Ron Wyden

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my postcloture debate time to Senator Schumer. I want to thank Senator Thune for his courtesy.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, before I begin my remarks, I want to make sure that everyone understands that Senator Murray has been on this floor hour after hour for a reason; that is, these nominations are enormously important. This one is right at the heart of what families and parents and communities want because it deals with education. I heard that again this weekend. I had three townhall meetings, mostly in rural areas. We had record turnouts. As Senator Murray knows, Oregon and Washington have been pounded in the last few weeks with bad weather--had to fly all night to get back for this debate. Everybody said how important this was because they understand what Betsy DeVos, if she is confirmed, would mean for our country. I want to start by putting a focus on this issue around what Oregonians are particularly concerned about this morning. They are concerned, when we talk about education, about boosting our high school graduation rates. Parents, teachers, and communities are all mobilized. I want to start my remarks by saying that I know people across the country are concerned about this. We worked very closely with Senator Murray and Senator Alexander on this. The reason that Oregonians feel so strongly is that we have been first in so many areas, for example, protecting our natural treasures, but we are not where we want to be in terms of high school graduation rates. For communities across Oregon, the business community, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Independents--you name it--it is top priority business for our State to improve high school graduation rates. That is because we understand that getting those graduation rates up is crucial to making sure that young people can be better prepared for their next step, whether that is college, whether it is the workforce--anything they want to do. I want to start my remarks with respect to the DeVos nomination very specifically. I do not believe improving high school graduation rates can be built on a foundation of alternative facts. Yet that is what Betsy DeVos has been promoting. For example, she recently told the Senate that graduation rates at virtual private schools--private schools which she has invested in--were almost twice as high as the actual graduation rates at those schools. She said that at the Nevada Virtual Academy there was a graduation rate of 100 percent. The actual graduation rate is 57 percent. She claimed that at the Ohio Virtual Academy there was a graduation rate of 92 percent. The actual rate is 46 percent. I think this pretty much qualifies as a set of alternative facts. At home, at the kinds of townhall meetings I had this weekend, people would probably call them four-Pinocchio falsehoods and ideological hocus-pocus. The alternative facts may be the DeVos way, but they aren't the Oregon way. As I said to Oregonians this weekend--we had teachers and community leaders come to these meetings--what we do is operate on something we call the Oregon way. The Oregon way is about Democrats and Republicans, people of all philosophies. We had great Republican Governors--Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield--who also served in this body and were independent. We want fresh, practical approaches. We focused on our ideas that work, ideas that get results, and we focus not on alternative facts but on the truth. What I heard again this weekend at home is that we are bringing together teachers in the classrooms and parents and community leaders and trying to determine what are the key factors in why students are not graduating. At home people are asking, how do you get results? What actually is going to work in the classroom and at our schools? Educators and principals tell me that mentoring programs work. They tell me at home that summer learning programs work. They point out the track record of afterschool programs, and they have the facts to back them up. These facts aren't alternative facts. They are not inflated graduation rates, the way Betsy DeVos told the Senate. These are based on actual studies: Studies that have shown that youth--especially at-risk youth--with mentors are more likely to join extracurricular activities, take on leadership roles at school, or volunteer in their communities. Afterschool and summer learning programs, again, have very solid track records, providing a safe place to learn and keeping low-income and at-risk youngsters on a path towards graduation. Those same educators have told me in my townhalls that they oppose elevating Betsy DeVos to a job with the important responsibility of steering the future of our Nation's children. The reason they have expressed these views is much like what I have stated to the Senate; and that is, that the evidence--not alternative facts but hard evidence--doesn't back up many of the judgments Betsy DeVos has made in guiding her work in this field. In Oregon, citizens--thousands of them--worry that the confirmation of Betsy DeVos is going to make it harder to help students succeed in the classroom and graduate from high school. This graduation rate for us in Oregon--and I am sure we are not alone--takes on a new and important urgency because of the changes that were made last year-- bipartisan changes Senators Murray and Alexander made to pass the Every Student Succeeds Act. The whole point of this bill was because, of course, there was great frustration across the country with No Child Left Behind, the predecessor. I remember at one point illustrating the frustration with that law. We had a wonderful school in rural Oregon with mostly low-income youngsters and mostly minority youngsters. They worked like crazy. Their parents were very involved. Their teachers rolled up their sleeves, and they were doing well at getting their test scores up. At one point, we were told they were going to be labeled a failing school, because, apparently, for a short period of time, a number of youngsters had the flu, and so the attendance rate wasn't what it should be. Those were the kinds of stories that illustrated why it was so important to fix No Child Left Behind and focus on approaches that work. It is my view that what Senator Murray and Senator Alexander did with respect to bipartisan leadership was to work for an important bill-- important for the future of students, important for their ability to get a job and do what they want in their years ahead. When you have a bipartisan bill that the President has signed into law, replacing failed education policies, and giving teachers more control over their classrooms, you ought to move quickly and boldly to carry out that law. That law included a provision that I wrote to help high schools with low graduation rates turn around student achievement by putting the most disadvantaged students on a path to success. It allows local educators--this isn't run by Washington, DC. I am always hearing that everybody is talking about having it run from Washington, DC. That is not what I voted for. What I voted for--and the majority of Senators voted for--was a fresh approach allowing local educators to promote and expand programs and policies that actually work in their community. They recognized that what works in Coos Bay or Roseburg, OR, may not necessarily work in Tallahassee. We wrote a bipartisan bill to come up with approaches tailored to what local educators want to pursue. Now as we are moving to see this law implemented in the States and as schools across the country are moving to implementation, it is more important than ever that the Senate get this right, that we get it right now, and that we use approaches grounded in the facts and grounded in the reality of public education. My concern is that--based on Betsy DeVos's record, which I have looked at in length--bipartisan work could be undercut by a system that has not been shown to improve academic outcomes for students. In Detroit, Mrs. DeVos has spent years advocating for a voucher system that gives taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools. Her efforts have essentially left public schools to do more for their students with less of the funding they desperately need. I was on a program this morning, a radio program. They were discussing the views of various Senators on this. I heard discussion of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle describing the fact that they were supportive of Mrs. DeVos because they thought her unconventional approaches and her fresh ideas were a real advantage in her having this position. I don't take a back seat to anybody in terms of being for unconventional approaches. I think it would be fair to say that pretty much most of my time in public life has been defined by taking unconventional approaches. So I welcome new ideas from people who have not been involved in government--and ideas that, frankly, are out of the box, that are unconventional. But they still have to be based on hard evidence that they are going to work. We are trying fresh approaches in Medicare, for example. The idea is that Medicare today is no longer the Medicare of 1965. It is all about chronic disease--cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and strokes. A big bipartisan group of us here in the Senate have written bipartisan legislation to try a very different approach--certainly unconventional--but it is grounded on the facts. It is grounded on what we know about taking care of folks at home and on the benefits of telemedicine. So that is why I am opposing the DeVos nomination. It is not because I am hostile to unconventional approaches or fresh faces or people who haven't been involved in government--quite the contrary. I probably have a bit of a bias for just that. I am opposing the nomination, No. 1, because of the track record that much of what she has advocated for hasn't worked, and, No. 2, when she was challenged on it--such as the question of the graduation rates and some of those programs she invested in--she inflated the rates. She said they were almost twice as high as they actually were. So the country can't afford to allow failed policies--particularly as we move to implement the new laws that do not suggest a very positive set of opportunities for public schools at the local level. We have recognized as a nation for years how vital public education is to giving children in America the chance to climb the economic ladder. It is a bedrock principle of public education that investments in public schools and investments where there is a track record of fresh ideas that work, rather than ideological approaches where the evidence suggests it doesn't work, can serve everyone. I cannot support an Education Secretary with a track record that flies in the face of the need for our country to make smart investments in public schools. I described how the next Education Secretary faces a challenging agenda with huge stakes. Graduation rates and improving them are right at the heart of it. But, obviously, we are going to have a need for other fresh ideas, like making college more affordable. Mrs. DeVos just doesn't have the qualifications to achieve the success that 50 million students in American public schools demand. The person entrusted with our children's future should not be put at the head of the class just because she is part of a family that wields enormous public influence. You get these jobs because you earn them, because you have been involved in your community and various kinds of charitable or philanthropic efforts, and your work produces concrete, tangible results that indicate that you can carry out a job of this importance. The reality is that these nominations are some of the most important judgments we make as a Senate. The people we put in these offices are going to control, literally, billions of dollars in spending. They are going to enforce laws that in some instances are decades old and, at a minimum, update the ones that need updating. I can tell you that what I heard again this weekend in rural Oregon indicates that the people I have the honor to represent do not believe Betsy DeVos is up for the job. So this morning, I stand up for kids, parents, and families who deserve education policies that will let them go after their dreams and secure their futures. I believe they deserve better. I believe Betsy DeVos is going to make it harder for working families to achieve those aspirations. That is why I will vote this morning against the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education. I encourage my colleagues to do the same. I yield the floor.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, as the Senate begins to consider the Price nomination, I wanted to see if I could put a little perspective on the upcoming debate. Focusing on bipartisanship has always been important to me. I know many of my colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee, on the Democratic side, share that view, and in 2009, the nominations of Democrats Tom Daschle, Tim Geithner, and Ron Kirk were all handled in a bipartisan way. Issues came up in the vetting process in each of these cases, and both sides of the committee took the investigation seriously. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in 2017. While Congressman Price served on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, he traded in health care stocks, pushed policies that helped his portfolio, and got special access to a promising stock deal. I asked the congressman directly in his Finance Committee hearing whether he got a special deal. He said that he did not. I don't think you could be much clearer than the following passage from a recent report by a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He wrote: ``Rep. Tom Price got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical stock at a discount, the company's officials said, contrary to his congressional testimony this month.'' I want to repeat that because I think it goes right to the heart of why Finance Committee Democrats feel that the effort to do the vetting necessary with respect to Congressman Price is not completed. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Wall Street Journal--I will just read it again--wrote: ``Rep. Tom Price got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical stock at a discount, the company's officials said, contrary to his congressional testimony this month.'' So, as I indicated, my Democratic colleagues and I on the committee said it was important to take more time to look into this issue. But the majority, when we said we needed to take more time to look at it, decided to look the other way. That is the first reason for concern on my side. The second is how Congressman Price would manage Health and Human Services, a Department that is really all about people: services for seniors, services for the poor, for the disabled, for children, and for families. These are the powerful threads of our safety net. If the safety net is not there for those who have nowhere else to turn, those poor will suffer greatly. Now, the debate on Congressman Price's nomination, in my view, is a referendum on the future of health care in America. In short, it is a debate about whether it makes sense for our country to go back to the dark days when health care worked only for the healthy and the wealthy. Based on the public record, Medicare is a program Congressman Price doesn't believe in, and it guarantees services he doesn't believe seniors should have. On the Affordable Care Act, he is the architect of repeal and run. He wrote the bill himself. He proposed weakening protections for Americans with preexisting conditions. He would slash Medicaid, shredding the health care safety net for the least fortunate in our country. He would take away health care choices for women across the country. Look for the common thread, Mr. President and colleagues, among the Price proposals. They take away coverage for our people and make health care more expensive for individuals or both. That is where Congressman Price stands when it comes to American health care. Every Senator who casts a vote for Congressman Price has to stand by that agenda. Beyond what this means for the future of American health care, there is the lingering specter of serious legal and ethical issues. Tonight and in the hours ahead, this debate is going to tackle each of those issues and more. As it gets underway, I am going to begin with Medicare. In my view, Medicare has been a historic achievement in the way policy is made in our country. In any debate like this one, I recall my days when I was the codirector of the Oregon Gray Panthers, when I worked with seniors who couldn't imagine life without Medicare. But I will tell you, they told me stories about what it was like for their grandparents when there wasn't Medicare. There were poor farms-- literally, poor farms--where older people who had served our country in the Armed Forces very often spent their last days in what amounted to squalor at these poor farms. Then Medicare came along. For millions of older people, it was a godsend. So I want to start my discussion with respect to Medicare with a comment that Congressman Price made about Medicare in 2009. It is a quote that speaks volumes about the Price perspective on the Medicare program that is so treasured by millions of older people. Congressman Price wrote in 2009: ``Nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare.'' I would just say to my friend, the Presiding Officer of the Senate knows how seniors in Oregon see this. Seniors in Oregon consider Medicare to be a Godsend, not an intrusion into medicine, as you see from the Price perspective. Here is the bottom line, colleagues, as we begin here today: Medicare is a promise. Medicare is built on a promise of guaranteed benefits-- guaranteed benefits that will be there for you. It is not a voucher. It is not a slip of paper. It is guaranteed benefits that you can count on, and it is a promise that Congressman Price has indicated--and it is a matter of public record--it is a promise that Congressman Price is more than willing to break. It is a promise that when you turn 65, you will be guaranteed health care benefits regardless of your economic station in life or the status of your health. And the reason Medicare was built with this special guarantee is straightforward: No American knows how healthy they will be when they reach age 65. Perhaps you are a marathoner at age 50 and you develop arthritis or Alzheimer's or cancer a decade and a half later. Furthermore, no one knows what the economy is going to look like years ahead or decades ahead into the future. For the less fortunate, high inflation or a stock market crash could all but wipe out what they set aside over a lifetime of work. Seniors could find their benefits exposed to new danger every time there is a financial downturn. During the recent campaign, the American people heard a standard Trump pledge: No cuts to Medicare. But when you look at the Price record and the promise of President Trump, there is a big gap between the two. When you look at Congressman Price's plan, it is clear that the Trump pledge was on the ropes the minute he was nominated. In fact, Congressman Price said that he wants to voucherize Medicare within the first 6 to 8 months of the administration. Let me repeat that again. Mr. President, some of these statements that the Congressman has made are so far-fetched that once in a while I am going to have to repeat them so that people really get a sense of why we are so concerned. Congressman Price said he wants to voucherize Medicare within the first 6 to 8 months of the administration. So what that would mean is that right out of the chute, the Medicare promise, the promise of guaranteed benefits--Congressman Price wants to break the promise. In his budget, the Congressman called for privatizing Medicare and cutting it by nearly $500 billion. He also championed legislation to allow a practice called balanced billing in Medicare. That means seniors could be forced to cover extra charges above what the program pays for the services they receive in the doctor's office. Older Americans on fixed incomes would be forced to pay more for their care. Colleagues, I believe the Congress has no greater duty than to uphold the promise of Medicare. In my view, there is no need to mince words: Privatizing Medicare as Congressman Price has thought to do means an end--an end to the program-guaranteed health benefit. It would break the Medicare promise, the promise of guaranteed benefits and services, and end Medicare as our country knows it. Now let me turn to the Affordable Care Act. When it comes to the Affordable Care Act, for years now, there has been a steady drumbeat coming from my colleagues on the other side: Repeal and replace. Repeal and replace. I think it has gotten to the point where children sing it almost as a jingle. Repeal and replace. It has been said so many times. A government shutdown all built around that slogan--repeal and replace. At one point, the President-elect said repeal and replace would happen, in his words, ``simultaneously.'' Shortly before inauguration, he said they would come within the same hour, and he said Congressman Price was writing the replacement plan and it was nearly ready to be unveiled. But the public heard a different story during Congressman Price's Finance Committee hearing. At that hearing, our colleague Senator Brown of Ohio asked: The President said he is working with you on a replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act, which is nearly finished, and it will be revealed after your confirmation; is that true? That was the question posed by Senator Brown to Congressman Price. The Congressman said: It is true that he said that, yeah--that he said that, yeah. A moment later he added, ``I have had conversations with the President about health care, yes.'' So if anybody is waiting for the curtain to rise on the Price replacement plan, it sounds like you are going to have to wait a while longer. In fact, the President said this weekend, just this weekend, Americans might have to wait until next year to see the replacement, but the uncertainty about what comes next sure hasn't slowed down the charge of many toward repeal. In fact, the President issued a day one Executive order instructing the executive branch to roll back the Affordable Care Act in any way possible. So I thought given these developments, the fact that Congressman Price is the architect of a repeal-and-run bill; that the President immediately on day one tried to set in motion a strategy to gut some of the key protections in the Affordable Care Act, I thought I ought to follow this up with Congressman Price during his nomination hearing in the Finance Committee. So I asked Congressman Price during his finance nomination hearing whether the Congressman would state that nobody would be worse off under the President's Executive order--not real complicated. There had been all this talk through the campaign about how now President Trump could do a better job, less money. That was the constant refrain. I decided, given these ominous developments that I just described since the beginning of this year, I thought I would just ask Congressman Price whether anybody would be worse off under the Executive order. He ducked the question. I remember asking him about whether people would be worse off with respect to coverage, and I remembered he said something about how people would have access to health care. Well, I will tell you, hearing the word ``access'' rather than ``coverage'' means that somebody is walking back a commitment to people really getting care. Everybody pretty much can have access. Sure, if I had the money, I could get it. It is about coverage. So we asked Congressman Price whether people would be worse off and he ducked the question. So then I asked if he would commit that no one would lose coverage, and he ducked once more. Then I asked if he would commit to holding off on implementing the Executive order until a replacement plan was enacted. He ducked. So the Congressman was given an opportunity to, in effect, say that he would honor what the American people were told by President Trump in the campaign; that the two would be hand in hand, the replacement and repeal would go hand in hand, but he had the chance to say that at the nomination hearing and he ducked and ducked and he ducked some more. Americans are still being told that the Affordable Care Act is the problem and it has to be repealed. It looks to me that what Republicans have on offer now isn't repeal and replace at all. It is what I have been calling it since last year, repeal and run, and the architect of repeal and run is Congressman Price. In fact, he wrote the bill. He wrote the bill that would have gutted the ACA the last time around. Under the Price plan, 18 million Americans would lose their health insurance in less than 2 years. By 2026, it would be 32 million who would lose coverage. Today 26 million Americans are uninsured. In a decade it would be 59 million. Working Americans would make up four out of every five people who lose their coverage. These are folks struggling to climb the economic ladder. No-cost contraceptive coverage for millions of women would be gone. We would have hundreds of thousands of women losing access to care almost immediately just by the defunding of Planned Parenthood. Hundreds of thousands more would lose their choice to see the doctors they trust. Just think about that. Legislation that is going to take away from American women the chance to see the doctor of their choosing, the doctor they trust. I don't know anybody in the last election who thought they were voting to see women lose the choice of the doctor they trust. Under the Price plan, premiums jumped by hundreds of dollars a year as the individual market for health insurance collapses. Health care costs skyrocket. It is a gut punt to all, even those who get their health insurance at work because what it would do is, in effect, it would shrink--it would shrink the health care market in a way that there would be many more people who are seriously ill and had great expenses, and when you try to pass those on, that would mean people in the marketplace and those who had health insurance from their employer would see increases. Another issue in the Price plan that ought to set off any alarm bells, in my view, is what Congressman Price has proposed for those with preexisting health care conditions. This is especially important in my view. When I proposed my own health plan, eight Democrats, eight Republicans, I was especially pleased that Senators on both sides of the aisle understood that making sure that insurance companies could not knock the stuffing out of people with a preexisting condition any longer was central to reform. Because when you allow discrimination against those with a preexisting condition, what you are essentially saying is health care in America is going to be for the healthy and wealthy. If you are healthy, no problem with a preexisting condition. If you are wealthy, again, no problem. So right at the heart of the Affordable Care Act is a guarantee that insurance companies cannot discriminate against Americans with preexisting conditions. Frankly, I was very pleased to see that because as I indicated, 16 Senators--8 Democrats and 8 Republicans--on our bill said that was right at the heart of what they wanted in health care reform. So the ACA--the Affordable Care Act--said, No denying coverage to pregnant women, no denying coverage to cancer patients, no denying coverage to kids with autism. Under the Affordable Care Act, that is the law of the land. It protects every single American. No American under the Affordable Care Act should have to feel, when they go to bed at night, that they are going to get hammered as in the old days because they have a preexisting condition. Now, Congressman Price, once again turning to the public record--it is all in the public record here. Congressman Price doesn't believe the American people should have the protection of that kind of real ban against discrimination for a preexisting condition. In fact, he was quoted in 2012 saying that it was, in his words, ``a terrible idea.'' So he, like the law, changed, and his way to change a law that guarantees universal protection is to get rid of the guarantee that you aren't going to get discriminated against if you have a preexisting condition. Our colleague, Senator Nelson of Florida, asked Congressman Price about the issue of making sure those with preexisting conditions don't get discriminated against when the Finance Committee held their nomination hearing. Once again, Congressman Price ducked, bobbed, and weaved. Senator Nelson asked if the Congressman thought that the proposal to continue the ban on discriminating against people with a preexisting condition is a terrible idea. Here is what Congressman Price said: ``What I have always said about preexisting conditions is that nobody, in a system that pays attention to patients, nobody ought to be priced out of the market for having a bad diagnosis. Nobody.'' Now, that probably is a pretty good sound bite. It is a good sound bite if you are trying to duck a question, but it is not a real answer to what Congressman Price was asked by Senator Nelson. And if you examine Congressman Price's own proposal, when it comes to actually protecting people with a preexisting condition from discrimination, you can see why Congressman Price isn't very interested in giving a straight answer. I am going to turn now to one of the Congressman's bills. It is ironically called ``Empowering Patients First.'' Instead of a ban on discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, the Price bill opened up loopholes to benefit insurance companies. The Price plan hinged on something called continuous coverage, and Americans are going to probably hear a fair amount about that in the months ahead. The Price plan said that insurance companies had the right to inspect your recent past when you applied for coverage to the private market. If they found gaps when you went without insurance, they could deny coverage for your preexisting condition for up to a year and a half, or they could hike your premiums by 50 percent. In short, under the Price plan, insurance companies could take your money and skip out on covering the health care that you actually need. Short summary of the Price health provision there: Worse health care, higher costs. Now let's think about what this would mean for a cancer patient who suffers a job loss: Up to 18 months without coverage for cancer treatment they need that could be the difference between life and death. Congressman Price's bill didn't allow any special exceptions for certain gaps in coverage. No matter why you lost your insurance--maybe a layoff, maybe your spouse passed, quitting your job to start a business or go back to school--insurance companies with the Price plan again would be allowed to discriminate. And Congressman Price's bill didn't create any safeguards for particular patients with life- threatening illnesses. No matter what kind of preexisting condition you have, you would be at risk of losing access to care. And going by the practices those companies followed before the Affordable Care Act, more than 130 million Americans under age 65 may have a preexisting condition. Now, it is correct that Republicans may not decide to go ahead with Congressman Price's bill as the final measure on replacement. But make no mistake about it: If confirmed, Congressman Price will be the captain of the Trump administration's health team. His proposals matter. And his approach is one that is followed by just about every other Republican who has put forward a plan of their own. Colleagues, I think it would be an enormous mistake for this Senate-- for our country--to turn back the clock and go back to the days when health care was for the healthy and wealthy. I don't think there ought to be a debate about the need for real, truly strong protection for our people against discrimination for those with a preexisting condition. The Affordable Care Act locked it in to black letter law. It set a new standard: Nobody in America is going to be denied insurance due to a preexisting condition. In my view, it would be unconscionable to look to yesteryear, turn back the clock, and undermine those strong protections for the millions and millions of Americans who suffer from those preexisting health conditions. That, as a matter of public record, is what Congressman Price's proposal would do. I want to turn now to his ideas with respect to Medicaid. This, in my view, is an especially important program, and a part of it that is usually missed is the nursing home benefit for seniors. Back when I was the director of the Oregon Gray Panthers and I ran the legal aid office for the elderly, I saw in particular what Medicaid meant for seniors who needed nursing home care. Medicaid now covers costs for two-thirds of the seniors in nursing homes. And I think we ought to think about who these people are because these are people in Colorado, in Oregon, and across the country, who worked hard. They always played by the rules. They put their kids through school. They were part of their communities. They saved, they scrimped, they didn't go on an extra vacation; maybe they were thinking about buying a boat, but they didn't do any of that. They didn't do any of that because they wanted to save and make sure their spouse could have a dignified retirement, that they could put their kids through school, and they did everything right. So they saved and they saved and they saved. But the fact is, it costs a lot to be a senior in America today. So perhaps they spent down all those savings, and their kids--the kids they love so much--aren't doing that well economically, so it is hard for the kids to help out with long-term care. Without Medicaid--and particularly the nursing home benefit--seniors, 65 percent of whom depend on the program for nursing homes, wouldn't be able to have a dignified retirement. So that nursing home benefit that is paid for by Medicaid is also one that Congressman Price has proposed slashing. He does that by cutting $2 trillion out of Medicaid over the course of two stages. First, Congressman Price repeals the expansion of Medicaid created under the Affordable Care Act. This means that more than 11 million Americans lose their coverage. And it is a plan that even Republican Governors are speaking out against. John Kasich of Ohio--I think he would probably tell you he is not anybody's idea of a bleeding heart liberal--said recently: ``So if all of a sudden that goes away, what do we tell those 700,000 people? We are closed? Can't do that.'' But that is exactly what Congressman Price's plan is going to end up doing. It is going to end up telling those 700,000 Ohioans, along with millions of people across the country in Oregon, and across the land-- and that is because he is pushing to take away their coverage and hasn't offered any real alternative that would preserve their access to care. So for all of those seniors--the ones who worked hard and saved and did everything right--we all know them; perhaps they are the widower down at the end of the block--there is not going to be a way to pay for their health care, and they are not going to be able to have a dignified retirement, in spite of the fact they did everything all their life to plan and save. Congressman Price's second Medicaid cut turns the program into a block grant and introduces a cap approach. That slashes another 30 percent of its funding and sets it up to be squeezed even more down the road. Now, Medicaid goes a lot further in terms of taking on some of the biggest health care challenges in America. I cited the nursing home benefit because that is one that I dealt with again and again when I was director of the Gray Panthers. But the fact is that the program is helping communities across the country take on a whole host of health care challenges. The opioid epidemic is one example. Now, we know that opioid addiction has hit American communities like a wrecking ball. More than a million people struggle with substance abuse, and they would lose access to care if the Price plan to repeal Medicaid expansion goes through. And further cuts to Medicaid would make the problem even worse, and it wouldn't just be for adults. Tens of thousands of babies are born with a dependency to drugs each year. It is largely a product of the opioid crisis. My view is that number can only rise under Congressman Price's plan to cut Medicaid, a key source of primary care, prenatal care, and substance abuse treatment for pregnant women. Medicaid is also the biggest source of funding for community and home-based care for those vulnerable Americans with serious disabilities. It is a huge source of AIDS treatment in America, particularly with the Affordable Care Act expansion. All in all, 74 million Americans rely on Medicaid, and they are certainly not among the most fortunate. Half of them are kids, including millions with special needs. The program covers nearly half of all births and millions of Americans with disabilities. I want to come back again to the faces of these people because I am not sure, when people hear the word ``Medicaid,'' what they see. I mention that it is so many seniors who, after planning, saving, and scrimping, need the program for nursing home care. It covers people who toil through hard work, even multiple jobs, bringing home just enough to keep them out of poverty. For many, signing up for the Medicaid Program brought an end to the years when they had to choose between visiting the doctor and putting food on the table. Medicaid is their health care safety net. Make no mistake about it; Congressman Price's proposals leave that safety net in tatters. There isn't any other backstop for those vulnerable Americans. From small, tiny children to seniors who depend on it for nursing home care, there is no other backstop if their access to health care through Medicaid goes away. One of the arguments made by advocates of block grants and caps is that States would have flexibility, and they point to a section of the Affordable Care Act I wrote to support their case. I believe they are talking about what is called section 1332. There is a big difference between what I wrote in the Affordable Care Act and what block grants would do. We had a number of Senators on both sides of the aisle who were interested in this issue. What I wrote is this: With that flexibility, the Affordable Care Act lets States do better by their people. The Price plan to block grant and cap Medicaid costs lets States do worse. Slashing Medicaid also hits State budgets extraordinarily hard. That is a big reason why Governors across the country have been skeptical-- even Republican Governors, like John Kasich and Rick Snyder of Michigan. Today, Medicaid comes with an open-ended kind of feature. Federal funding for the program doesn't tick down to zero. Nobody gets cut off. If you are working in America and are eligible for Medicaid, you don't have to worry about being locked out of the doctor's office if the program goes into the red. Block granting and capping the program changes that. States get a chunk of money each year. There is a big risk that money runs out, especially during times of economic downturn. That is when Medicaid is needed most, at times when working Americans have the most trouble walking the economic tightrope. This is in addition to the undeniable, routine demands on the program: an aging baby-boomer population that will be in increasing need of nursing home and home-based care, public health emergencies like the Zika virus that can come without warning, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Flint water crisis that devastate communities, new high-priced drugs that can be cures but come with a steep price. The reality is if a State's block grant runs out, that raises questions that ought to be alarming to all who care about vulnerable Americans having access to the care they need. What happens if seniors lose their nursing home benefits in the middle of the year? Where would they go? Would patients in substance abuse treatment lose access to care? If a State's Medicaid funding dries up midway through the fiscal year, who would pay for a birth? Would the parents of a newborn child have to bear the entire cost when they are on a modest income, working hard, and a hospital bill could reach tens of thousands of dollars? When it comes time to pitch this very extreme health care agenda to the American people, Congressman Price is very articulate and sticks closely to well-rehearsed language. That is because the Price agenda would strip tens of millions of Americans of their insurance coverage and force people to pay much higher costs for much lesser care. It isn't going to go over very well when people really understand what is at stake. One of the priorities Congressman Price talks about most frequently is access--always saying that his vision is Americans are going to have access to care. That is one very hollow theory. Access to health care doesn't mean a lot if you can't afford the cost. So when Americans hear the Price plan that people will have access, rather than coverage, pay attention. Pay attention, because if you have coverage today, and he is going to promise you access in the future, chances are you are going into the hole and you had better figure out how you are going to pay for it. The Congressman talks about flexibility for patients. But under Congressman Price's plans that wipe out consumer protections and minimum standards for coverage, it is insurance companies that get the most flexibility. The Congressman likes to talk about using metrics to measure health care. It is very hard to follow what this metrics approach is all about. When his proposals are challenged using facts and figures, including those that come from our nonpartisan scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office, he disagrees or he dodges. During his hearing, he just disagreed with the Congressional Budget Office when I asked him about some of his funding cuts that would deprive women of access to preventive care. He objects to even the simplest of measures--how much funding his proposals cut from our health care programs--as calculated by the nonpartisan experts. In my view, you can't run from the metrics when they don't tell you what you want to hear. Finally, the Congressman and many others say patients should be at the center of care. Now, I want it understood, I don't see how anybody could dispute that idea. Of course patients should be at the center of care. But when I look at the Price proposals, I don't see the patient at the center of health care. I see money and I see special interests at the center of health care. The Price plan tells vulnerable Americans that their health care will only go as far as their bank accounts are going to take them. The well- to-do may be able to manage just fine under the Price proposals and the costs they push onto patients, but I am absolutely certain that millions of working Americans won't be able to do it. I am going to wrap up talking about several glaring ethical issues with respect to Congressman Price. I will begin with the Congressman's significant investments in an Australian biomedical company. A lot of information about those investments has come into view over the course of months of investigation and reporting. What the facts show is that in 2016, the Congressman was part of an exclusive deal to buy stock at a discounted price--a deal called a ``private placement.'' On multiple occasions he was given opportunities to come clean and explain his participation in the special stock sale. He never has. Now, the majority on the Finance Committee has cut off the vetting process before getting all the facts or having the Congressman correct the record. So I am going to take a moment tonight to lay out the facts. It is well known that Congressman Price learned about the company from a House colleague, Congressman Chris Collins. But Chris Collins isn't exactly a casual observer of the Australian business pages. He is Innate's--the company's--largest shareholder and a member of its board. Many of the company's other major shareholders are people in Congressman Collins' orbit, family members and chief of staff and others that he is close to. After learning about the company from his colleague, Congressman Price made his first purchase of the company's stock in 2015. He bought 61,000 shares. Now let's fast forward to August 2016. The Congressman bought another 400,000 shares of Innate as part of a private stock sale for U.S. investors. When the private sale took place, Innate's shares were trading on the Australian stock exchange for the equivalent of 31 American cents, but participants in this private sale got the shares at a steep discount. That discount meant that Congressman Price paid tens of thousands of dollars less than a typical investor would have paid on the open market. With respect to that purchase, the record remains unclear. It does come down to two issues: how he came to participate in the private placement, and whether he got special access that other investors didn't have. On those issues, Congressman Price tells one story; company officials, Congressman Collins, and public documents tell another. First I am going to examine how Congressman Price came to participate in this private deal. As he tells it, he decided to make that purchase based on his own research into the company. But the Wall Street Journal and a little common sense say otherwise. I will read from a January 30 report. Mr. Price got in on the discounted sale after Mr. Collins filled him in on the company's drug trial, according to Mr. Collins. . . . Mr. Collins said he told Mr. Price of the additional private placement. He said Mr. Price asked if he could participate in it. ``Could you have someone send me the documents?'' Mr. Collins recalled Mr. Price asking him. It paints a pretty clear picture. Congressman Price got information from his colleague, the company's top shareholder, and he got an invitation to a special deal. The claim that his conversations with Congressman Collins had no effect on Congressman Price's decision to invest just does not pass muster. So I will turn to the second point--whether or not the deal was available to all company shareholders. Congressman Price insists it was. Here is the exchange he and I had during his nomination hearing in the Finance Committee. I said: ``You purchased stock in an Australian company through private offerings at discounts not available to the public.'' Congressman Price responded: ``Well, if I may, those--they were available to every single individual that was an investor at the time.'' But that is not what Innate management--including the CEO--told the Wall Street Journal. According to the Wall Street Journal's report, Congressman Price was one of six special American investors in a category called ``friends and family.'' I will read a passage from the story. The cabinet nominee [Mr. Price] was one of fewer than 20 U.S. investors who were invited last year to buy discounted shares of the company--an opportunity that, for Mr. Price, arose from an invitation from a company director and a fellow congressman. At Mr. Collins's invitation, Mr. Price in June ordered shares discounted in the private placement at 18 cents apiece, and then more in July at 26 cents a share, Mr. Collins said in an interview. Those orders went through in August, after board approval. Mr. Price invested between $50,000 and $100,000, according to his disclosure form . . . Mr. Wilkinson [the company's CEO] said investors who had bought in a previous private placement were called to make friends and family aware of the opportunity. . . . We are always looking to increase our shareholder base. But those new parties have to meet the definition of sophisticated financial investor. Only six U.S. investors, including Mr. Price, fell into the friends-and-family category, Mr. Collins [his friend in Congress] said. About 10 more U.S. investors were offered discounted shares by the company because they had previously been invited to partake in private placement offerings. Furthermore, Congressman Collins and Mr. Wilkinson added more detail. The discounted stock offer in Innate Immuno, as the company is known, was made to all shareholders in Australia and New Zealand--but not in the U.S., according to Mr. Collins and confirmed in a separate interview with Innate Immuno CEO Simon Wilkinson. Bottom line, Congressman Price got in as a special guest, a friends and family guest of Congressman Collins. What he told the committee-- that the deal was open to shareholders--was dead wrong. I am going to repeat this quote from the Wall Street Journal. This was part of a report that was authored by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. This is what he wrote in the Wall Street Journal: ``Rep. Tom Price got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical stock at a discount, the company's officials said, contrary to his congressional testimony this month.'' The stock deals I outlined are of very great significance. They aren't the only ethical issue at hand. Congressman Price introduced legislation that would lower the tax bills of three major pharmaceutical companies in which he owns significant amounts of stock. He invested $15,000 in a medical equipment company and then introduced legislation to increase the amount Medicare pays for that type of equipment. Parts of his bill went on to become law. Then there is his investment in a company called Zimmer Biomet. In 2015, Medicare was preparing a new pricing model that would change the way the program paid for hip and knee replacements. Instead of paying for each individual service, Medicare said it would try to make its payments more efficient by bundling the costs together in one lump sum. The new system, however, had the potential to affect the revenues of Zimmer Biomet. On March 17, 2016, a few weeks before the government's model--that is, the CMS model was set to go into effect--Congressman Price bought thousands of dollars' worth of Zimmer Biomet stock through his brokerage account. On March 23, 2016, less than a week later, he introduced H.R. 4848, the HIP Act, which would have delayed the implementation of CMS regulations for Medicare coverage of joint replacements. He was the lead Republican sponsor of the bill. Bottom line, Congressman Price introduced legislation that certainly had the potential to add to his personal fortune. Congressman Price has argued that he didn't purchase this stock and others; his broker was making the deal. But at the very least, he would have known about the deals within days when he filed his periodic transaction reports with the House. On August 15, 2016, not only did Congressman Price file a report that he had purchased Zimmer Biomet along with dozens of other stocks, he initialed the entry for Zimmer Biomet in order to correct a mistake on the document. Wrapping up, I want to go back to the fact that when Congressman Price came before the Finance Committee, he didn't give us the whole story. In effect, I think the Finance Committee regrettably has an ethical double standard now. Look at the nominations of Tom Daschle, Tim Geithner, and Ron Kirk at the outset of the Obama administration. That vetting was vigorous. It was bipartisan. We looked over every stone and peered around every corner. Now, when a glaring issue comes up that undeniably deserves investigation, the party in power is shutting down the vetting process and moving toward confirmation. I think this is sending a dangerous message to nominees in the future. I will close by way of saying this is a nominee with an extreme agenda. His proposals strip tens of millions of Americans of their health care coverage. His proposals would put Americans with preexisting conditions in danger of losing coverage through the care they need. It would unravel the Medicare promise, the guarantee of secured benefits of vital importance to millions of American seniors. When it comes to ethics, as I have described, Congressman Price falls well short of the standard the American people expect nominees to meet. I will not support his nomination. I urge my colleagues to join me in opposition. I yield the floor.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Eric Skidmore, Kailee Farrell, Benjamin Willis, Kelly Singleton, and Kathryn Haake, legislative fellows in my office, be given floor privileges for the rest of this Congress. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, before he leaves the floor, I want to thank Senator Leahy, particularly because, once again, on this issue he showed there was a path forward that was bipartisan. The senior Senator from Vermont got together with our colleague from Utah, Senator Lee, and the two of them set out from the get-go to try to find common ground. I think most people didn't give us great odds. Senator Leahy and I used to talk about how when we began the effort, being on the Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee, a group of us could probably have met in a phone booth, but then, under Senator Leahy's leadership, we began to pick up colleagues from both sides of the aisle. The Obama administration, which we both remember, had reservations at the beginning. We said: Look, we can find a way. The intelligence community said to go forward with this, but this didn't happen by osmosis. It happened under the leadership of Senator Leahy and Senator Lee, our colleague on the other side of the aisle. One of the reasons we feel so strongly, as the Senator from Vermont has stated, is that if we are not careful, particularly with this nomination, we could undo, we could unravel a lot of that good bipartisan work. I know my colleague has a tight schedule, and I so appreciate his coming over and very much recognize that one of the reasons we are here is to make sure we don't undo the good bipartisan work that he has authored. Madam President, today the Senate is doing something that doesn't happen often around here--having an open debate about the future of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Central Intelligence Agency, in my view, is an enormously important and valuable part of our government. It is staffed by thousands and thousands of patriotic Americans who make extraordinary sacrifices on our behalf. They work so hard to protect our country in so many ways Americans will never find out about. They give up their time. They give up their weekends, family vacations, and all kinds of things that would be scheduled that they would enjoy personally, and they give it up on 1 or 2 hours' worth of notice because they want to protect the security and the well-being of our Nation. The fact is, many at the CIA have risked their lives defending us and some have made the ultimate sacrifice with their lives. When you talk about the CIA on the Senate floor, it is especially important to protect the people I have just mentioned and to protect what are called their sources and methods. Sources and methods are the secret means by which the CIA gets the information that is needed for our national security, and it needs to stay classified. While sources and methods need to stay classified, the debate about our laws and those who execute them is a public matter. The policies that guide what the CIA does in its important work--the debate about policies always has to be public. The nomination of a CIA Director is a rare and important chance to talk about what the nominee thinks those policies ought to be. In the beginning, I am going to offer my guiding principle. Smart national security policies protect both our security and our liberty, and they recognize that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive; that it is possible to have both; that it is essential to have both. Nothing illustrates the need for policies that promote security and liberty more clearly than the issue of encryption, which we will be talking about--in my view--at length in this Congress as part of the intelligence debate. Strong encryption protects Americans from foreign hackers, criminals, identity thieves, stalkers, and other bad actors. It is the key to protecting our cyber security. Yet there are some in government and some in the Congress who think it would make sense to require American companies to build backdoors into their products so the government can get access to that information. My own view is this would be an enormous mistake, a mistake from a security standpoint, a mistake from a liberty standpoint, and also very damaging to our companies-- companies that produce jobs with good wages. I have been fighting against ill-advised encryption proposals because they would be bad for security for the reason I mentioned. It would be a big gift to foreign hackers and bad for liberty. The reality is, if we require our companies to build backdoors into their products, the first thing that is going to happen is all the companies overseas, where they will not have such rules, will benefit enormously. A lot of good-paying jobs-- high-skill, high-wage jobs--would be at risk. I bring this up only by way of stressing how important it is that we get this right; that we advance policies that promote security and liberty and we recognize right at the get-go that they are not mutually exclusive. With that in mind, we turn to the nomination of Congressman Mike Pompeo to be the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. After consideration of his testimony and a review of his past statements--and response to written questions--I have concluded that he is the wrong man for the job. He has endorsed extreme policies that would fundamentally erode the liberties and freedoms of our people without making us safer. He has been unwilling to provide meaningful responses to my questions with respect to these views. When he has provided responses, they have often either been so vague or so contradictory that it is impossible to determine what his core beliefs are or what he might actually do if he is confirmed. On issue after issue, the Congressman has taken two, three, or four positions, depending on when he says it and whom he is talking to. He has done this with surveillance, with torture, with Russia, and a number of other subjects. So now we are at the end of the confirmation process. There has been a hearing. I met with the nominee in private. We submitted two sets of questions, both before and after the hearing. Despite it all, it has been impossible to walk away with consistent answers on the Congressman's beliefs on how he would lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Let me begin with surveillance. Just over a year ago, after the USA FREEDOM Act had become law, Congressman Pompeo wrote in an op-ed that Congress should pass a law reestablishing collection of all metadata. This was a reference to the program in which the government collected and kept the records of tens of millions of innocent Americans. When the American people found out about this program, they were rightly horrified and they rejected it, which was why--as we touched on this afternoon on a bipartisan basis--Congress abolished the program through the USA FREEDOM Act. That law got the government out of the business of collecting these millions of phone records on law-abiding people, and it did nothing to harm our security. For example, I am very proud that I was able to work in a bipartisan way to author a provision that allowed the government, in emergency circumstances, to get phone records immediately and then go back later and seek court approval. I wrote that provision to make sure that when the security of our great Nation was on the line, it would be possible for our national security officials to move immediately, without delay, to get the information that was needed. Congressman Pompeo himself voted for the USA FREEDOM Act before he turned around 8 months later and wrote that he wanted to reestablish this sweeping and unnecessary program. So understand the timeline. The Congressman talks about voting for the USA FREEDOM Act, but after he cast that vote, he came out in a widely circulated article in the Wall Street Journal for a proposal that really makes all the earlier collection of phone records about law-abiding people look like small potatoes. I am going to discuss that this afternoon. The question really is, What does the Congressman believe? Does he stand by his vote to abolish the NSA phone records dragnet? Was that what he was suggesting when he brought up that vote during his hearing or does he stand by what he wrote in his major opinion article that came out well after the law he voted for? In response to questions, the Congressman wrote that he believes the collection of tens of millions of Americans' phone records provided a significant tool for the intelligence community and that ``I have not changed my position.'' That sounds like an endorsement of the mass surveillance of phone records. Again, in the hearing, the nominee said something else. Senator Heinrich asked him whether he had been briefed on whether the current process--where the government collects phone records on an individual basis rather than in bulk from millions of Americans, even if they are not suspected of a crime--protects our Nation as well as the liberty of millions of innocent Americans. The Congressman is a member of the House Intelligence Committee so he has had the opportunity to be briefed on this topic, but here is his response to Senator Heinrich: ``Senator, I have not had a chance to have a complete briefing on that, but I can say I have not heard anything that suggests that there is a need for change today.'' In other words, in just a matter of days, Congressman Pompeo has taken the position, first, that the bulk collection of American phone records was a significant tool and that it should be reestablished, and, second, while testifying to the committee, that he has no basis on which to believe that is necessary. That is such a head scratcher, I just don't know how to go about squaring these truly conflicting statements. What troubles me especially is if the Congressman were to be confirmed as CIA Director, the doors would close and he would operate in secret. Yet Americans do not know which position he would take in running the CIA. The American people have no idea how Congressman Pompeo would advise the President and his national security team on what is truly necessary to protect the Nation. Phone records are not the only communication records we need to be concerned about. Until a few years ago, the NSA also ran a program in which millions of Americans' email records were collected. Since the Congressman wrote that he wanted to reestablish collecting all of the metadata, I asked him whether he would support the resumption of that program as well and whether he believed that millions of Americans' email records should be combined with millions of American phone records. He could have said no. He could have clarified that he was only talking about phone records. Instead, he ducked taking a position. In fact, he even indicated that he would be open to including email records in his new database. His exact words were: ``If I am confirmed and agency officials inform me that they believe the current programs and legal framework are insufficient to protect the country, I would make appropriate recommendations for any needed changes to laws and regulations.'' What is especially troubling about this is that the bulk email program was discontinued because it wasn't effective. I spent a lot of time pressing intelligence officials to give us some evidence that you had to go out and collect all of these email records from law-abiding Americans. In the end, the Agency decided to look at it, and they came to the same conclusion I did; that it wasn't needed. That is not a judgment about whether the program violated Americans' privacy because it definitely did that. The NSA determined that--in its words, not mine--the program did not meet their ``operational expectations.'' This is public information. All the details are available to the House Intelligence Committee on which the Congressman sits. This should have been an easy answer for the nominee, but he refused to rule out the inclusion of millions of Americans' email records--records the NSA has said it doesn't need--in what would be his idea of a massive new government database. The collection of phone and email records of millions of innocent Americans is small potatoes compared to what the nominee wrote next. His proposal was to combine all of the communications metadata, and these are his words, with ``publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive searchable data base.'' This is far bigger and more encompassing than any such data collection program that the Bush-Cheney administration ever imagined. I have been a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee since before 9/11. I have been in a lot of debates about the appropriate scope of government surveillance. I have never heard ever--not from anyone--an idea so extreme, so overarching, and so intrusive on Americans' privacy. I wanted to give the Congressman the opportunity to explain what he was actually proposing. So during the confirmation hearing--and later in what are questions that are submitted to him--I tried to find out what his database would include and what, if anything, it wouldn't include. I could not get substantive answers. What we basically got was a big word salad with a liberal helping of words that just kind of skirted the issue. My folks would call them weasel words. The Congressman did mention social media in his answers. But it is one thing for the government to read the social media postings of Americans because there is a specific reason to do so; it is something else entirely to create a giant government database of everyone's social media postings and to match that up with everyone's phone records. We asked where the nominee would draw the line. He wouldn't say. Congressman Pompeo's vision of this vast government database doesn't stop, by the way, with social media. What he wrote in his responses to my questions was that he was ``generally'' referring to publicly available information on the Internet or other ``public databases.'' I will repeat that. He was generally talking about information already in the public domain. That raised the question of what else the nominee wanted to enter into a giant government database of information on millions of innocent Americans. For example, did he have in mind information on Americans that the government could obtain or purchase from third parties, such as data brokers who collect information on the purchasing history of our people? Imagine putting every American's purchases into a government database, along with their social media postings and all of their phone records. After two rounds of submitted questions and a hearing, it was not clear what the Congressman meant when he referred to ``all metadata'' or how he defined ``publicly available financial and lifestyle information.'' What we do know for sure is that he wouldn't give us any real sense of what he wanted to do with this proposal. He was unwilling to talk about it. The responses I got from the Congressman on this and other topics generally fell into three categories. The first was, I will do what is legal. The second one was, when it comes to Americans' privacy, that is the FBI's problem, not the CIA's. And third, as CIA Director, I won't do policy. I am going to briefly state why these are unacceptable answers. First, I asked the Congressman if there were any boundaries to his proposed new, vast database on Americans. His response was, ``Of course there are boundaries; any collection and retention must be conducted in accordance with the Constitution, statutes, and applicable presidential directives.'' That is not a response. Just because the government may be able to legally obtain information on Americans on an individualized or limited basis doesn't necessarily make it legal, much less appropriate, to create this vast database with all kinds of information on law-abiding Americans. If you take his response to mean that the only boundaries are those established by law, then it is worth considering how the intelligence community has frequently interpreted the legal limits in which it operates: flexibly and in secret. Even if we imagine that there are established legal boundaries that would rein in the Congressman's CIA, consider what he himself has said about those legal boundaries. He wrote in his op-ed--and these are his words, not mine--that ``legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.'' It is also significant that throughout his response to questions, he refers to CIA policies, procedures, and regulations. As CIA Director, he would be in a position to change those. It seems to me that the Congressman can't have it both ways--he can't say he is bound only by legal restrictions and avoid saying what he thinks those restrictions should be. The nominee's second way to avoid answering these questions was by arguing that concerns about the privacy of Americans are the business of the FBI, not the CIA. That is just not the case. There is a long and unfortunate history related to the CIA and domestic intelligence, which the Church Committee documented in the 1970s. I will be clear--I don't believe the CIA is up to anything like this today, but the possibility of returning to those days is certainly a possibility if the Director of the CIA takes the flexible approach to the rules that are intended to keep the CIA out of the lives of American citizens. I will give just a few examples. On January 3, the Director of National Intelligence put out new procedures about the distribution within the intelligence community of what is called raw signals intelligence. These are the actual content of communications, as opposed to an analyst's report about these communications. According to the new procedures, these communications can be provided to the CIA if the CIA Director asks for them and explains to the NSA why the CIA needs them. Here is why this matters to the privacy of Americans: When raw communications are distributed to the CIA, they include the communications of Americans that have been sucked up in the overall collection. So at this point, the CIA would have these communications. According to the new procedures, in some instances the Director of the CIA can approve CIA searches of that data for the communications of Americans. The Director of the CIA can also approve the use of Americans' communications. The question is, How would the Congressman exercise these authorities? We just don't know. Another example would be the CIA's own procedures for dealing with information on Americans. Last week, the CIA updated these procedures in a 41-page public document. They covered, for example, the CIA's collection of vast amounts of information that includes the communications of or information about Americans--what can be collected by the CIA, what can be kept by the CIA, what can be distributed by the CIA. The new procedures also cover when CIA officers are required and when they are not required to identify themselves when participating in organizations in our country. Just reading these procedures makes it clear that the CIA's activities bump up against the liberties of Americans all the time. That is why the regulations exist. But if a CIA Director has extreme views with regard to the liberties and freedoms of our people, that could very well be reflected in how the Agency implements these procedures or whether they get rewritten. How would the Congressman apply these rules? Would he propose new ones to make it easier for the CIA to look at more information about Americans? Again, we just don't know. One thing is clear: The views of the CIA Director about the liberties and freedoms of Americans are just as relevant as those of the FBI Director. The nominee's third effort to avoid discussing his position was to say that as the CIA Director, he wouldn't be responsible for policy. As he asserted in his opening statement at the hearing, he would ``change roles from policymaker to information provider.'' But anyone who is familiar with the role of the CIA Director knows that is just not what happens at the Agency. First, the CIA Director does far more than deliver analysis to government officials. Collection priorities, methods of collection, relationships with foreign services, covert action, and many other responsibilities of the office are policy matters. In addition, the CIA Director and other leaders of the intelligence community are asked repeatedly what they think is necessary and appropriate to keep our Nation safe. At a moment of crisis, these questions are especially pressing. We now know what happens in those moments when leaders give wrong answers. After September 11, the Directors of the NSA and the CIA offered their views of what should be done. We all thought they had time stamps on them because we came back to look at them after the immediate crisis was over, but our country ended up for a fair amount of time with programs that ripped at the very fabric of our democracy. There were warrantless wiretappings and torture. The Director of the CIA is a unique position. When someone is nominated to lead a department that operates more or less openly, at least the public can assess his or her performance, and at least a fully-informed Congress can respond when he or she implements wrongheaded policies. But the CIA Director operates in secret. What the public finds out is entirely up to the CIA and the administration. When it comes to deciding whether this is the right person for the job, there is nothing for the public and most of the Congress to go on other than what the nominee has said and done before and during the confirmation process. Unless this is going to be a rare exception and the Congressman would be a historically transparent CIA Director--and there aren't any indications of that--then what we are talking about in this confirmation debate today and why I thought it was important to have a real debate today is that what we are talking about in terms of much of the future of the CIA and the person who heads it--this is a one-time shot for that discussion. That is why I don't consider the vetting process to be finished. (Mr. MORAN assumed the Chair.) On the topic of the proposed massive new database and on a range of other topics both classified and unclassified, the Congressman did not provide substantive responses, so I have resubmitted my questions to him. Now, some--I heard this mentioned today--have said the Congressman answered every question. They claim that somehow we are stalling, that stalling is taking place for political reasons, so I want to be very specific about what I mean when I say the Senate has not gotten responsive answers. The facts show that the nominee has gone to great lengths to dodge, evade, and in effect tiptoe around a significant number of the questions that were put to him. We held our hearing on January 12. I asked the Congressman about what information that he would put in his comprehensive, searchable database. I didn't get a meaningful response, so I said at the hearing that I would like the nominee to furnish in writing what limits, what safeguards, what railings would exist with regard to this massive new database, far more encompassing than the one the Congress voted to sideline. The next day, I sent over specific questions. I asked him in writing, as I had at the hearing: What are the boundaries for collection on Americans who aren't connected to a specific investigation? This is fundamental. What are the boundaries on collecting information on Americans who aren't connected to a specific investigation? It is particularly relevant since the nominee proposed this vast and sweeping new database. I wanted to know, and I believe the American people would like to know because, as I said at the beginning, I think the public wants security and liberty. That is what I am committed to doing. That is what we did in the debate about the FREEDOM Act, where we stopped collecting all of these phone records of law-abiding people, but I wrote the provision that increased government's authority in emergency situations. People want to know: Are there any kind of limits and safeguards, particularly if you are proposing something brandnew, a centralized database, after the Congress voted to curtail something much more limited? The Congressman responded by saying that publicly available information can be useful in stopping terrorist attacks and that publicly available information involves fewer privacy concerns compared to surveillance. I agree on both counts. Nobody, no sensible person would dispute these matters. The question which remains unanswered is whether publicly available information on every American should be gathered up into what the Congressman describes as a ``comprehensive, searchable database.'' Since I had trouble getting an answer at that point, I also sent a written question about whether--if information on an American is legally available to the government on an individualized or limited basis, does that make it legal or appropriate to compile it into a bulk, giant database? The Congressman testified that the boundaries of his database of ``publicly available financial and lifestyle information'' were legal. That raised the question: Is this whole database, this huge, new database legal or not? He responded: ``I have not consulted legal experts.'' That is it. That was his answer. So, again, when you have this sweeping new proposal, far more encompassing than anything I have heard people talk about, the Congressman, when asked whether the database was even legal, said that he had not consulted legal experts. Here is another question I submitted. I asked if his comprehensive database should include information from third parties, such as data brokers. And I think the distinguished Presiding Officer, who has a great interest in these issues in the private sector, knows about the possibilities of abuses with data brokers. I wanted to know whether this database was going to include this kind of information. Here is the Congressman's response in full: ``I have not studied what information is available from third parties and the applicable legal restrictions on obtaining such information.'' That is it. Nothing more. He could have said, for example, that he wasn't contemplating including information from data brokers in this database. He could have elaborated on what he actually meant. He didn't do either. It was just more stonewalling. Now, I want to make it clear. The question that I have asked--and I heard a comment about why would we be taking this time. The questions were prompted because of the Congressman's own words. He is the one who proposed a vast database on innocent Americans. He is the one who will not articulate the boundaries of what is a very extreme proposal. These are basic questions that are directly relevant to this nomination. They are questions that Americans need answered, and they go right to the heart of how, in the future, we will have smart national security policies that protect both our security and our liberty. The American people thought after the USA FREEDOM Act was passed-- this was before, as I mentioned, the Congressman's new idea, something vastly more involved. The public thought when the FREEDOM Act was passed that the government was out of the business of collecting millions and millions of phone records on law-abiding Americans. Now we are talking about a nominee to be CIA Director who not only wants to bring this back but proposes something that makes the collection of millions of phone records on law-abiding people look like nothing. That is why I wanted this debate. That is why I wanted us to have a chance to talk about it in the light of day, rather than late Friday night in the middle of inauguration parties. I wanted the public to understand what the issues were and these questions I had about the Congressman's own words. That is what this debate is about: What is the Congressman really talking about with his own words? When I receive meaningful answers to these and other questions, I will consider the confirmation process complete. Until then, I don't believe our work in reviewing the nominee and his views is done. That, in my view, is the only way to pin down a nominee who has taken multiple positions with regard to some of the most important issues. By the way, I think it is worth noting, with respect to trying to get some guardrails and protections into the most sweeping new surveillance program I have ever heard of, that the Congressman said in his testimony to the committee: ``I take a back seat to no one with respect to protecting Americans' privacy.'' Now I want to turn to several other issues. I tried to get answers from the Congressman about the outsourcing of surveillance against Americans. During the campaign, the President invited the Russian Government to continue hacking operations against his political opponent. The President also said, with regard to Russian hacking, that he would ``love to have that power.'' That is his quote, not mine. So the question I wanted answered is: What would happen if the Russians, or some other foreign entity, collected the communications of Americans and, instead of giving them to WikiLeaks, provided them directly to our government? This could be information about our political leaders, journalists, religious leaders, business people, typical innocent Americans. At the hearing, the Congressman testified that it is not lawful to outsource collection that the Agency isn't authorized to conduct itself. That sounds like a reassuring statement to me. The problem is, we are in a world in which the President of the United States has already openly encouraged a foreign adversary to use its hacking capabilities to attack our democracy. What if a foreign adversary does it again and provides the fruits of that hacking to the government without waiting for a specific invitation from the CIA? What happens then? In response to questions, the nominee wrote that only in ``very limited circumstances'' would the collection of Americans' communications be so improper that it would be inappropriate for the CIA to receive, use, or disseminate them. So I asked what those circumstances would be. The response was that it was ``highly fact-specific.'' The vagueness here also is very troubling, so I tried to follow up. What if the information came from an adversary, rather than an ally? Did it matter what the intent of the foreign partner was--to support our national security or further disrupt our democracy? Did it matter if the information was about Americans engaged in First Amendment- protected activities, rather than about terror suspects? What if the information provided to the government involved thousands or millions of U.S. persons? I received no substantive answer other than all of these issues were ``relevant.'' Other members of the committee and I asked other questions relating to the collection and use of information on law-abiding Americans. First, I asked the Congressman about section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, specifically about the government's backdoor searches of data for information on Americans. He responded that the CIA can conduct these warrantless searches if they are ``reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.'' This is certainly potentially troublesome and is an issue that the Senate is going to need to take up when considering the reauthorization of that part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Perhaps more concerning, however, was the Congressman's statement that when we are talking about collection outside of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the rules of what the CIA can access, query, use, and retain should be even more broad and more flexible. And I will just say, I don't know how you get much broader and more flexible than the standard that currently applies to section 702. Then I asked the Congressman about encryption, and, frankly, I did because I had gotten the sense that maybe he held moderate positions, and, as I said earlier, I am very troubled about the possibility that American companies would be required to build back doors into their products and that strong encryption would be weakened. I think this is a massive gift to foreign hackers. I think it is a huge gift, by the way, to pedophiles because if you weaken strong encryption, you weaken that feature that parents use to make sure they are watching their child and their child is safe. I think it is very important not to weaken strong encryption from a security standpoint, from a liberty standpoint. And I think it is just flatout nuts to do it to our companies because our companies wouldn't be able to compete with the companies overseas that would continue to rely on strong encryption to be able to assure that their customers' data was protected. So I had kind of gotten the thought that the Congressman had moderate positions. I asked him about that. And all he would say was that it was a complicated issue, and he said that he might begin to form some judgments. This is an issue that has been discussed extensively in the Congress. It has been discussed in this body. It has been discussed in the other body. There are Members of both the Senate and the House, high-ranking senior Members, who have a difference of opinion with me on encryption. They want to weaken strong encryption. They think this is what the government needs to get this data. I think that is a flawed view, but people can have differences of opinion. That is why we have our unique system of government; we have real debates, unlike what goes on in most of the world. But here is a topic that has been discussed extensively in Congress. And it was my hope that the nominee would at least have some sort of judgment about this issue and could express that to the American people prior to a confirmation vote. Instead, what I got was: It is complicated. I think everybody understands that. Now I would like to turn to the question of torture. I simply have not been reassured by the shifting statements about torture that the nominee has given, so I would like to walk through this. I happen to share the views of our very, very widely respected and acclaimed senior Senator from Arizona that it is just not effective, and he makes the case more eloquently than I. But that is not what is at issue here specifically. It is about trying to sort out the nominee's shifting statements about torture. As late as 2014, he cited ending the CIA's torture program as purported evidence that President Obama had refused to take counterterrorism seriously. That is a pretty extreme view. By then, even Members of Congress who had previously supported the program believed it was best left in the past, but not our nominee to head the CIA. Now we come to this hearing when he emphasizes commitment to the 2015 law that limits interrogation techniques to those authorized by the Army Field Manual. That sounds pretty good, but a review of his responses to the committee's questions revealed more troubling views. For example, he was asked about his statements in 2014 and whether he believed the CIA's interrogation program should be resumed. He responded that he would have consultations about whether there should be ``changes to current interrogation or detention programs involving CIA.'' Understand the implications of that. He was asked: Should this interrogation program be resumed? And he was going to have consultations about whether there ought to be changes in it. With respect to the Army Field Manual, he wrote that these consultations, including ``with experts at the Agency'' on ``whether the Army Field Manual uniform application is an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country or whether any rewrite of the Army Field Manual is needed,'' certainly suggest again that there are open questions with respect to the field manual and torture. The fact is that the Army Field Manual could be improved to further clarify, in my view, that the U.S. Government should rely on noncoercive techniques that are the most effective. The statute states clearly that revisions to the Army Field Manual cannot ``involve the use of threat or force.'' But given the Congressman's statements in support of torture, it is not clear that is what he has on his mind. Consistently, on this issue, there is a difference between what he says and the fine print when he is required to state his views about interrogation in writing. Moreover, the nominee is not just talking about changes in the Army Field Manual, he is expressing openness to ditching the whole thing, at least as far as the CIA is concerned. The fundamental premise of the McCain-Feinstein legislation in 2015 was that the Army Field Manual would apply uniformly across the U.S. Government, including the Department of Defense and the CIA. So while he may have testified that McCain-Feinstein is the law, he plans on questioning whether the whole thing ought to be tossed out. Who are the experts at the Agency he wants to ask? There are certainly CIA officers who understand the importance of uniform standards and recognize the effectiveness of noncoercive interrogation techniques. But if he is talking about going back to individuals associated with the CIA's torture program, everybody ought to be very apprehensive about what he is going to hear. In other words, reading the nominee's response to written questions is very different than listening to his testimony. His written responses indicate both an openness to resuming the CIA's interrogation program and questions about whether the Army Field Manual should apply to the CIA. I come back to that point. The nominee is a very skilled lawyer, and he has been involved in intelligence for quite some time, but I have been concerned that he has consistently said things that are different than his written responses with respect to this issue. Part of what concerns me about all this hedging is that the Congressman doesn't seem familiar with the broad consensus that torture, in addition to being contrary to our values, does not work. This is what was documented extensively in the Intelligence Committee's torture report--not just the 500-page summary but the 6,700-page full report. But there is a growing body of additional evidence. For example, the role of interrogating high-level terrorist suspects in present years has been given to the High-value Detainee Interrogation Group, which does not torture. The Congressman was asked whether he believed this program was effective, a topic with which he should be familiar as a member of the committee. He said he hadn't studied the question. He was asked about their report last year that detailed how noncoercive interrogation techniques are more effective. He refused to give an opinion on this as well. All of this is problematic because, as in the case of surveillance, the Congressman has not considered whether we can do without highly problematic programs at no cost to our security. Just as we have security and liberty, we can have smart security policies that maintain our national values. His troubling views on torture were most apparent in the inflammatory statements made in December 2014, when the Intelligence Committee released the torture report. The nominee referred to criticism of the CIA torture program as a ``liberal game,'' as if this view hadn't also been expressed by some of the most conservative Members of Congress and dozens of retired U.S. generals and admirals. Many Senators from both parties supported the release of that report. In my view, his statement was a direct attack on the patriotism of people who had a different view. The nominee said that the release of the report ``will ultimately cause Americans to be killed.'' The torture report was not some leak. The CIA engaged in what is called redaction, where they take out provisions that could put Americans at risk. They took out names, pseudonyms, and, in some cases, titles. I asked the Congressman whether he thought the Agency had failed to protect Americans. He said he hadn't looked into it. In other words, he just asserted that the release of the report would cause Americans to be killed without having considered whether the CIA had adequately protected against that. When an intelligence program such as the CIA's torture program raises so many questions about our laws, our policies, and our fundamental values, the American people deserve to know about it. When the President of the United States has repeatedly advocated for torture, it is especially critical that it be a public debate based on facts. If that can be done while protecting sources and methods, openness is an imperative. That is why the Congressman's statements about the release of the torture report are still so relevant. In my view, they call into question his commitment to the principles of transparency and accountability when our country needs both. Finally, his responses to a number of other questions I proposed raised additional concerns about the lack of transparency. I asked him if he would commit to correct inaccurate public statements. He said that wouldn't always be possible, and it would be his ``bias'' to correct his own inaccurate statements. I don't think that is good enough. As we saw in the case of the public testimony by the Director of National Intelligence about surveillance, when the American people learn that intelligence officials have not been straight with them, it fundamentally erodes the trust between the public and the government, and that is not good for anyone. I also asked the Congressman whether, if a U.S. Ambassador tells the CIA to cease activities in his or her country, the Agency is obligated to comply. Despite a clear statute that establishes this authority, the nominee refused to answer. In my view, this raises questions about whether the CIA is going to retain secret interpretations of the law. Without taking a lot of time, sources and methods have to be classified in secret, but the law ought to be public. Going back to secret laws, we saw that the phone records program would be a big mistake. I will wrap up by mentioning the Congressman's shifting views on the intelligence community's assessment with regard to Russia and the U.S. election. On January 3 he submitted responses to prehearing questions. At the time, then President-Elect Trump was still dismissing the intelligence community's assessment, including the October 7 statement from the Director of National Intelligence and Homeland Security that the Russian Government had interfered in our election. The nominee is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. So he had every opportunity to judge the assessment for himself. But when he was asked about the intelligence community's assessment by the committee, all he would say is that it was a ``serious assessment of attribution and charge against another country'' and that it ``should be taken seriously.'' That is it. He didn't say whether he agreed with the Director of National Intelligence or Homeland Security. In fact, he even defended the President-elect's dismissal of the intelligence community's assessment, saying that the ``context'' for the President-elect's statements was political criticism of him and the election. Whatever politics are going on have nothing to do with whether the intelligence community's assessments about Russia made by the Director of National Intelligence and made by the head of Homeland Security were or weren't accurate. But then everything changed. On January 11, the President-elect said: ``As far as [the] hacking, I think it was Russia.'' The next day at our hearing, the nominee changed. He said the analysis was sound, but that was a position he could have taken before, when the President-elect didn't yet want to hear it. We are headed into dangerous times. We need a CIA Director who is direct about his beliefs and his assessments. The Congressman's evolution on whether he agreed with the intelligence community's assessment on Russia and our election is just one of the problematic aspects of this nomination. Time and again, the nominee has taken multiple positions on the same issue, which is why I have given him a number of opportunities to explain where he stands. But as I have explained this evening, that has been impossible. I haven't gotten adequate responses. I resubmitted them. I also note that I sent him classified questions as well. They were also unresponsive. Frankly, I don't consider this nomination to have been fully vetted, but we are going to vote. What I have heard leads me to conclude that the Congressman should not be confirmed. He has held extreme views on surveillance, torture, and other issues. His positions on surveillance have failed to recognize that it is possible to have security and liberty. I see virtually no commitment toward real transparency. His views on the most fundamental analysis issue of the day--the involvement of Russia in our election--seemed to shift with those of the President. His changing positions on all these matters suggest that, at this rare moment when the American people actually have an opportunity to know who it is we are entrusting with some of the most important, weighty, and secret positions in government, they are going to be denied that chance. That is why I oppose this nomination. I urge my colleagues to do so as well.

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

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I want to be very brief. I know colleagues are facing tough weather and are trying to deal with the logistics of all that. I just want to close with a couple of points. The first is that I have heard several of my colleagues say to me that a central reason for voting for Congressman Pompeo this afternoon is that they have said that he voted for the USA FREEDOM Act. That is correct. The problem is that just a few months after he cast that vote, the Congressman turned around and said he wanted to reestablish the bulk phone record program in a way that was vastly more encompassing and way more intrusive than the USA FREEDOM Act abolished. What he was proposing after he voted for the USA FREEDOM Act, which says that Congress says you ought to have limits, was a bulk metadata program that was way beyond anything that the Bush-Cheney administration ever imagined. I have been on the Senate Intelligence Committee since before September 11. I have been in the middle of countless debates about the appropriate scope of government surveillance, but I have never heard-- not from anyone--an idea that was so extreme and so overreaching and so intrusive of Americans' privacy. I bring this up only by way of saying that, if confirmed, the nominee is going to be dealing with a whole host of issues that, if we really think it through carefully and thoughtfully, we can find a way to ensure that Americans have security and liberty and that the two are not mutually exclusive. If we do it wrong, which would certainly happen if one were to weaken strong encryption, we will end up with less of both--less security and less liberty. With respect to the process, I would only say that this matter of the way the Congressman handled his views with respect to surveillance and torture and Russia really reflect how his views change on a major issue, whether it is surveillance or torture or Russia, depending on the time and who he is talking to. I just don't think that ought to be the standard for winning support to head an agency as important as the CIA. I know my colleagues are on a very tight time schedule. I appreciate the fact that we have had a chance to have this debate. I urge my colleagues to oppose this nomination. I yield back.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, this would ensure that there would be a debate about the CIA and its future Director in the light of day. I am not going to object, and I withdraw my reservation.

Mr. WYDEN. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I will be very brief, just to respond to my good friend from Arizona who said that the Senate not taking up Pompeo would be contradicting the will of the people. That is not the case at all. This is about whether the Senate is going to be a rubberstamp and whether the Senate is in effect going to abdicate its responsibility to do oversight. Let me just mention four points real quickly. No. 1, this nomination has not been considered in the Intelligence Committee. It could have been. It was not. No. 2, we have not been able to get answers to our questions. A major question in particular, this body voted to sideline a law that collected phone records on law-abiding Americans. Congressman Pompeo has proposed something that makes the law we sidelined look like small potatoes. He is talking about collecting lifestyle information on all Americans. We are trying to get an answer about whether there are any legal boundaries at all. We have not been able to get them. That is argument No. 2. Argument No. 3 is that we have never confirmed on inauguration day a CIA Director. That is the history of this particular nomination. No. 4, I want to talk about the realities of national security because I share the view of the chairman of the committee that this is a dangerous time. That is not up for debate. There are lots of people out there who do not wish our country well. If we were to have a tragedy tonight or tomorrow--heaven forbid that happens to our great country--if it did, we would have the talented senior people at the CIA there to protect our country, and I would submit, however you feel about Mr. Pompeo, the reality is that if he got confirmed tonight or tomorrow, and heaven forbid there was that tragedy, we would still be relying on those trained, talented professionals at the CIA who have been there, in some cases for decades, to protect our country when we are vulnerable. That is what this is all about, ensuring that we actually have some discussion here when there are outstanding questions. Senator Leahy, Senator Blumenthal, and I have all said we just believe there ought to be some debate. There hasn't been any in the Intelligence Committee. There hasn't been any on the floor. I have gone through the history of this nomination and explained what would happen if a tragedy were to befall our great country. That is why I think we ought to have a debate in broad daylight, not when Senators are trying to figure out if their tux is going to fit and we can't get people into a real discussion.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. I object, Madam President.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I spent the last few days having town hall meetings at home. It was a big challenge. We had a tremendous amount of snow. The distinguished Presiding Officer is very familiar with that. We had the most snow since 1937, and it just goes on and on. We are battling freezing rain. Yet Oregonians came out in big numbers to participate in the discussion about what is going on in Washington, DC. They were particularly troubled about what was being done at the Environmental Protection Agency in the nomination of Scott Pruitt to head it. We had 200 people in McMinnville on Saturday night, a small community. I think the temperature was about 22 degrees. What really troubled them is that it sure looks like, when you examine the record of Mr. Pruitt, that he is trampling on everything we call the Oregon Way. The Oregon Way is something that Democrats, Republicans, people across the political spectrum subscribe to because it involves protecting our treasured land, air, and water. It was something we want for our generation, and we will pass it on to our kids, and it has been hugely valuable to us in attracting more industries that pay well because the workers at those industries want clean air and clean water. When you look at Mr. Pruitt's career, it really upends everything that I would call the Oregon Way--repeated attempts to weaken or eliminate health-based environmental standards, air quality standards for toxic air pollutants, limits on carbon emissions to take on the challenge of climate change. These rollbacks are particularly harmful to children and low-income households, communities of color, minorities, families, and communities. Yesterday, Senator Merkley and I spoke at our wonderful Martin Luther King Day Breakfast put on by The Skanner. Bernie and Bobbie Foster have been doing this for years. All I could think of is, if you roll back clean air and health standards, the people who are going to be hurt the most are low-income minorities, and communities of color. I don't see a big outcry in America for policies that would do that kind of harm to some of the most vulnerable Americans. Mr. Pruitt also has a troubling history of denying that fundamental science really ought to be the basis of American policymaking when it comes to environmental protection. For example, he disputed the Agency's science-based findings in 2009 that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. Now, my view is that this is an inarguable and unfortunate reality of climate change. But Mr. Pruitt's challenge suggests either a misunderstanding about how environmental agencies ought to make science-based decisions or, even worse, a habit of setting science aside when the outcome is at odds with the special interests. Again, that comes back to the kind of comments that were made during my five town hall meetings over the last few days at home. People would say: Look, Democrats and Republicans at home in Oregon, great Republican Governors--particularly led by the late Tom McCall--they would constantly come back to the proposition that you should not let the special interests trample on your treasures, your land and your air and your water, because not only was it bad for this generation--our generation--but it would be particularly damaging to our young people. So it is really troubling that this has been the choice of the President-elect. My own view is that when it comes to environmental standards, one of the unsung successes of the last few years has been a rule cutting emissions of mercury, arsenic, lead, and other dangerous materials. It prevented, in 2016, 11,000 premature deaths. My concern is that a lot of those deaths would be seen in minority communities and communities of color, the people I was concerned about when we had our Martin Luther King Day Breakfast. Mr. Pruitt worked hard to gut that rule. He really pulled out all the stops to oppose a rule cutting emissions of mercury, arsenic, lead and dangerous heavy metals. He worked hard to gut it. If he is confirmed, he may just possibly be successful. Now, the message that I have heard again and again is that we can do better than this. We can do better than this. I think the American people, when they see what is at stake--it has been hard to follow all of the hearings. I know that I was very interested in the questioning in the Foreign Relations Committee by the Presiding Officer. I was trying to follow all the nominations, and I could not get to all the hearings. I could not follow all of the questioning that I thought was important. But even when all of this is going on, when people tell you before a Trailblazers game--at home in Portland, a pregame event--that they are unhappy about the environmental rules and the prospects of the environmental rules being gutted by the new head of the EPA, you know that you have people alarmed. Oregon is no stranger to the threats of pollution. In 2015, there was a discovery that heavy metals, including cadmium and arsenic, had been emitted for decades into the air of Portland neighborhoods at dangerous levels. This pollution was caused by a regulatory loophole the size of Crater Lake. At the time, I called on the Environmental Protection Agency to take action. Within days, they were on the ground in Portland helping to assess the public health risks. Not long after, they identified the cause of the regulatory oversight and corrected course. It seems to me that Americans need to trust that the Environmental Protection Agency will be able to defend their communities from air pollution or from water contamination. That is how we have always looked at it in my home State of Oregon. We always felt that we could trust those that we elected of both political parties for years and years to say: You don't mess with Oregon's land and air and water. Now, obviously, we have continued, even with that ethic, to have problems. While I was pleased that we were able to get some significant public health changes after we made that discovery in 2015 that there were heavy metals, including cadmium and arsenic, in the air of our neighborhoods, we have to do better. We have to do better at every level of government, and the EPA plays a critical role in ensuring clean and safe water, whether the water is running through a mountain stream or through a pipe to a Portland kitchen. Cities across the country, like my home town of Portland, are facing threats with high levels of lead in the water supply and outdated infrastructure to fix the problem. These communities are counting on the Environmental Protection Agency to be in a partnership with them to get this fixed to enforce strong water quality standards, and it only can happen if you have strong leadership that starts at the top. The American people have a right to have confidence that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is going to defend the health and well-being of our communities and not the profits and the pocketbooks of the most powerful special interests in our country. I am going to close by saying that I am not confident that a Pruitt EPA will stand on the side of those families against the special interests. That is why tonight I state that I will be opposing the nomination of Mr. Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency. I yield the floor.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Madam Clerk, because health care--

Mr. WYDEN.--should not just be for the healthy and wealthy, I vote no.

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 188 and ask unanimous consent that it be reported by number.

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President and colleagues, this amendment is supported by a number of Senators because, as the Senate majority plows ahead with a scheme that I call repeal and run, it is putting tens of millions of Americans in danger of losing their health insurance, and Americans are waiting for Congress to step up and adopt smart policies that will drive down the cost of prescription medicine. We understand this is an era of miracle cures and treatments. There are drugs on the market today that were science fiction not very long ago. With drug prices rising, the question is whether Americans are going to be able to afford them. This is a growing source of inequality, and it cannot go unchecked. Here is my bottom line.

Mr. WYDEN. In a country as rich and strong as ours, cures have to be available for everyone, not just the wealthy. I urge support for this amendment.

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive section 305(b)(2) of that act for purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I am very pleased to be able to join Senator Donnelly, Senator Hirono, and Senator Blumenthal on this extraordinarily important issue that goes right to the heart of what we want health care to be in this country. I have always felt that the really big issues, the really important issues, need to be bipartisan. You need to find a path to some common ground. As Senator Donnelly and our colleagues have pointed out, what is being discussed now is an inherently partisan process for dealing with one of the most sensitive and most important issues of our time; that is, Medicare and what it represents. I had a chance to listen to Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono discuss this issue. It made me recall my days when I was director of the Oregon Gray Panthers, the senior citizens group. I was director of the group for almost 7 years before I was elected to Congress. This was back in the days when I had a full head of hair and rugged good looks. We always talked about Medicare being a promise. It was a promise of guaranteed benefits. They were going to be there. They were going to be secure. They were going to be defined. In effect, all who supported Medicare said they would oppose unraveling that promise, unraveling that pledge of guaranteed benefits. It seems to me, without strong legislation, the kind of legislation my colleagues are advocating, we are putting that promise at risk. I think when you look back at the history of what was available for older people before Medicare, you would see why this promise and this pledge is so important. For so many older people, there was, essentially, what amounted to poor farms. We had one not far from where we lived at home in Oregon. When Medicare was being debated, people brought out those pictures. They talked about what it meant, in a country as strong and good and rich as ours, for older people not to have a life of dignity and security and decent health care. When Medicare was adopted in 1965, it was all about the promise. It was all about the guarantee. That is what Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono are standing up for as part of this debate. I know that some who don't share our view are going to say: Well, there are tremendous challenges with respect to Medicare. There is no question about that-- 10,000 people turning 65 every day for years and years--but there is so much that can be done, Democrats and Republicans, if you want to reject something that is partisan like reconciliation and come together. You can come together around updating the Medicare guarantee. I say this to my friends Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono, who have done such good work on this. We are not saying there aren't any challenges. The fact is that Medicare today in 2017 is very different than Medicare when it began in 1965. It is dominated by chronic illness: cancer, diabetes, heart disease. But we can come up with fresh, practical approaches for dealing with those challenges, consistent with what Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono are talking about, which is keeping the Medicare promise, keeping the Medicare guarantee, not allowing the program to be privatized. We started on that with the Affordable Care Act. There were a number of us in the Senate. Senator Isakson was very involved. At the time, Senator Markey was a Member of the other body. We advocated for something called Independence at Home, which allowed the Medicare Program to begin to take care of those with chronic illness at home. So I am very appreciative of what Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono are doing because what they are saying is this: Instead of gambling on the health of older people with a partisan reconciliation process, let's work in a bipartisan way to build on the promise of Medicare, the promise of those guaranteed benefits. We can do that. We can do that by creating more options for caring for older people at home. We can do it by expanding telemedicine and using new technology. We can do it by creating more opportunities for nonphysician providers. These are all ways that we can build on the Medicare promise and the Medicare guarantee and deal with the challenges of our time. But we are not going to be able to deal with those challenges through partisan approaches like reconciliation that would privatize the program and unravel the promise. So I am very pleased to be able to have a chance to be out on the floor with my colleagues who have been strong advocates for Medicare, who rightly put this issue front and center in the debate, because I think a lot of what is being discussed is really getting lost. A big part of this debate really seems to be about creating a Trojan horse to give tax cuts to some of the most fortunate, while, in effect, raising health care costs for millions of others and breaking the Medicare promise, which is what my colleagues are seeking to protect in their amendment No. 20. We are going to be talking more about this. Certainly, as the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, we will be having significant debates about these issues in the committee. But I am very appreciative that Senator Donnelly and Senator Hirono have allowed us to jump-start what this debate is really all about; and that is, keeping the promise of Medicare, keeping the promise of guaranteed benefits, working in a bipartisan way to update the guarantee to deal with chronic illness and improve options for home care. I commend them both for their good work. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, my colleague from Illinois has addressed very clearly what some of the human consequences of this are going to be. I am going to take a few minutes as well to describe it. I am very pleased our colleague Senator Murray is here because she has really led the effort--and I have been very pleased to join her--in terms of trying to promote expanded health care services for vulnerable women in America. I say to Senator Murray, I saw there was a comment made by some who advocate the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. They said: Nobody was going to get hurt--nobody in America was going to get hurt. The reality is, that is not true for the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of women who depend on Planned Parenthood for basic health care, for preventive health services, for essential services, for example, like cancer screens. So this notion that somehow nobody is going to get hurt by repealing the Affordable Care Act is simply contradicted, from rural Oregon to rural Maine, when you see the kind of pain and suffering this is going to end up generating for some of the poorest and most vulnerable women in our country. The fact is, what has been set in motion by Republicans here in the Senate is a scheme that I call repeal and run. It is about very large tax breaks for the most fortunate, paid for by taking health insurance away from millions of working people. Under it, the insurance companies are back in the driver's seat, health care costs skyrocket across the board, and that is true even for those who get their insurance at work. The replacement plan our colleagues on the other side have promised for years is somehow hidden away, with tens of millions of Americans in the dark about what is coming next for their health care. Whenever I hear about the replacement, the whole notion of what would be there for families in the future, it reminds me of what used to be the old movie house in town. It had a big marquee up at the top of it, and it would always talk about the movie ``coming soon,'' but the movie never actually got there. When I hear about the replacement, what I think about is that everybody is going to be sitting in the dark again. What is essentially at stake here is whether America is going to go back to the days when health care was for the healthy and the wealthy. That is what health care used to be all about. If you were healthy, no problems, nothing to worry about. If you were wealthy, you could just write out checks when you had a whole host of preexisting conditions. What the Senate is going to vote on this week is whether to green- light the first step in this scheme to go back to the days when health care was for the healthy and wealthy with a budget resolution. I think it is fair to say budget resolutions usually aren't the prime topic at dinner table conversations in America, but this year there are serious consequences--serious consequences--personal, life-and-death consequences because of this scheme that is being pushed through the Senate. That is where I believe the focus ought to be and why I am going to spend the remainder of my time talking about persons whose lives in Oregon are going to be directly affected and, in some cases, endangered. Maleta Christian is from Douglas County, OR, a beautiful rural community. She is a personal support worker, providing care to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She had always carried health insurance until she was unexpectedly laid off from her job. She was without coverage for more than a year, but then she was able to buy a plan through the Affordable Care Act. For Maleta, having insurance meant cancer screenings that, very likely, saved her life. Doctors found tumors that had to be removed. Later, she was diagnosed with a degenerative hip and back problems that caused her pain every day, making it difficult to get through a physically demanding and grueling job. Her prescription drug coverage, which she gets through a plan under the Affordable Care Act, is what makes it possible for Maleta to get up every morning and get through that workday. Thanks to the care she has received, Maleta made it to her daughter's wedding, and she was proud that she even baked the cake. Another Oregonian, Rita from Salem, comes from a family who has been struggling with depression. It is a condition that has been stigmatized for far too long in this country. I know something about this because my late brother, Jeff, faced the stigma of mental health. He was a schizophrenic, and he passed at far too early an age. Far too many of those with mental illness have been denied care and shunted to the fringes of society. Before Rita got coverage through the Affordable Care Act, she was forced to pour a staggering share of her income into health-related expenses. It was nearly two-thirds in 2011. Even then, she didn't have access to the mental health treatments she needed. Her depression used to keep her out of work. With coverage from the Affordable Care Act tax credits that made it affordable, Rita's costs have fallen substantially. She now gets the prescription and therapy that help her manage her condition, and she can live a healthier life. Another of my constituents is Mary, who lives in Milwaukie, OR, with her husband and 7-year-old daughter. She has a hereditary disease known as HAE. It is a rare genetic condition that causes dangerous swelling, lasting days at a time, affecting various parts of the body. If Mary goes without treatment, attacks come on regularly, even multiple times a week. When they do, it is completely disabling. Before she got insurance through the Affordable Care Act, she rotated through health plans and insurers to maintain coverage and avoid hitting caps on treatments. She sought out clinical studies to get free care, typically participating in one each year. So on top of holding down a job, raising a daughter, battling a life- threatening condition that affects 1 in 50,000 Americans, she was basically out trying to cobble some decent health care together. The system was so badly broken, she basically sewed her own health care safety net, but the ACA protected patients like Mary from discrimination and guaranteed access to care. These are three Oregonians. They come from different backgrounds, and they have battled different conditions, but they share a lot in common with each other and with people around the land. Not long ago, in the eyes of insurance companies, the women who I just mentioned would have worn their preexisting conditions like scarlet letters. But the insurance they have now gives them the opportunity for healthier, more productive lives, and that is what is endangered because of the scheme that is being pushed through Congress, pushed through the Senate by Republicans right now. Costs are going to shoot up if the plan goes forward. The premium subsidies millions of Americans count on to buy insurance could be eliminated. Even if Americans with preexisting conditions have access to health care after this repeal scheme goes through, it doesn't mean they can afford it. What my colleagues on the other side have said repeatedly for years is that they were going to repeal and replace--no gap, no harm done to anybody. The replacement would be ready on day one. It sure looks as though that promise is going to be broken. The replacement is still hidden somewhere, but the process of repeal is rolling forward. In the meantime, millions of Americans are left guessing what is going to happen to their care if this plays out. The bottom line for me and my colleagues is really this. If Members on the other side want to debate how to solve this country's health care challenge, we will have that debate. I would say to my colleagues on the other side: I have spent about as much time as anybody here in this body looking for bipartisan approaches to address health care. So let's find ways to bring down costs for families. Let's make prescription drugs more affordable. Let's uphold the promise of Medicare because that is what it is; it is a promise of guaranteed benefits. But we are not going to be able to do that on a partisan scheme called the budget resolution and reconciliation. That is not about bringing people together for a bipartisan effort. That is about tearing things down, tearing down the Affordable Care Act, so I want that understood. My colleague Senator Murray is here. She and I work together closely because of our committees. We feel very, very strongly about how uniquely important this time is because this is a time when our country has to decide not to go back to the dark days when health care was reserved for the healthy and wealthy. That is what the other side has on offer right now. It is a proposition that my colleagues and I are going to fight with all our strength. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following legislative fellows in my office be given floor privileges for the remainder of this Congress: Sophia Vogt, Emily Douglas, Kripa Sreepada, Katherine Tsantiris, Chris Jones, and Noah Ben-Aderet.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I want to begin my remarks this morning by taking stock of how the 115th Congress, led by my Republican colleagues, seems to be coming out of the gate. Here is what is coming if the budget process that began this week plays out: 30 million Americans from Portland, OR, to Portland, ME, will be in danger of being kicked off their health care plans; sharply rising health care costs for everybody else, even those who get their insurance through their employer; broken campaign promises about a replacement coming on day one. With this resolution, Republicans in the Congress are building a Trojan horse of tax cuts for the most fortunate in America. I want to discuss each of those issues this morning, but first let us recognize the bottom line. What is at stake in this debate is whether or not America is going to go back to the dark days when health care was reserved for the healthy and wealthy. For nearly 7 years and through 4 punishing campaigns, Americans have heard and felt the steady, partisan drumbeat of repeal and replace from the other side. Dozens and dozens of show votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act have been held in either Chamber. There have been countless press conferences, speeches, and hearings, even a government shutdown, and the message is always the same. The President-elect himself said that repeal and replace would happen--his words, not mine--simultaneously. The replacement plan was coming. It would be fully written, ready to plug in--no gap, no harm relevant to anyone in our country. The same words, ``Coming Soon,'' have sat on that marquee for 7 years now. It seems to me it is time to admit that the show will not open. This is a broken promise, plain and simple. Americans are no longer looking at repeal and replace; now it is repeal and run. The consequences will be serious and immediate for tens of millions of Americans, both in access to health care and the bottom line for family budgets across the country. In short, it is a plan that will make America sick again. According to independent analysis, nearly 30 million Americans will lose their health insurance quickly after repeal. The first act of a new Congress: Kicking 30 million people off the insurance rolls--that is seven times the population of my home State. The overwhelming majority of those 30 million Americans are not wealthy people. They are not in a position to be able to afford to go out and pick an expensive plan once the insurance companies get back in the driver's seat. Millions come from working families who will lose tax cuts for health insurance. Millions of others toil, often working multiple jobs, but still what they bring home is just barely enough to keep them out of poverty. For many, signing up for Medicaid brought an end to the years when they had to choose between visiting a doctor and putting food on the table. If repeal goes forward, Americans all over the country are going to face that dilemma once again. I think it is important to remember that the danger of repeal does not end with Americans getting kicked off their insurance plans. Repeal will send costs skyrocketing for everyone across the board, even those Americans who get their insurance through work, including a lot of folks who say the Affordable Care Act has not touched them at all. They are going to get a gut punch, a gut punch with higher premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs. When you kick tens of millions off the insurance rolls and send the markets into chaos, there is going to be a ripple effect. Everyone is going to feel those harmful effects, even those who have had the same plan from a particular employer for years or decades. Rising costs are going to eat into paychecks, crowding out the pay raises that our people need so desperately. Colleagues, if you are watching this budget debate at home, I am sure you are going to say: Why in the world would any lawmaker go forward with this plan? I am going to go back to what I just said. In my view, this is a Trojan horse of tax cuts for the wealthy and the most fortunate. When you look at both sides of the ledger, you see how exceptionally unfair this scheme actually is. On one side, tens of millions of Americans lose insurance and suffer economic pain. That is the typical family. On the other side, there are substantial tax breaks for those at the top of the income scale. One of the questions I am asked nearly every day in these halls, and I am asked this by many in the press and elsewhere, is whether Democrats are going to take part in this effort and what ideas Democrats would put forward. I want to take just a minute to describe why that question is so off the mark. First, you have to look at the nature of the reconciliation process itself. Budget reconciliation is inherently a partisan exercise. Inherently, it is not a process that brings people together. It is a process that drives people apart. It is inherently partisan. A typical proposal that comes to the Senate floor is subject to unlimited debate and unlimited amendments. Usually it takes 60 Senators, Members from both parties to come together and pass legislation. It is very rare that a party builds that kind of supermajority on its own, so the two sides have to work together. That is the Senate at its best. I see my friend, the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Enzi. He and I have served on the Finance Committee. At its best, that is what the Finance Committee has always been about--trying to find common ground, working together to get a proposal that can get 60 votes. Reconciliation throws those unique characteristics of bringing Senators together; basically, reconciliation just trashes it, throws it out the window. In my view, when you use reconciliation the way it is being used here, you are telling the other party you neither need nor want their votes. It puts a one-sided proposal on the fast track to passage, tight limits on debate and amendments, a bare majority of votes required to actually pass it. I am very concerned that what is at issue now is a serious misuse of the reconciliation process. This is not a simplified procedure to address a budget issue; this is an effort to ram through repeal and run. Second, this is not your run-of-the-mill congressional debate where you have both sides bringing their best ideas forward to tackle a policy issue. For years, my Democratic colleagues and I have said that we are ready to work on a bipartisan basis to solve this country's health care challenges. I think I have spent about as much time as anybody in the Senate working to try to find bipartisan solutions to the country's big health challenges. Back in 2008, 2009, we had a bipartisan proposal: seven Democrats, seven Republicans. We had never had that before. I can tell you, we Democrats are ready to work on a bipartisan basis to solve the country's health care challenges. For me, essentially what I have tried to make my top priority for public service--health care is one-sixth of the American economy. It has always been the issue that Americans care the most about because if you and your loved ones don't have health, nothing else much matters. So we ought to be working on a bipartisan basis to solve the country's health care challenges, finding ways to bring costs down for families, making prescription drugs more affordable, upholding the promise of Medicare, and strengthening its guaranteed benefits. When I was director of the Gray Panthers at home, a senior citizens group, we always said that Medicare was a promise. It was a promise of guaranteed benefits. We ought to strengthen that promise, particularly updating it to incorporate changes in the program that reflect the needs of the Americans who face chronic health conditions, which is where the vast majority of Medicare dollars are going. That is what we ought to be doing, upholding the promise of Medicare, working together in a bipartisan way. But that is not what is happening here. From the other side, what we have heard again and again is repeal and replace, dozens of partisan votes producing legislation that burned out in the Senate or met the veto pen. Now, with a new administration, the Trump administration coming in, the Republicans kick off a procedural scheme that slashes taxes for the most fortunate, raises costs for typical Americans, and takes insurance coverage away from tens of millions of people. No Democrat is going to buy in to that proposition. The reason they won't is that the American people are not going to buy into that proposition. This scheme is going to bring on a manufactured crisis that does harm to millions of Americans across the land, rocks our health care sector, our providers, our plans--all of those who make up this health care system. One side is pushing it, but the other side is saying: No, let's not create this catastrophe. That is why, in my view, the questions about Democrats signing on to flawed, bad proposals miss the point. Everyone recognizes that the strict and immovable strategy adopted by the other side 8 years ago paid dividends in elections. But politics is different from governing. Politics is different from governing because there are serious life- and-death consequences to actions that deprive Americans of health insurance. Families are going to feel economic pain when premiums and deductibles jump. I believe Americans are going to speak out. They are going to rally against an unfair, unbalanced bill that cuts taxes for the most fortunate, while putting insurance companies back again in the driver's seat. What is at stake here is pretty simple; it is whether or not America is going to turn back the clock and go back to those dark days when health care in our Nation was reserved for the healthy and the wealthy. My colleagues and I say no way. We are going to fight that unfair, imbalanced approach in every way we can. I yield the floor.

Mr. WYDEN

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, in just a few minutes, because it is very late or very early, if one might characterize the hour of the morning, I will be offering a unanimous consent request to pass Calendar No. 527, H.R. 5456, the Family First Prevention Services Act. Just to give a short description of this bill, there has been an enormous amount of bipartisan effort and good will to enact this legislation that many policy experts consider the most significant improvement in child welfare policy in decades. In the other body, the legislation passed unanimously, and there was superb work done by Chairman Brady, the Speaker, Congressman Ryan, Vern Buchanan. There was a whole host of colleagues on the Democratic side, Sandy Levin, Lloyd Doggett, and Leader Pelosi, a whole host of Members and enormous effort. You had the leadership, the Ways and Means Committee. They came together and passed the legislation unanimously. The reason they did is, 500 organizations, groups representing children and pediatricians and the Catholic bishops, the Children's Defense Fund, all came together. They said the current policy today with respect to vulnerable children just defies common sense. In effect, you cannot get help to the families when it really is most critical. When a family member or parent, for example, is dealing with drug abuse or mental health or a challenge where, if they were able to get a modest amount of assistance, the family could come together again and be healthy, the youngster would be able to stay in the home. Very often, in these kinds of instances, a grandparent or an uncle, if we made some modest changes in Federal policy, could step up as well-- something I feel very strongly about having written the kinship care law a number of years ago to reward grandparents, aunts, and uncles when they could meet the strict standards for qualifying to take care of a youngster in these circumstances. Chairman Hatch, Chairman Grassley, and many of our senior Members have worked very hard with me and our colleague Senator Bennet from Colorado, who has devoted an enormous amount of attention to the needs of youngsters. I have been on the floor tonight really for the last 5 or 6 hours trying to resolve remaining concerns. Now, we had a hotline months and months ago on this bill, and there really wasn't much reaction at the outset, and finally there were three Members who had concerns, and we moved to address them. Chairman Brady has been particularly gracious on the other side of the Capitol, saying if a State needed more time, if there were questions with respect to whether they could meet some of the criteria, he was open to giving them that kind of additional time. I will tell my colleagues: I told my constituents this fall that probably nothing is more important to me than to come back here and pursue what I call principled bipartisanship. Bipartisanship is not about taking each other's bad ideas. Anybody can do that. That is a piece of cake. Principled bipartisanship is about taking good ideas from both sides of the aisle. For example, I know that with the Presiding Officer, there was a question about the type of providers in his home State that might be eligible for this service. So we said we had heard from a number of conservatives that they wanted to make sure that one type of provider over another wasn't favored. So we said all of the providers can participate as long as they meet the quality standards. That was essentially a conservative concept. We had a number on our side of the aisle who wanted to make sure there really were wrap-around services for these kinds of families. There is good foster care. Nobody has ever said that is not the case. But we know that Federal policy shouldn't create an incentive to rip these families apart. It should create incentives to keep families together. So I wanted to come tonight and make one more appeal to pass what is, according to many of the most authoritative experts of child welfare, the most significant improvement in child welfare law in decades. There are no objections on our side of the aisle. This is the second time I brought up this unanimous consent request, and no Senator has come to the floor on the other side of the aisle to raise an objection in terms of policy and substance. Frankly, I wish that somebody would, because I think we could accommodate them. Because of the graciousness of Chairman Brady, the Republican chair on the other side, I think we could accommodate them. But no Senator has come now, for the second time this week, to actually offer a substantive objection. So if you want what I call principled bipartisanship, which is what Chairman Hatch, Chairman Grassley, Chairman Brady--so many colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been working for--we have to have colleagues who will come and actually voice their substantive objection. I am making it clear again tonight that if anyone on the other side of the aisle has a substantive objection, my guess is we could resolve it, because there has been a lot of goodwill on both sides. But if people won't come and make a substantive objection, then it is hard to know what might satisfy them and allow us to proceed with this very important child welfare reform. So I want it understood that I am going to prosecute this case of improving the lives of these vulnerable youngsters and these families for as long as I have the honor to represent Oregon in the Senate. I think this is what public service is supposed to be all about. I will continue to work in a bipartisan way. I think that is how we tackle the big issues, the big challenges facing our country. Nobody really has enough votes to have it all their way. Certainly, if you want a policy that you can sustain, it has to be bipartisan. So we are going to stay at this until we get it done. With that in mind, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 527, H.R. 5456, the Family First Prevention Services Act, that the Wyden substitute amendment be agreed to, and the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed.