling 115,000 Native-American people. As a Tribal member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Stan was inducted into the Chickasaw National Hall of Fame in 2002. Stan has devoted his life's work to the advancement of Tribes and Indian people. He has worked hard to uphold and protect Tribal treaty rights, and through his stewardship of trust property and natural resources, trust income has helped meet the individual and family needs of Tribal members. He became the regional director at a time when the Western Oregon Tribes were being restored. Stan has long been a champion for Tribal veterans. He has supported housing, the expansion of veterans benefits, and access to healthcare. He, along with his lovely wife, Lois, are a staple at the annual veterans dinner sponsored by the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians each July. He has assisted the federally recognized Tribes in my home State of Oregon with both advice and financial assistance on a variety of business and economic development ventures. His efforts have created hundreds of job opportunities for Indian and non-Indian people in every Tribal community across Oregon and the Northwest. Stan has achieved countless victories for Native Americans, which will have long lasting beneficial impacts for years to come. He has been critical in maintaining the relationship between the Federal Government and Indian Tribes. Oregon has benefited from Stanley Speaks' career management and leadership contributions. His legacies of achievement for our Tribes will live on to benefit not only this generation, but for generations yet to come. I thank Stan for his service to Indian Country and to this Nation.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. WYDEN. It is my intention, Mr. President, to come back every 30 minutes until we get an answer to the question. I just asked my colleague from South Carolina if there was a hearing on the sweeping changes that are being proposed in this bill, the Affordable Care Act. I asked him for a date. He said nothing with respect to----

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, we will be back in 30 minutes to continue this.

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, will my colleague yield for a question before he yields?

Mr. WYDEN. I am just curious. I am heading home for townhall meetings in Oregon over the weekend. I am the ranking Democrat on the committee, the storied committee, as my colleagues know, that works in a bipartisan way. Bill Bradley tells this story about how he flew all over the country to meet with Republicans to talk about how you could find common ground to deal with tax reform. At this time, we haven't been able to get the majority to even walk down the corridor in an effort to try to get a bipartisan bill. As I told my colleagues, I have written two of them. My question to my friend is, when you have your community meeting, how do you think people in Connecticut are going to react to the idea that we had maybe an hour or so to try to make our way through a bill that is actually the biggest tax bill in 31 years? I know my colleague tries very hard to be straightforward with his constituents, and he will tell them: I got it with insufficient time to get into it. How will they react to that?

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, for this tranche, I believe we will have Senator Durbin lead off for us and then Senator Nelson and Senator Bennet. Each is going to try to take around 5 minutes. Senator Durbin.

Mr. WYDEN. Correct.

Mr. WYDEN. I am just not aware of any.

Mr. WYDEN. Reserving the right to object, if I could, I don't think the UC was granted.

Mr. WYDEN. Well, I would like to reserve my right to object at this time.

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I want to pick up where Senator Murray left off and emphasize to colleagues that not only would this bill raise taxes on millions of middle-class families, but it would also be a dagger in the heart of the Affordable Care Act, causing millions to lose their coverage and raise costs for millions more. By gutting the personal responsibility portion of the Affordable Care Act, this legislation is going to take America back to the days when healthcare was for the healthy and wealthy because it will green-light once more discriminating against those with preexisting conditions. It will say the insurance companies can go out and beat the stuffing out of somebody who has a preexisting condition. If that is not enough, evidence this morning in the paper shows that this will trigger a new wave of health insurance scams and rip-offs that are going to harm our people. This morning in the paper, they talked about how this is going to encourage these cheap, junk, short- term health insurance policies, which often lack consumer protections and in so many instances have been a magnet for fraud and unscrupulous sales practices. For example, the paper this morning talked about how--I will read it. ``Examples abound of people who are dumped from such policies''--these short-term policies--``or denied coverage, mired in debt and medical bills totaling thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.'' It documents the various sales tactics used to rip people off. I remember what those tactics were like. When I was director of the senior citizens, the Gray Panthers, at home, it was common for agents to sell policy after policy that was not worth much more than the paper it was written on. It sure sounds to me as though these short-term policies, while a different time, are going to encourage the same kinds of rip- off practices that are going to harm our people. As we have touched on, we have heard from Senators on the other side that they think that if they vote for this bill, what they are going to be able to do is get two other bills that somehow will mitigate, will eliminate a lot of the harm this horribly flawed bill is going to do. It is going to harm millions of middle-class families who don't get a fair shake in the marketplace and then inflict all this damage on healthcare that I just described. I happen to think these two bills are constructive bills. The Alexander-Murray bill will make payments that will help limit the amount low-income Americans pay for health insurance. Our colleagues, Senators Collins and Nelson, have another constructive idea-- reinsurance money. That helps to stabilize the insurance market, which, by the way, the President of the United States has worked so hard to destabilize. The fact is, the Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan group of experts we use, has made it clear that these two bills will not even come close to wiping out the disastrous consequences of the health provisions in this bill that the Senate is about to vote for. I want to be clear. This is not just a tax bill, not just a bill with handouts to multinational corporations and a grab bag full of goodies for campaign supporters and powerful, well-connected interests. It is not just that. It is a big step backward in the cause of making sure that all our people have affordable, accessible healthcare. What we ought to be doing is looking at ways to come together and find common ground on provisions that we know are cost-effective, things like the children's health bill, which if I had my way would have been passed a long time ago, and community health centers and other vital provisions. We should be building on what we have, such as holding down the cost of pharmaceuticals, for example, targeting the middlemen who are at the heart of the problem. That is what we ought to be doing. We should not be doing what is on offer this morning. What is on offer this morning is turning back the clock on American healthcare, turning back the clock to those dark days when the insurance companies could beat the stuffing out of somebody who had a preexisting condition. We are better than that. We still have time. As I have said on the floor, as the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, we still have time to choose a different course. A few days ago, 17 Democratic Senators--led by Senators Manchin, Kaine, Donnelly, and Heitkamp--came together and said: We want to find common ground on taxes. I have written two bipartisan, comprehensive Federal income tax bills, the most recent one with a member of the President's Cabinet. We don't have to go this route. We don't have to go this route on taxes. We certainly don't have to do it on healthcare. There are approaches that would bring us together, and I have just described several of them. What I know we shouldn't do is turn back the clock to the days when healthcare in America was for the healthy and wealthy. That is what you get when you green-light discrimination against people with preexisting conditions. If they are healthy, no problem. If they are wealthy, they can take care of it. We should reject this bill and especially the provisions that relate to healthcare and that take America back to dark days, horrible days when healthcare in America was essentially for the healthy and wealthy. I yield the floor.

Mr. WYDEN. I am very pleased that my colleague from Vermont is discussing this issue on the floor. The Finance Democratic staff has been looking into this and has been working also with the Senator's staff, and I think that it would be fair to say that every few hours, this bill just seems to get worse. I mean, we don't know if, in the middle of the night, somebody will add another round of favors for the powerful interests, the politically well connected. What I can tell the Senator is what we have been able to put together as of now. In 2004, legislation was written that we were very much involved in that helped eliminate the loophole by requiring U.S. citizens to be bona fide residents of the Virgin Islands and imposing U.S. tax on income effectively connected with the United States. Now, in the dark of night, as I have indicated, it appears that we have a provision that is relaxing this rule. From our conversations, I know the Senator understands that we all want to help the people of the Virgin Islands after a devastating hurricane. Are we helping people by creating a huge, new loophole, possibly for a handful of those people who are especially well connected and can get to the Finance Committee? I am convinced that if one looks at the Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers, what they were warning about in those papers was of all of these efforts to stash money and create new options for people to wheel and deal in offshore accounts. So my colleague is right. I continue to wonder why, when we want to ask these really important questions about special interest favors and when we look to the other side, we have this barrier between both sides of the aisle. We need somebody here to explain to us and explain to the American people how this has seemed to just fly out of the sky. I am very appreciative of the Senator's raising a question about what looks like yet another scam that has come into a process that has been one big sham from the beginning. I appreciate my colleague's question.

Mr. WYDEN. If my colleague will yield, there is no question he is correct that in terms of stacking the deck, this is not just stacked to the top but to the top 1 percent or a fraction of the 1 percent.

Mr. WYDEN. There is absolutely no question about that. We are looking at something like half of the middle class to be paying more in taxes come 2027.

Mr. WYDEN. Not for a minute. The reason my colleague's questions are so important is that this is, certainly, an example of what seems to turn up every few hours, practically in the middle of the night. My colleague raised a very good point with respect to the development of this bill. I mean, we are talking about making $10 trillion worth of changes in tax policy on the fly--without a hearing. The Senator's colleagues have said--Chairman Enzi and the Budget Committee--and I have heard it several times on the other side--that there were 70 hearings on this bill. There was not one on this piece of legislation. It certainly didn't examine this issue. It didn't examine the question, for example, of what is going to happen to people with this dagger to the Affordable Care Act. I can tell this to my colleague because he is right to talk about how one brings parties together. I know my colleague did that as part of a major bill on the Veterans' Affairs Committee with Senator McCain. Our former colleague Bill Bradley mentioned that when he wrote a tax bill, he flew all over the country to work with Republicans. In this case, apropos of my colleague's question, not only did no one do that sort of thing, but they wouldn't even walk down the corridor to talk about working with the other side.

Mr. WYDEN. Will my colleague yield for a moment?

Mr. WYDEN. I want to ask the Senator a question because I am not sure that we have really laid out the timetable of what is ahead. My colleague, of course, who is our ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, is very up on this. We have all been concerned because we have seen it before. You pass these big tax cuts. You get on a sugar high for a relatively short period of time. Then the deficits start rolling in. What we see next are the cuts in the programs that are a lifeline for millions of people--the anti-hunger programs, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. I saw comments in the paper that what my colleague is concerned about has already been announced by the Speaker of the House. I understand that what the Speaker of the House has said is that his next plan is to take up the issues of what he calls entitlement reform. They are not talking about the things that the American people care about and that I am going to hear about at townhall meetings at home this weekend-- holding down the costs of prescription drugs. They are talking about rolling back the safety net--Medicaid and the anti-hunger programs and Social Security. Is that my colleague's understanding?

Mr. WYDEN. Reserving my right to object, and I will not object. I would just like to make sure that our colleague from Oklahoma and our colleague from Washington are both accommodated in this matter. Senator Sanders and I have finished. I believe Senator Cantwell said that Senator Inhofe will go ahead. We thank Senator Cantwell for her usual collegiality. Senator Inhofe will go first and I ask unanimous consent that Senator Cantwell follow Senator Inhofe, and I will withdraw my reservation. I withdraw my reservation and I ask unanimous consent that Senator Cantwell follow Senator Inhofe.

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Cantwell and Senator Van Hollen be allowed a total of 15 minutes to discuss some very important issues.

Mr. WYDEN. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President and colleagues, the Senate is looking at making $10 trillion of changes in tax policy on the fly. This is the biggest change in Federal income tax policy in more than three decades. This is legislation that will determine our country's economic future for a generation, and, at this time, the Senate does not have the language the Senate will be voting on. My colleagues have been saying that they are out looking for it. I have a couple of questions I would like to ask the distinguished majority leader. When will the Senate be able to actually see the full text of this legislation?

Mr. WYDEN. Again, through the Chair, we are talking about complicated materials. We are talking about extraordinarily difficult, technical issues under the best of circumstances. While I respect the majority leader, to just be told we will have plenty of time to read it, what I can say--coming on top of the fact that we didn't have a single hearing on the actual legislation, nothing with regard to specifics--I think on this side of the aisle we have a right to some sense of when we will actually be able to see this. It strikes me as a reasonable and pretty straightforward request, given the fact that the American people have been kept in the dark about this for so long. So, again, I respectfully ask the majority leader: When will it be possible to see the full text of this bill?

Mr. WYDEN. Further reserving my right to object, I know that on the other side there has been discussion of scores and scores of hearings. I would say to the distinguished majority leader, there was not one single hearing--not one--on the specifics with respect to this legislation. There was not one single hearing on the health changes the majority seeks to make that put a dagger into the heart of the Affordable Care Act. So I will ask my colleague once more, and if we don't get a sense of what time we are actually going to see this bill, I intend to object.

Mr. WYDEN. Will my colleague yield for a question? Could my colleague tell me when the hearing was held on the health changes envisioned in this legislation?