Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, may I ask unanimous consent that a military fellow with Senator Murray's office, Major James O'Brien, be granted floor privileges for today's session of the Senate.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I wish to engage for perhaps the next 20 or so minutes with Senator Cantwell, who is arriving shortly. I will begin with some remarks and ask unanimous consent for us to engage in a colloquy.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Isn't it the heart of what the Senator said just a moment ago that there is an area that actually touches on a lot of health care--it is a big area--where you can do two things at once? You can save significant money for taxpayers and insurance ratepayers, and at the same time you can improve the quality of care that people receive. So often in legislative matters it is a zero sum game. One wins so the other has to lose exactly by the same amount. This is not like that. This is a win-win situation. So there really should be energetic efforts to pursue these win-win opportunities.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, in responding to what Senator Cantwell just said about the Congressional Budget Office, it indeed has been frustrating and bedeviling to run up against their inability to project these savings in a way that would allow us to--what we call in Washington--score them and get budget credit for them. But even though they have that difficulty, there are some very serious organizations that project that very significant savings of the kind I have mentioned--the $1 trillion savings--are possible. Some years ago the President's own Council of Economic Advisers estimated that we could do savings of $700 billion without affecting the quality of care in any way for the worse. The National Institute of Medicine has made several regular projections. The most recent one is $750 billion a year. The Institute of Medicine is pretty serious folks, and they are entitled to respect when they say we can have those kinds of savings. RAND Corporation--a lot of people know a lot about it--is a very expert organization. They have done two things. They looked at what we can save in health care, and then they looked at what we can save in health care plus an additional bit for dealing with waste and fraud. They gave ranges for the two. The midpoint of the range for savings is about $730 billion. If we add their suggestions on waste and fraud, the midpoint of their range goes to about $910 billion a year. The Lewin Group, which is another respected think tank that looks at health care issues, wrote a piece some time ago with George Bush's former Treasury Secretary, and they said it was $1 trillion. So is it $700 billion a year? Is it $750 billion a year? Is it somewhere between $730 and $910 billion a year depending on how you score the waste and fraud? Is it $1 trillion a year? Either way, I will take it. Those are big numbers, and wherever it falls in that range, we should be energetically fighting for it. I will close with the request I always make in these speeches--and this is a request to the President and to his administration--and that is to inspire us and set a bold national target. Sure, CBO, OMB, and our actuarial and accounting organizations cannot predict what these savings are going to be, but, by gosh, the President can direct his administration to target a savings goal and to go after it. I think if the President were to set a hard date and dollar target for delivery system savings--a couple of years out so we have a chance to do that-- that would make a big difference. The example that I use is of President Kennedy. Back in 1961, when it looked as if we were losing the space race to the Soviet Union, President Kennedy declared that within 10 years--he put a date on it-- he would put a man on the Moon and bring him back safely. He had a hard target, something specific so you would know if it was or wasn't achieved. The message was clear, the mission that was outlined was clear, and the result was a vast mobilization of private and public resources to achieve that purpose. It is not enough to talk about bending the health care cost curve. That catchphrase should be jettisoned and discarded. We should have a hard date and dollar figure, and that should be a target the entire administration aims toward. Had President Kennedy given that speech back in 1961 and declared as his purpose to bend the curve of space exploration, I very much doubt we would have put that man on the Moon within 10 years. It was his exercise of Presidential leadership and challenge--ahead of what the scientists knew could be done but with confidence and faith in our ability to achieve big things--that put the executive branch of government into focus so we could achieve exactly what he had directed. We can do the same with health care. We should do the same with health care. There is no downside to it because this is a win-win area, as I discussed with Senator Cantwell. On that note, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. If I could ask the Senator another question in response to what she just said, not only is it a win-win, being lower cost and better quality care, but I believe the Senator said that there is actually a third win here. There is the win of lower cost, there is the win of better quality care, but for seniors there is a huge win of maintaining your independence and being able to stay at home. It is hard to put a price on that, but if you are facing the choice of having to leave your home and having to go to a more restrictive health care setting, being able to stay at home is a very big plus. Really, it is not win-win, it is win-win-win.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I am here today to talk about the health care problem in the country, because I think the fixation of this body on the health care Web site has taken our eye off the fact we have a very significant and fundamental health care problem. This graph represents how much we spend on health care as a country. It begins back here in 1960. I was 5 years old in 1960. So this is a lifetime: 50-some years, $27.4 billion. That is what we spent on health care. Now here we are. This is up to 2011, and $2.7 trillion is what we spend on health care. It is 100 times as much in 50 years. Granted, there are more Americans but not 100 times as many. This has been an explosive cost growth curve. When we were trying to pass the health care bill, that is what we were looking at for costs. It is a big competitive problem for our country. This is a really interesting graph. I wish every time anybody talked about health care they would take 1 minute and look at this graph. I will explain briefly what it is. This column is the up access and measures life expectancy in years, country by country, 65 to 85, where countries fall in terms of their average life expectancy for their population, for their citizens. This along the bottom is the cost, the health spending per capita per person in that country. So if you measure it all out, what you see is a great raft of countries all through here: Japan, Great Britain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Greece. There is a whole large group of countries right here, and all of them have a life expectancy 80 or older and they all spend between $6,000 and $2,000 per person on their country's health care. Essentially the entire modernized, civilized world is in that zone, from here to here. Guess where the United States of America is. Boom. Here. We are below them all in life expectancy. We are trailing the pack of modern industrialized nations in our life expectancy. We are competing with Chile and the Czech Republic. But Japan, Greece, Great Britain, France, Germany, Luxembourg, all manage with their health care systems to achieve longer lifespans for their people. And we are doing it at a cost of about $8,500 per person per year. To give a comparison, here are Switzerland and Norway. They are the other two most expensive countries in the world per capita on health care spending, and they are at about $5,700 per year. If we could bring our per capita health care spending in this country down to the most expensive countries in the world, if we could compete head to head with the most expensive countries in the world, we would save more than $1 trillion a year. This is an interesting graph because it shows basically all the modern industrialized nations here, and it shows us here as a way outlier. It is a big deal for us to be an outlier here, because it means we blow about $1 trillion a year in wasteful and unnecessary health care which could be building infrastructure, solving problems, reducing the deficit, and could be doing other work. Instead, we spend it on a health care system which doesn't produce good health care results--at least not measured by life expectancy, which is a pretty good proxy. There is a huge $1 trillion a year cost to our society in being that bad of an outlier. The cost is also measured in lost lives and lost years of life, because we are averaging 77 years and these countries are averaging 82 years of life. We have a real problem on our hands, and obsessing about a Web site is a complete distraction from getting after this problem--5 years off every human's life in this country and $1 trillion a year. That is worth paying attention to. The health care changes we brought are actually making a difference. Here are some interesting graphs. Each one is a projection done by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office of what health care costs are going to look like in the future, and what you see is a progression. They did this graph in August of 2010. This was where they projected health care spending would go when they projected in August of 2010 for this period, from 2014 onward to the next decade. A year later they went back and they projected again, and they projected actually costs would be lower. Then they came back in August of 2012 and they did another projection, and their projection showed that these anticipated costs went down again, every year, lower and lower. Here is the big one. In May of this year, the Congressional Budget Office went back and redid its projections for Medicare and Medicaid spending from 2014 to 2023. Look how far below what they had projected 1 year ago, 2 years ago, and 3 years ago the current projection. That is a saving of about $1.2 trillion in that decade. That is a long way from $1 trillion a year we could be saving if we just got back to where we were on this graph, if we got back from here to where Switzerland and Norway, the most expensive countries in the world, are. That is $1 trillion over 1 year. This is $1.2 trillion over 10 years, but it is still a big change and it is still moving in the right direction. So we shouldn't be too quick to condemn ObamaCare when that kind of savings is already being projected. The last slide I will show before I go to Senator Cantwell, who has been good enough to join us, is this one. Why might it be that those costs went down so far in May of 2013? Why might it be that graph of projected costs keeps going down? It is because of changes in what is going on in the health care system. This is one good example. This shows the hospital readmission rate from January of 2007 until August of 2013. This is how often somebody was discharged from the hospital, went home, and then within 30 days had to come back and be readmitted. That could potentially be for a completely new reason, but usually it is because the discharge planning wasn't done well enough and there was a bad handoff between the hospital and the primary care physician or the nursing home. What we found is you could make that transition much better for patients. When you do, guess what. They don't get sent back to the hospital. When they don't get sent back to the hospital, you save money. That is just one way the kind of huge $1.2 trillion over 10-year savings CBO has already projected could be taking place, but this is clearly a part of it. It is improving the quality of care so people aren't going back into the hospital, aren't going to the emergency room, and you avoid that cost at all by having handled the patient better, by having given them better treatment and better care. It is pretty astounding. In 2007, right through here until the end of 2011, it was a pretty steady readmission rate. Then when we changed the signal to the hospitals and cut their payment for readmissions, boom, down it fell. That represents a very significant savings in the system. And in the personal lives of those people and their families not having to go back to the hospital, that is a pretty big plus too. It was Senator Cantwell's idea that we should come down today and talk a little bit about the delivery system reform side of the health care discussion. I got started a little bit before she could get here, but my wonderful colleague now has arrived, so let me yield the floor to her. I will put this graph back because I want to leave this here for whenever the camera swings my way. I want people to see this graph. It is inexcusable that all of these competitive industrialized nations of ours should be able to deliver universal high-quality health care for what would be a $1 trillion a year savings if we could simply match them, and they produce a longer life expectancy for their people and we are stuck competing for life expectancy with Chile and the Czech Republic. Come on. We can do a lot better than that, and that should be the ball we have our eye on rather than obsessing about the ObamaCare Web site. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today with my colleagues, Senator Blunt, Senator Blumenthal, and soon to be joining us Senator Graham, to speak about our Cybersecurity Public Awareness Act of 2013. It is now broadly accepted in this body that the cyber threat posed by criminals, foreign intelligence, and military services, and even terrorists, is enormous and unrelenting. But useful information about cyber attacks and cyber risks still is not consistently available to consumers, to businesses or to policymakers. The legislation the four of us have introduced, the Cybersecurity Public Awareness Act, is an important first step toward fixing this problem. Senator Blunt has earned a reputation for working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle, particularly on issues of national security. I was very glad to have the opportunity to work with him last year as part of a bipartisan group of Senators seeking a sensible middle ground on cyber security legislation. He has brought his keen understanding of national security issues to bear on this important problem, as well as his expertise on public and private collaboration. So I thank the good Senator from Missouri for the opportunity to work together. Likewise, Senator Graham, as my colleagues know, has a long track record of bipartisan legislative accomplishments and a passion for issues of national security. On our Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, where together we are the chair and ranking member, Senator Graham has been a worthy partner in our work to improve America's cyber readiness, including our readiness against economic espionage and trade secret threat. I thank Senator Graham for his continuing leadership and partnership as we introduce this bill to improve public awareness of the cyber threats facing our country. I am pleased also to be joined by my colleague Senator Blumenthal. We were attorneys general together. We serve on the Judiciary Committee together. We are northeasterners together. I know he brings to this Chamber a deep understanding of the tools at the disposal of law enforcement, as well as the challenges of adapting to a swiftly evolving threat. Americans' privacy is routinely violated by criminals who steal credit card information and Social Security numbers or even spy on us through the webcams of our personal computers. Bank accounts and businesses, local governments and individuals have been emptied overnight. Sensitive government networks have been compromised. The networks that run our critical infrastructure, the basics we depend on for heat, for communications, for commerce, have been compromised, raising the prospect of a cyber attack that could bring down a portion of the electric grid or disrupt our financial system. Even our Nation's long-term economic competitiveness is at risk. General Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, has said, for example, that the theft of trade secrets through cyber hacks has put us on the losing end of the largest illicit transfer of wealth in history. Yet most Americans are still unaware of the full extent of this threat. Why? Cyber threat information is often classified when it is gathered by the government or is held as proprietary when collected by a company that has been attacked. As a result, Americans are left in the dark about the frequency, extent, and intensity of these attacks. Raising awareness of cyber threats is an important element of Congress's work to improve our Nation's cyber security. The Cybersecurity Public Awareness Act of 2013 takes up that challenge. Building on legislation I previously introduced with Senator John Kyl, it will increase public awareness of the cyber threats against our Nation and do so in a matter that protects classified, business-sensitive, and proprietary information. The bill addresses several different elements of the cyber security awareness gap. It enhances public awareness of attacks on Federal networks by requiring that the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense report to Congress on cyber incidents in the ``.gov'' and ``.mil'' domains. As we work to protect the American people from cyber attacks, we must first understand the nature of attacks on our own systems and what we can do to ensure that those attacks are not successful. The bill tasks the Department of Justice and the FBI to report to Congress on their investigations and prosecutions of cyber intrusions, computer or network compromise, or other forms of illegal hacking. Those reports also must detail the resources they devote to fighting cyber crime and any legal impediments they find that frustrate prosecutions of cyber criminals. It is not enough just to try to stop hackers when they are coming after us; we must also identify and prosecute the people responsible for cyber crimes wherever they may be. In addition, the bill requires the Securities and Exchange Commission to report to Congress on the corporate reporting of cyber risks and cyber incidents in the financial statements of publicly traded companies. The purpose of this requirement is to make sure American businesses are adequately informing their shareholders of any material information shareholders should know relating to cyber security. Last, the bill requires the Department of Homeland Security to report to Congress on the vulnerabilities to cyber threats in each critical infrastructure sector: the electric grid, the gas and oil markets, the banking sector, and others. When it comes to protecting our critical infrastructure from cyber attacks, there is no margin of error. Failure in this area could mean a blackout in a major American city or a serious disruption of the banking system on which our economy depends. That is why we must fully understand the threats to these sectors and do what we can to stop them. These are ways in which the Cybersecurity Public Awareness Act will help to better inform the American people about the nature of the cyber threats we face and help us in Congress make the informed decisions about how to better protect against these threats. We have more work to do to improve our Nation's cyber security, but a key first step is to ensure that members of the public, businesses, shareholders, policymakers, and other cyber security stakeholders have an appropriate awareness of cyber vulnerabilities, threats, and opportunities. I look forward to working with Senator Blunt, with Senator Graham, and with Senator Blumenthal to get this bill passed into law, and I thank them each for their helpful cooperation and their insight. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank Senator Blumenthal for that question, and I thank him for his work in this area. For some time he, Senator Graham, Senator Blunt, and I were part of a group that tried to pull together a bipartisan compromise, a meaningful piece of cyber security legislation, which, unfortunately, failed at the last minute. As a result of that failure, the President began a process by Executive order for bringing together the various private sector industries in this country whose operations qualify as critical infrastructure, and that provide the basics for your lives--the basic heat, electricity, financial services, and communications on which modern, civilized life depends. From all the reports I have heard--and I have looked at it very closely--that process is actually going very smoothly. As a result, the administration is comfortable with deferring legislative activity in that area--in the area of trying to regulate and improve the cyber security of our critical infrastructure. We are holding off for the time being on that, but the area of public awareness is still wide open. Legislative authorities are required--not just Executive order authorities--in many of these areas, particularly for organizations, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is largely independent of direct Presidential control, because they are independent agencies under our constitutional system. This bill would not interfere with what is going on under the authority of the Executive order. It is something we can do in a bipartisan way in the meantime while the Executive order process goes forward. I believe it will be very productive because, as Senator Blumenthal and Senator Blunt have noted, we are a better country and more effective legislators in the Senate when the public knows what is going on and has had a chance to engage on an issue. For that to happen, the public needs the information, and for the public to get that information, they need to have it collected by these different agencies and presented to them. We can't expect an average American citizen to go out and try to do this research on their own if it has not been gathered anywhere. I appreciate the question. I think what we are doing will be both very productive and consistent with what the President has done under his Executive order. I applaud him for picking up the baton after we failed in Congress. Certainly, that failure had nothing to do with the energy and determination to get something done on this issue with Senator Graham, who has joined us on the floor. I will yield the floor so Senator Graham can offer his thoughts.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me conclude for our side with the observation that in this season of peace and reconciliation, perhaps this is an issue where a little peace and reconciliation, a little zone of peace and reconciliation can emerge through all of our partisan rancor so we can go forward and do something that will indeed protect this country that we love. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, if the Senator would yield for a question, I might inquire of him whether it is his view that if you actually take a look at what is being done by the administration under the executive order, it bears a considerable resemblance to the proposal we had worked on?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank the Chair.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

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

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I ask consent to speak as in morning business for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, this is my 53rd time for consecutive weeks we are in session that I have come to the floor to speak about climate change and to urge my colleagues that it is time to wake up. These speeches are not easy. A great deal of effort goes into assisting me with research and crafting of them. I am particularly grateful for the hard work of Dr. Todd Bianco in helping me to prepare them. He is the fellow sitting on the other side of the sign, looking embarrassed that I have just called him out. Todd joined my office in September of 2012 as a Geological Society of America-U.S. Geological Survey congressional science fellow. He has contributed considerable scientific understanding and analytical rigor to our work. His ability to interpret the latest climate research has helped me to convey complex scientific concepts both accurately and in a way that is accessible and meaningful to policymakers and the public. You may be used to seeing him with me here on the floor for each week's speech, but he has also been effective in researching legislation and preparing for hearings in the Environment and Public Works Committee. I say this because this week marks the end of Todd's fellowship and he will soon return home to Rhode Island with his wife Allison. Allison Bianco, by the way, is a very talented artist whose work reflects our deep human connection to the natural world. In addition to lending us Todd, Allison has also lent us some of her artwork which is hung on display in my front office. So in addition to thanking Todd for his efforts, I also want to thank Allison. Todd, like me, is an over- married human being. I wish them both the best of luck back home, and I thank Todd for his work in the U.S. Senate to advance responsible public policy, grounded firmly in the best science. It is time at last for Congress at least to heed that best science and act responsibly. It is time to wake up. Denying and delaying is irresponsible. In the judgment of history, it will ultimately, I believe, be shameful. Carbon pollution from the burning of fossil fuels is altering the climate. The consensus around this fact within the scientific community is overwhelming, and public awareness of this crisis is growing stronger. Interestingly, it is growing stronger across party lines. Republicans might want to listen to this. A survey conducted for the League of Conservation Voters found that more than half of young Republican voters, 53 percent of Republicans under the age of 35--53 percent would describe a politician who denies climate change is happening as ``ignorant,'' ``out-of-touch,'' or ``crazy.'' Madam President, 53 percent of Republicans under 35 view that kind of climate denying as ``ignorant,'' ``out-of-touch,'' or ``crazy.'' Even though a majority of young Republicans understands that denying climate change is out of touch with reality, Republicans in Congress refuse to get serious. Why? Another national survey, this one by the Pew Research Center, found that 61 percent of non-tea-party Republicans actually agree there is solid evidence the Earth is warming, with a plurality saying it is mostly because of humans. But the tea partiers are different. Seventy percent of tea partiers, contrarily, say there is ``no solid evidence'' the Earth is warming and 41 percent of tea partiers assert that warming is ``just not happening.'' Not that we don't have enough information yet, but it is ``just not happening.'' Regardless of what you think is the cause, there are legion independent measurements that the Earth is warming. This is not a theory. We measure that the temperature of the atmosphere and oceans is rising. We measure that snow, ice caps, and glaciers are melting. We measure that seas are rising. We measure that the very seasons are shifting. It is one thing to be the party that is against science. The tea partiers would make it the party against measurement. Just as the tea partiers led the Republicans off the government shutdown cliff, just as the tea partiers tried to defeat the budget deal most Republicans supported, so the tea party wants to lead the Republican Party off the climate cliff. Outside these walls it is different. Responsible Republican voices more and more acknowledge the threat of climate change and call for responsible solutions. Many want to correct the market failure that aids and abets the polluters' irresponsible practices. My colleagues, Representative Henry Waxman, Representative Earl Blumenauer, Senator Brian Schatz, and I have put forward just such a market-based proposal, a revenue-neutral fee on carbon emissions, the revenues of which would be returned back to the American people. Here, within Congress, where the polluters' money flows so abundantly, no Republican colleague has come forward to join us. But outside of Congress here are some of the responsible voices in the Republican Party: Former South Carolina Representative Bob Inglis has long urged his party to get serious on climate change. In an article in the Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum this year, Mr. Inglis invoked the tenets of conservative economics. He wrote: If you're a conservative, it is time to step forward and engage in the climate and energy debate because we have the answer--free enterprise. . . . Conservatives understand that we must set the correct incentives and this should include internalizing pollution and other environmental costs in our market system. We tax income but we don't tax emissions. It makes sense to conservatives to take the tax off something you want more of, income, and shift the tax to something you want less of, emissions. That was Bob Inglis and that is exactly how you use his words ``internalize pollution and other environmental costs in our market system.'' You do it with a carbon fee. Sherwood Boehlert and Wayne Gilchrest, former Republican Representatives from New York and Virginia, in a joint February 2012 op ed with Representative Waxman and Senator Markey, made the fiscal case for a carbon fee. Here is what they said: The debate over how to reduce our nation's debt has been presented as a dilemma between cutting spending on programs Americans cherish or raising taxes on American job creators. But there is a better way: We could slash our debt by making power plants and oil refineries pay for the carbon emissions that endanger our health and environment. This policy would strengthen our economy, lessen our dependence on foreign oil, keep our skies clean--and raise a lot of revenue. The best approach [they continue] would be to use a market mechanism such as the sale of carbon allowances or a fee on carbon pollution to lower emissions and increase revenue. For one former Republican Member of this body, the threat of climate change has serious professional implications. As Secretary of Defense, it is Chuck Hagel's job to account for all hazards to our national security and our interests in the world. He gave this clear-eyed assessment at the Halifax International Security Forum just last month: Climate change does not directly cause conflict, but it can significantly add to the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. Food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, more severe natural disasters--all place additional burdens on economies, societies, and institutions around the world. . . . The effects of climate change and new energy resources are far-reaching and unpredictable . . . demanding our attention and strategic thinking. Top advisers to former Republican Presidents have joined this chorus of Republicans speaking out on climate and urging a carbon fee. Republican Presidents listened to these men and women. Who knows, maybe Republican Members of Congress will listen to them also. William D. Ruckelshaus, Lee M. Thomas, William K. Reilly, and Christine Todd Whitman, all headed the Environmental Protection Agency during Republican administrations. They spoke with one voice in an August New York Times op-ed. They wrote: As administrators of the EPA under Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush, we held fast to common-sense conservative principles--protecting the health of the American people, working with the best technology available, and trusting in the innovation of American business and in the market to find the best solutions for the least cost. These former Republican officials recognize both the wisdom of properly pricing carbon and, as well, the obstinate opposition that stands in the way of progress in Congress. They continued in their article: A market-based approach, like a carbon tax, would be the best path to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but that is unachievable in the current political gridlock in Washington. But we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste. They could even have said that it is time to wake up. George Schultz, another prominent Republican, served as Secretary of both Labor and Treasury under President Nixon and Secretary of State under President Reagan. He, too, is calling for an end to the polluters' free ride. In an April op-ed with Nobel economist Gary Becker that appeared in RealClearPolitics, George Schultz appealed to our American sense of fairness writing: Americans like to compete on a level playing field. All the players should have an equal opportunity to win based on their competitive merits, not on some artificial imbalance that gives someone or some group a special advantage. We think this idea should be applied to energy producers. They all should bear the full costs of the use of the energy they provide. Let me repeat that: They all should bear the full costs of the use of the energy they provide . . . Clearly, a revenue-neutral carbon tax would benefit all Americans by eliminating the need for costly energy subsidies while promoting a level playing field for energy producers. Veterans of a much more recent Republican administration are likewise acknowledging the appeal of a carbon fee proposal. David Frum, speechwriter to George W. Bush, wrote in a December 2012 cnn.com op-ed that a carbon fee could help address a number of pressing national issues. Here is what he wrote: Take three worrying long-term challenges: climate change, the weak economic recovery, and America's chronic budget deficits. Combine them into one. And suddenly three tough problems become one attractive solution. Tax carbon. . . . The revenues from a carbon tax could be used to reduce the deficit while also extending new forms of payroll tax relief to middle-class families, thus supporting middle-class family incomes. Gregory Mankiw, economic adviser to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, specifically highlighted our carbon fee proposal in an August op-ed in the New York Times. Our bill, he wrote, ``is more effective and less invasive than the regulatory approach that the federal government has traditionally pursued.'' Speaking of us, he said: If the Democratic sponsors conceded to using the new revenue to reduce personal and corporate income tax rates, a bipartisan compromise is possible to imagine. Among economists, the issue is largely a no-brainier. I say to Mr. Mankiw, as one of the Democratic sponsors, we are very interested in a bipartisan compromise. We just need a Republican to come to the negotiating table and we can begin. That is what the American people want, what voters want, and it is what responsible State and local leaders want as well. Take, for example, Jim Brainard, a five-term Republican mayor from Carmel, IN. In an Indianapolis Star op-ed this month, Mayor Brainard implored Democrats and Republicans alike to face up to the reality of climate change. Here is what Mayor Brainard said: [T]his issue isn't just about saving polar bears. It's about saving our cities. . . . No matter your politics, there is overwhelming evidence of climate change and we as a nation have a moral obligation to address these issues. For himself, he says he plans ``to urge the federal government to take a stronger leadership role in helping our cities prepare for what is certainly coming our way.'' There are a lot of Republicans out there who are awake to the threat of climate change and to the win-win-benefits of pricing carbon and using the revenues to invest in tax reductions and adaptation and other ways to protect ourselves and advance our economy. Unfortunately, in Congress, the dark, heavy hand of the polluters is helping the tea party drive the Republican party off the cliff. One day the Republican Party will pay a heavy price for this, and that day may be soon. They need to make the change. It is the responsibility of Congress to heed the warnings of environmental calamity, to stamp out market distortions that favor polluters, and to steer this country on a prudent, reasonable path toward a proud future that is both sustainable and equitable. It is time for Congress to wake up. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, any Senator will acknowledge that each of us is only as effective as the staff who support us. For nearly as long as I have been a Member of this body, I have enjoyed the benefit of the considerable abilities and expertise of Stephen Lilley. Stephen's tenure on my staff has drawn to a close, and the U.S. Senate loses a gifted lawyer and a dedicated public servant. Stephen joined my team in 2008 as a Heyman Federal Public Service fellow and quickly demonstrated a keen understanding of the workings of the Senate and of the Judiciary Committee. Unwilling to part with either his sharp legal analysis or his good humor, we brought him on board full time as a counsel after his fellowship ended. After more outstanding work, he was soon promoted to chief counsel on the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts and later the Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism. Stephen has ably staffed hundreds of committee hearings and markups and advised me on every issue under the wide-ranging jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee. In particular, he played a key role in the investigation of the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts into the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; he helped me during the confirmation of two Justices to the Supreme Court; he worked with me to promote and defend the role of the civil jury; and he has emerged as one of the Senate's leading experts on cybersecurity and intellectual property, facilitating immensely complex negotiations that brought us to the brink of comprehensive cyber legislation. In addition to producing great work, Stephen elevated the work of those around him. His diligence, his ability to work well with other offices, his passion for doing right, and--not least--his sharp and dry wit, all made him a pleasure to work with. I particularly wish to thank his wife Jaynie and his daughter Mary Win for supporting Stephen and for sharing him with us. Stephen's hard work brought him success before his arrival at the Senate, whether at Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude; at Yale University, where he earned his law degree; or as a clerk to Judge Thomas Ambro on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Judge Jeremy Fogel on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. I have no doubt he will find continued success in all of his future endeavors. Theodore Roosevelt reminded us of the credit due to the man who spends himself in a worthy cause. I gratefully credit Stephen Lilley for his exceptional service to the Senate, the people of Rhode Island, and the United States of America.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, this is the 52nd consecutive week we are in session that I have come to the floor to ask us to please, for Lord's sake, wake up to the damage carbon pollution is already doing to our atmosphere, oceans, and climate, and to look ahead, to use our God- given sense, and to plan for what is so obviously coming. In those weeks, I have spoken about all different aspects of carbon pollution, its effect on sports and our economy; its effect on oceans and coasts; its effect on agriculture and wildfires; its effect on storms and insurance costs. I have spoken about the measurements we can already make of the harm already happening: Sea level rise, which we measure with a yardstick, basically; ocean temperature, which we measure with a thermometer; and ocean acidification--the fastest in 50 million years, according to research published in ``Nature Geoscience''--which we can measure with litmus tests. I have, I hope, to anyone listening with their logic turned on, thoroughly rebutted the deniers' phony arguments against solving carbon pollution, whether those arguments purport to be based in science or religion or economics or our competitiveness. I have listed the thoughtful and responsible groups--from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, from Walmart to NASA, from Ford and GM to Coke and Pepsi, from America's garden clubs to just last month our major sports leagues--who understand the truth about climate change and are saying so. I have done my best to expose the calculated campaign of lies that we are up against and the vast scandalous apparatus of phony organizations and engineered messages that are designed to propagate those lies. I have traced the connections back to, of course, the big carbon polluters and their billionaire owners. I have been obliged to point out that the money of those big polluters and billionaires floods this Chamber, that their lobbyists prowl the outer halls, and that to a sad and disappointing degree this Congress is bought and paid for by that polluter influence. One factor we have yet to consider is whether as an institution Congress has just become completely irresponsible. Maybe this Congress just cannot operate as an institution at an intelligent level. Some Congresses are going to be smarter and more responsible than others. That is just the natural order of variation. Some Congress is going to be the sorriest Congress ever. Maybe we are it. Some organizations, like NASA, for instance, are very smart. That is why NASA is driving a rover around on the surface of Mars right now. That is a seriously smart organization. Some organizations take ordinary people and call them to be their very best, to play at a level above their natural talents, to heed a higher calling than their selfish inclinations. At their best, our military and our churches tend to achieve that. Some organizations, however, take even the most talented people and drag them down to the lowest common denominator, and stifle the best and bring out the worst in even those very talented people. I ask people watching, which type of organization do you think Congress is right now? Which type do you think we are? As an organization, it is hard to say anything kinder of Congress than that it is now a really irresponsible organization. We could not even keep the U.S. Government running. Standard & Poor's estimated that our tea party shutdown foolishness cost Americans tens of billions of dollars for no gain--none. We cannot sort out the basics of building and maintaining our American infrastructure. Our own American Society of Civil Engineers gives our country a D-plus for infrastructure. That is not complicated stuff. Yet we flub it like a football team that fumbles the ball at the snap. Get a little more complicated and Congress seems to get even worse. Let me show you just one health care chart. This chart I have in the Chamber shows the average life expectancy--in years--in a country compared to the cost per capita of health care in that country. Together, they make a pretty good proxy for how a country's health care system is doing. This group shown here on the chart represents most of the OECD member and partner countries--our industrialized international competitors. This, shown here on the chart, is us--way out here, all alone, spending the most by far for results that are mediocre at best. We would save nearly $1 trillion a year if we could just get our per capita cost down to what Norway and Switzerland spend. They are the next two most expensive countries on the planet, and we are $1 trillion a year more laid out per capita. Think of what we could do as a nation, what we could build and invent with $1 trillion a year if we were not wasting it on bad health care. And bad it is. We get worse results in longevity than virtually any modern economy. Look who beats us: Japan, Great Britain, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway. Germany does, Italy does, Greece does, Luxembourg does. They all beat us. Chile and the Czech Republic are the two countries we beat for longevity. Look at the size of that problem--those lives lost, those trillions of dollars wasted--and then look at the quality of the health care discussion we are having in Congress, and tell me this is not a completely irresponsible organization. That brings us to climate change. Yes, it is complicated, when you are trying to predict and model something as complex as what our climate is going to do in the years ahead. But it is also simple, when you look at the stuff that everyone agrees on, the stuff that you can measure, the stuff that you would have to be a nut or a crank or an eccentric to dispute. Nobody responsible--nobody responsible--disputes the principle that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere raises the temperature of the Earth, and that it does so through the so-called greenhouse effect. A scientist named John Tyndall figured that out at the time of the American Civil War. I brought his musty old paper in here several speeches ago. Its old leather binding was flaking and peeling. When that report was first published, Abraham Lincoln had just been elected President. In all the years since then, this principle of science has always been confirmed and validated. It is not some questionable theory. The greenhouse effect is real. It would not just be wrong, it would be irresponsible to deny that. Nobody responsible disputes that for over a century our modern economy has run on fossil fuels and that burning those fossil fuels has released gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The Global Carbon Project estimates that mankind has pumped about 2,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since 1870. That is a pretty solid estimate, and I have never even heard anyone dispute it. So we know those two things: adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere traps more heat; and we have released an estimated 2,000 gigatons-- 2,000 billion tons--of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Let's go on from there. It is a known principle of science that a significant portion of that multigigaton carbon load is absorbed by the oceans, and that the chemical reaction when that absorption happens into the oceans makes the oceans more acidic. No responsible person disputes either proposition. It is not some theory. It is something that you can actually do and measure in a lab. Again, it would not just be wrong, it would be really irresponsible to deny that. We also know that the oceans do more than absorb carbon. They absorb heat. Indeed, they have absorbed most of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases--over 90 percent of the heat between 1971 and 2010, according to the recent IPCC report. What happens when the oceans absorb heat? They expand. Thermal expansion is a basic physical property of liquids. It can also be shown in a very simple lab. It is not a theory. Again, it would be not just wrong but irresponsible to deny that too. It would not just be wrong, it would be irresponsible to deny what those simple measurements and clear principles tell us. But we do. We do. We deny it. Congress will not wake up and address this problem. Like those monkeys: See no carbon, hear no carbon, speak no carbon. Because we are so irresponsible, because we deny this reality, we are failing to take precautions and, as a result, many people will suffer. For those of us who love this country and are proud of it, and are proud of our government, and want this country and its government to be a beacon of hope and promise and rectitude, it hurts a little extra for the Congress to be such a failure. It hurts a little extra that we in our generation have driven Congress--the hub of our noble American experiment in democracy, the beating heart of this great Republic--down to that low level. It is a harsh judgment that this body is an irresponsible failure. But on climate this Congress got it the old-fashioned way; it earned it. I will close with a final observation. Compare the irresponsibility of this ``see no carbon, hear no carbon, speak no carbon'' Congress with the recent exhortation from Pope Francis. Here is what the Pope said. I will quote him at some length. There are other weak and defenceless beings who are frequently at the mercy of economic interests or indiscriminate exploitation. I am speaking of creation as a whole. We human beings are not only the beneficiaries but also the stewards of other creatures. Thanks to our bodies, God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement. Let us not leave in our wake a swath of destruction and death which will affect our own lives and those of future generations. The Pope continued: Here I would make my own the touching and prophetic lament voiced some years ago by the bishops of the Philippines: And he quotes them: ``An incredible variety of insects lived in the forest and were busy with all kinds of tasks. . . . Birds flew through the air, their bright plumes and varying calls adding color and song to the green of the forests. . . . God intended this land for us, his special creatures, but not so that we might destroy it and turn it into a wasteland. . . . After a single night's rain, look at the chocolate brown rivers in your locality and remember that they are carrying the life blood of the land into the sea. . . . How can fish swim in sewers like the . . . rivers which we have polluted? Who has turned the wonderworld of the seas into underwater cemeteries bereft of color and life?'' Small yet strong in the love of God, like Saint Francis of Assisi, all of us, as Christians, are called to watch over and protect the fragile world in which we live, and all its peoples. What is our answer to the Pope, to this great Christian leader? In Congress, it is the monkey answer: Hear no carbon, see no carbon, speak no carbon. We still have time to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. We can actually do it in painless ways. We can even do it in advantageous ways, in ways that will boost our economy, but we have to do it. We have to wake up. We simply have to wake up. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I am back again for now the 51st consecutive week that the Senate has been in session to urge Congress to wake up to the effects of carbon pollution on the Earth. Today I wish to talk about how climate change is taking its toll on an important part of our way of our life, some of our long-cherished American pastimes that we do in the great outdoors. New Englanders--and the distinguished Presiding Officer from Connecticut is very familiar with this--have fond memories of ski trips in Vermont, of ice hockey on frozen ponds in New Hampshire, and of fishing trips off the coast of Rhode Island. All of these activities are fun, they are fulfilling, and they leave us with indelible memories of the wonders of our natural world. But climate change is putting much of that at risk. The New York Times records that declining snowfall and an unseasonably warm weather were a drag on winter sports and recreational tourism during the 2011-2012 winter. Before the end of the century, they report the number of economically viable ski locations in New Hampshire and Maine will be cut in half. Skiing in New York will be cut by three-quarters. I am sorry to inform the Presiding Officer from the great State of Connecticut that there will be no ski area left in Connecticut or Massachusetts. I assume from the report that means Rhode Island as well, because Rhode Islanders have been skiing our beloved Yawgoo Valley since the 1960s. As drought and increasing temperatures reduce the snowpack in the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains, the future of ski and snowboarding there is also at risk. The Park City Foundation in Utah predicts an annual local temperature increase of 6.8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2075, which could cause a total loss of snowpack in the lower Park City resort area. Beyond the loss to the skiing tradition in Park City, the report estimates that this will result in thousands of lost jobs, tens of millions in lost earnings, and hundreds of millions in lost economic output. No part of the country will be immune from these changes our carbon pollution is driving. Studies have found that extremely warm days in the Southeast are on the rise. Ice on the Great Lakes is forming later and disappearing earlier. Rain will continue to decrease on the Great Plains. Wildfire seasons are getting worse in the West where the snowpack is melting earlier. Sea-level rise threatens Hawaii's famed beaches, and warming in Alaska is degrading the permafrost that entire communities are built on. Climate change has already changed rainfall patterns and can load the dice for bad weather conditions such as heat waves. This past summer a heat wave prompted the Kenosha public schools in Wisconsin to cancel all outdoor student practices and sporting events. The district stated on its Web site: ``Keeping the best interests of our athletes in mind, we are canceling/rescheduling all contests today.'' According to the Denver Post, this past spring a prolonged drought forced Denver Parks and Recreation to postpone opening of the grass sports fields for soccer and lacrosse, which kept thousands of children and adults from starting their athletic seasons. For some, warmer temperatures mean more time inside because the air is not fit to breathe. Ground-level ozone, commonly known as smog, forms more quickly during hot sunny days, causing asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and even hospitalizations. In August, I met with two Rhode Island kids: Nick Friend, a 15-year- old from East Providence, and Kenyatta Richards, who is an 8-year-old from Warwick. They have asthma. They have to stay indoors and avoid being too active on bad air days. We have had six bad air days from ozone this year in Rhode Island. That is 6 days when Rhode Islanders such as Nick and Kenyatta can't enjoy the outdoor activities that are so much a part of our American childhoods. The effects of climate change aren't limited to hotter days and smog. Oceans are warming, ice is melting, and sea levels are rising. This puts coastal infrastructure such as dams, bridges, and coastal powerplants at risk. It also threatens many of our most beloved and expensive palaces of sport. As far back as 2007, ``Sports Illustrated'' ran a special issue on sports and global warming, saying: ``Scientists project up to a one-meter increase in sea level by 2100,'' warned one article, ``which will alter the shape of the land in low-lying regions of U.S.--including San Francisco Bay and South Florida--and swamp well- known sports venues.'' Places such as the American Airlines Arena and Sun Life Stadium in Miami and AT&T Park in San Francisco are at risk. As Congress sleepwalks through history, blind to the harmful effects of carbon pollution, responsible groups are acting, including our major professional sports leagues. The NBA, MLB, NFL, and NHL are letters that almost every American knows. These leagues and their teams are cultural institutions. They are also big business with annual revenues in billions of dollars. They take the threat of postponed games and washed-out stadiums seriously. Earlier this year, the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change, which I started with Representative Henry Waxman, to keep attention focused on climate change and what we could do to address it, asked the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Football League, as well as the United States Olympic Committee, to tell us what climate change means for their sports. Each of these organizations is awake to the dangers of carbon pollution and each is acting. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig wrote to the task force and said: I have often said that Baseball is a social institution, and to that end we recognize our responsibility to be part of the national effort to preserve our environment. And that is why MLB and many of our Major League Clubs have adopted practices that have resulted in clean, energy-efficient ballparks and environmentally friendly baseball events. One of those practices is the partial offset of the energy used at all the All-Star Game events, including FanFest, the Home Run Derby, and the All-Star Game, by Green-e Certified energy renewable credits, including wind and solar energy. On the hockey front, NHL Deputy Commissioner William Daly wrote: Hockey's relationship with the environment is unique. Our sport was born on frozen ponds, where to this day--players of all ages and skill levels learn to skate. For this magnificent tradition to continue, it is imperative that we recognize the importance of maintaining the environment. The NHL has partnered with ENERGY STAR and the Natural Resources Defense Council to make its own facilities more energy efficient, and it has called on the U.S. Government to develop a nationwide retrofit strategy to help upgrade buildings such as ice rinks and to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. Kathy Behrens, executive vice president of Social Responsibility & Player Programs at the NBA, told us: While Professional NBA games are played inside climate controlled arenas, most basketball around the world is played outdoors. If air pollution, extreme heat, and other forms of climate disruption make it difficult to enjoy or attend our game and, of much concern, actually threatens the health and safety of basketball players, fans, and business partners, that matters greatly to the [NBA]. Pro basketball is working to reduce carbon emissions through improved energy efficiency at its arenas. A number of NBA arenas have achieved LEED certifications and some have installed on-site solar panels. The NBA has also come out in support of standards to reduce carbon pollution from electric powerplants, which is a cornerstone of President Obama's recently announced climate action plan. On the football front, Adolfo Birch III, senior vice president of Labor Policy and Government Affairs for the NFL, wrote: Twenty years ago, the NFL became the first professional sports organization formally to address the environmental impact of our marquee events--Super Bowl and Pro Bowl. The program to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions during every Super Bowl has resulted in the planting of more than 50,000 trees in the Super Bowl host communities. The National Football League estimates that the 2013 Super Bowl in New Orleans achieved a reduction of nearly 24,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions or the equivalent of the energy use of 8,000 American homes for an entire year. The U.S. Olympic Committee has also joined in the fight to reduce harmful carbon pollution. According to USOC CEO Scott Blackmun: The Green Ring program aims to mitigate the USOC and our athletes' impact on the environment through a number of sustainability efforts, an area that is a passion for many of our athletes. Through Green Ring, we hope to contribute to sustainability while using our platform to educate and inspire our constituents to do the same. Our focus is more action, less carbon. Other international bodies have also launched aggressive plans to fight climate change. The 2014 soccer World Cup in Brazil is aiming to be carbon neutral by offsetting 2.7 million tons of carbon dioxide estimated to be generated by this year's Confederation Cup tournament and the World Cup next year. Our major sports leagues thus join a great army amassing on the side of climate action: virtually every major scientific body, the insurance and reinsurance industry, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Academies, NASA, and the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, leading Americans and international corporations, and the American Public Health Association. To them and many others, who are all in this fight, we can add our friends in the world of sports: Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, the National Football League, and the U.S. Olympic Committee. There is a growing chorus of voices from every sector of American society calling for action. Indeed, there is work to be done. The major sports organizations are doing their part because they know that few things define American society like the teams we cheer and the games we play. We in Congress need to wake up and join the fight. It is time to set aside the partisan nonsense and the polluter-fueled fantasies and at last take real steps to reduce our carbon pollution and preserve our distinctly American way of life. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, for the past 25 years, Rev. Rebecca Spencer has provided parishioners at the United Church of Christ's Central Congregational Church in Providence, RI, with thoughtful, dedicated, and selfless leadership. I have been blessed to experience Reverend Spencer's inspiring stewardship firsthand. As a member of the Central Congregational Church for the years that I lived in Providence, I saw her regularly touch the lives of her parishioners by providing the spiritual guidance sought by so many in today's fast-paced and sometimes lonely world. And as the first woman in the United Church of Christ's history to become a senior minister without first serving as an associate of the congregation, Reverend Spencer has been a role model for the young women of her congregation who aspire to follow in her footsteps and one day take on leadership roles of their own. Outside of church, Reverend Spencer has been a leader in Rhode Island's close-knit community. From her work to prevent domestic violence, to her service to our children through the United Way of Rhode Island, to the counsel she provides the Bioethics Committee at Women & Infants Hospital, Reverend Spencer has demonstrated a deep devotion to public service. Her contributions have made our State a better place for all. Last year, I had the privilege of bringing Reverend Spencer to the Senate floor to deliver the opening prayer as a guest chaplain. Her invocation reminded each of us, particularly those us of elected to represent our fellow citizens, of our responsibility as members of the national and international community: Gracious and loving God, we thank You for Your presence with us. You offer wisdom and perspective and grace. We ask Your blessings to be upon these elected representatives. May all that we do reflect Your purpose that we live together as Your children in harmony and freedom. May Your blessings and our work bring real hope to those who may be struggling or oppressed. We do ask for Your special blessings to be with those who serve our country in the military--at home, at sea, in the air, and foreign countries. Shield them from danger as they work for peace. This is indeed a gift of a new day You have given to us. May all our endeavors honor You and may we all serve the cause of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in this beloved land of ours. May we truly do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with You, our God. Congratulations to Reverend Spencer on her 25th anniversary at the Central Congregational Church. Rhode Island is proud to call her one of our own, and I am proud to call her a friend.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Heinrich.) Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here because I serve on the conference committee that is charged with negotiating a bipartisan budget deal. The Democrats have come to the table with a Senate-passed budget. The Presiding Officer will remember the long all-night ordeal of that budget. Our budget replaces the dumb and harmful sequester cuts with balanced deficit reduction. If fact, you do not get much more balanced than the Democratic program. It is half from spending cuts and half from closing loopholes in the Tax Code. Our proposal would add almost $2 trillion more of deficit reduction to the $2.5 trillion we have already done so far. Let's look at what we have done so far. Of the $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction to date, about $1.5 trillion has come from cuts in what we call discretionary spending; the spending that Congress approves each year that funds most government operations including our military. This is the $1.5 trillion in cuts out of all of the $12.6 trillion in spending. We got another $600 billion in revenue, mostly from letting the Bush tax cuts expire for very high-income taxpayers. So this thin red line is the additional $600 billion in revenue compared to the existing revenue of the country. As you will see, we have cut far more in spending than we have added in revenues going into this budget discussion. The remainder of the $2.5 trillion comes from the interest savings that are associated with those, just to make the numbers true up. This circle is here to demonstrate that to date we have yet to touch one dime in the other big budget item, which is loophole spending in the Tax Code. This is a pretty good-sized chunk of annual spending, about 12 percent of the levels projected in 2010. The fiscal cliff bill that restored the Clinton-era rates to families making over $450,000 added about 2 percent to other revenue projections, to the loophole category which is worth at least $14 trillion, conceivably a lot more, because some of the loopholes are so wide you do not even know what is going through them. The money just shows up in the Cayman Islands. We do not know what we have lost. That remains totally untouched. What we want to do is take just 7 percent, a tiny slice of this loophole revenue, and bring it back and use it for deficit reduction. That touching the loophole nerve is what has brought the Republicans to a screeching halt. In contrast to our exactly balanced approach--50 percent spending, 50 percent loopholes--Chairman Ryan's budget would 100 percent go after the programs on which low-income and middle-class Americans rely, without touching a single Tax Code giveaway--no balance at all. But, of course, unbalanced is the Republican way in budgets. For instance, the Republican budget changes Medicare into a voucher program. That is not very balanced. That is not what the American people want. The Republican budget cuts nondefense discretionary spending to levels lower than anything the American public has ever seen since OMB started keeping track. That is an extreme budget and not a balanced approach. The Republican budget would set annual domestic spending levels below 1962. If you think back to what America was like in 1962, there were no Pell grants. So if any of the pages were thinking of someday getting a Pell grant, that is gone. It did not exist in 1962. In 1962, 30 percent of American seniors lived in poverty. That is the level of spending the Republican budget would take us back to. The rhetoric has been just as unbalanced as the proposals. Speaker Boehner has said talk about raising revenue is over--over. We have not even started and he says it is over, zero percent out of loopholes. He says the conversation is over. I do not think so. The conversation has not even begun. But true to the Speaker's rhetoric, the Republican budget puts the burden of deficit reduction back onto Americans who can least afford it, while preserving for corporations and for the people who get the benefit of Tax Code giveaways every single dollar. In his conference committee opening remarks, Chairman Ryan said: If this conference becomes an argument about taxes, we are not going to get anywhere. Let's take a look at the so-called taxes in this loophole area that Democrats would like to discuss. By the way, we get $975 billion out of that, which is a slice slightly larger than this one and considerably smaller than that one. So where do we get it from? We go to what I refer to as the Republican treasure trove. We go to their Ali Baba's cave of treasure carved aside and saved for corporations and the rich. We go to the tax earmarks and the special deals, the special interests which year after year have been squirreled away into the Tax Code through their lobbyists and through their numbers. How big can Ali Baba's cave be? Seriously? How much money goes out the backdoor of the Tax Code through these loopholes and deductions? I will show you. This bar represents $1.13 trillion, which is the amount of revenue collected by the government through the individual income sections of the Tax Code. That is what goes into Uncle Sam's pocket from the Tax Code. Here is what goes out the backdoor in loopholes and deductions: $1.02 trillion. So for every $1 that actually gets collected under the individual income tax, 90 cents goes out the backdoor through the loophole circle. That is off-limits? Oh, I do not see why. It is a grand total every year of more than $1 trillion. Do not tell me we cannot touch it at all. By the way, when you are talking budget numbers, you multiply by 10. So $1 trillion over 10 years becomes $10 trillion. That is talking some pretty serious money, to pretend, as Chairman Ryan said: If we are going to have an argument about taxes, we are not going to get anywhere. You are not even going to look at $10 trillion and not get anywhere? On the corporate side, for every $1 in revenues the United States collects, here it is, $242 billion that we actually collect, that goes into Uncle Sam's pocket from corporate income tax revenue, here is what goes out the bookdoor of the corporate Tax Code: $148 billion. So like individual income, when it comes to corporate income, for every $1 Uncle Sam actually gets in revenues through the Tax Code, 60 cents-plus goes out the bookdoor through loopholes and deductions and other tax gimmicks. So, again, we budget for 10 years. So $148 billion becomes pretty close to $1.5 trillion. That is big bucks. If you add the two together and do it for 10 years, which is what we do in the budget world, and account for modest growth over those 10 years, we are talking about $14 trillion. We need to do $975 billion in deficit reduction out of loopholes from a $14 trillion number. Do not tell me we cannot find it there. Of course, the $14 trillion does not even count the billions of dollars that corporations and wealthy tax avoiders hide offshore. They do not even go through the gateway of the Tax Code and then out the backdoor. They do not even get counted in the first instance. They go off to the Cayman Islands, to tax havens, they get hidden in Swiss bank accounts, who knows what, but they do not get subjected to American taxation. By the way, that is pretty big business. Chairman Conrad, who was our predecessor chairman on the Budget Committee, used to have a slide he would show that showed a picture of a rather bland-looking four- or five-story building, the building in the Cayman Islands that did not look like much, not very big. You could drive by it, you would not particularly notice it. But he would point out in that little building over 18,000 companies claim to be doing business. He would point out that the kind of business they were doing was monkey business with the Tax Code because nobody could put 18,000 businesses in that little building. None of that stuff gets counted in the $14 trillion, the stuff that goes through the front and then out the backdoor. So the spending--the earmarks--that gets done through the Tax Code is a very big treasure trove. While much of this tax spending helps low- income and middle-class families, too much of it goes to high-income taxpayers who do not need it but who are clever and connected enough to get special deals, to get their tax earmarks into the Tax Code. But, of course, the Republicans do not want us to look into their treasure trove. Ali Baba's cave of tax tricks is where the juicy earmarks are for the special interests. If you remember back to the last Presidential campaign, it became public that Mitt Romney had to fiddle his taxes in order to get his tax rate up to a 14-percent tax rate. Some people gimmick their taxes to try to get their rates down. The rates for people such as Mitt Romney are so low to begin with that he had to play tax games to get his rates up to 14 percent so he would not look too bad as a Presidential candidate. Fourteen percent is a lower tax rate than a solitary hospital orderly pays. The guy who is walking down the linoleum hallways of Rhode Island Hospital at 2 o'clock in the morning delivering supplies pays a higher tax rate than that. We cannot do anything about that? That is a tax question we cannot discuss? How do Romney and the hedge fund billionaires get away with that? Look in Ali Baba's cave of tax treasures for the carried interest exception. If you want to know where ExxonMobil, which is one of the richest and most profitable corporations in the history of the world, gets its hands into the American taxpayer's pockets and pulls out oil and gas subsidies, look for those Big Oil subsidies in Ali Baba's treasure cave. Do you want to know why Amazon, Boeing, Carnival Cruise Lines, Duke Energy, PG&E, all companies making billions of dollars in profits per year, pay effective tax rates well under 10 percent? Look at the $150 billion in corporate tax giveaways there in Ali Baba's treasure cave. Do you want to know how it is that corporate jets get special favored tax treatment compared to the commercial jets that ordinary mortals fly around in? Look at the accelerated corporate jet depreciation schedules in Ali Baba's tax treasure cave. When the Speaker says that talk about raising revenue is over, look at what he is protecting? The Republican treasure trove of corporate and special interest earmarks heaped up like gold and jewels in the old illustrations in Ali Baba's cave of tax treasures. We Democrats are knocking at that door. We are saying: Americans pay in deficit reduction $1.5 trillion already. We are offering another $975 billion on top of that. We are saying that $600 billion came out of tax increases. What about loopholes? Now we want to go into the cave. The Republicans are getting very anxious. The alarms are ringing at the special interests, and our colleagues are rushing to the trenches to defend the special interests and to defend their cherished tax earmarks. That is why they want to keep revenue--loophole closing--out of the debt and deficit discussion. They know that once we start taking a real look into Ali Baba's cave, some of that stuff will be impossible to defend to the American people. It wasn't fair when it first went in, it has never been fair through its sordid history in the Tax Code, and it is not fair sitting in the Tax Code now. These are things we should get rid of even if we didn't need it for the debt and deficit. This is special interest crony capitalism at its worst. We intend to have a look at it in these discussions. If we listened in the Budget Committee, the Republicans said it plainly: Not a penny of tax loopholes can go for deficit reduction. They have said they are willing to move the treasure around a little bit in Ali Baba's cave as long as it all still gets used for corporations and the wealthy. That is not a guess; that is the way the Republican budget is structured. Those are their budget numbers, all of it to lower tax rates for corporations and the rich. They are willing to spread the wealth around as long as it stays in the same hands. We are at the gates of Ali Baba's cave, this special treasure trove of Tax Code special deals and earmarks for the rich and well connected. We are at the place where the lobbyists wheel the sweet corporate tax deals. We are knocking on the door of the $14 trillion in tax spending that has been left completely untouched in the deficit reduction so far. Our Republican colleagues are getting a little twitchy. Come on, fellas. Out of nearly $14 trillion in tax spending and earmarks, can't we put just 7 percent of it toward the debt and the deficit? Our proposal is to leave 93 percent of the treasure in the cave. That is not unreasonable. What is unreasonable, what is unbalanced is the Republican desire that not a nickel in loophole closing can go toward our debt and deficit. I could go through innumerable comments by our Republican colleagues warning us about the dire danger of our debt and deficit, warning about the terrible injustice to future generations, warning about the threat to our national security and to our national welfare; dire, serious warnings about the epic nature of the danger of our debt and deficit and the importance of curing it. When we actually stack it up, it is less important to them than every loophole in the Tax Code. My point is that people can't have it both ways. They can't be telling the American people that the debt and the deficit is the No. 1 threat to the well-being of our beloved country but is also less important than every deduction every lobbyist ever squirreled away for every special interest in the Tax Code. Both of those cannot be true. We must persevere to get into Ali Baba's cave of tax treasures in the loophole side of this equation. I hope very much that we will. I think that is nothing more than reasonable, nothing more than balanced. Indeed, one could argue it is actually a lot less than balanced because we only want 7 percent and we would be letting them keep 93 percent. We would be doing far more on spending than we would on revenue and loopholes combined. It is not balanced in the even-steven sense of the word, but at least it is generally fair. The Republican proposal that it should be all spending and zero loopholes is what is unbalanced and what I object to. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.