Elizabeth Warren

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I want to start by thanking Senator Heitkamp for pulling us in here today to talk about this emergency and Senator Murray for her strong voice on this and many others who will be speaking out today. In 2014 Ebola broke out in West Africa. As it advanced, the international community came together to combat the outbreak. Doctors from around the world traveled to West Africa to set up emergency hospital units to help the sick and to attempt to contain the virus. President Obama deployed thousands of troops to support the effort. With the media focused on the outbreak right in the middle of the 2014 election, Republican Senators and Republican candidates across the country seized on this global health crisis. No, they didn't swoop in to rescue; in fact, Republicans did nothing to support the actual Ebola response before the elections. Instead, they terrified the American people with totally made-up stories of Ebola-infected immigrants coming across our southern border. They loudly trumpeted a number of dangerous and irresponsible solutions, such as travel bans that would actually make dealing with the problem more difficult. Ebola ravaged West Africa, but only four cases were ever diagnosed here in the United States. Republican politicians didn't care--they had found something to blame on President Obama and the Democrats, and they were happy to do it. They exploited the situation to help win an election. And it worked. Not all of the fearmongering candidates won, but most of them did, and they won in part because they promised to protect the American people from these horrible contagious diseases. Today, Republicans run the Senate, and we face a terrible threat right here in America--the rapidly spreading Zika virus. So I come to the floor to ask a simple question: Why haven't Republicans lifted a single finger to stop it? Unlike Ebola, Zika is not confined to one small region of the world; it has already spread through most of South America and through Mexico. Unlike Ebola, which can be transmitted only by direct contact with bodily fluids, Zika can spread rapidly across distances by transmission through mosquitoes. Unlike Ebola, our leaders at the NIH and CDC are raising the alarm that Zika is an imminent threat to Americans. Nearly 900 cases of Zika have already been reported on American soil. Zika can be devastating. Most people who contract Zika show no symptoms or only very mild symptoms, but Zika infections can trigger Guillain-Barre syndrome, a condition in which the body attacks its own nervous system, which can cause permanent and severe damage, hospitalizing some people for weeks and killing others. In addition, babies born to mothers who were infected with Zika may suffer severe and permanent brain damage. The World Health Organization estimates that 4 million people could be infected with Zika by the end of the year. The threat is real, but where are the Republicans? For weeks Senate Democrats have called for emergency supplemental funding to support public health efforts both in research and prevention. Republicans have done nothing. For weeks the President has called for emergency supplemental funding to protect the American people. Republicans have done nothing. For weeks leaders at the WHO, NIH, and CDC have begged Congress for resources to fight this disease. Republicans have done nothing. The President has been forced to divert funds intended for work on Ebola over to work on Zika. That is a very short-term strategy. Ebola has dropped out of the news, but the threat has not ended. We need funding for work on both, but still the Republicans have done nothing. Now Senate Republicans are taking us on a week-long recess. Where is the Republican plan to fund the Zika response? Where is the Republican plan to replenish the Ebola funds? Apparently, when there is no immediate political benefit, the Republicans can't be bothered to act. Forget Ebola. Forget Zika. They want to go on vacation. Well, I have news for my Republican colleagues: That is not good enough. They won the election by telling Americans they would protect them from scenarios just like this. Republicans run the Senate now, so it is time to govern. There is a public health crisis bearing down on this country. Babies will be born permanently disabled, and families will be devastated if Republicans keep blocking funding to deal with this problem. It is up to you to act. This is what government is for--to help protect the people of the United States from serious threats, from real threats. The Republicans are failing the people of the United States. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, 8 years ago, we suffered through the worst financial crisis in generations. Millions of people lost their homes, their jobs, and their savings. Although the economy has improved under President Obama's leadership, many of those families are still struggling to recover today. Terrible subprime mortgages were at the heart of this crisis, but Wall Street invented other new financial devices, including exotic derivatives, that piled risks on top of risks in the financial market. The subprime mortgages were like hand grenades, but the derivatives packed them together and magnified the risks, turning them into giant bombs that blew up parts of the economy. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded that derivatives ``contributed significantly'' to the crisis, ``amplifying'' losses many times over and exposing institutions and investors throughout the system. Do you remember the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars that Congress shoveled into AIG as part of the bailout? That was to cover the massive losses from risky derivatives that went south. In response to the crisis and the bailout, Congress dedicated an entire title of the Dodd-Frank Act to the regulation of derivatives. Congress tried to make the derivatives market more transparent so that both investors and regulators could have at least a fighting chance to identify the risks and to address them. Congress also tried to reduce the risk to taxpayers by requiring banks to raise more capital as they increased their derivatives exposure and by forcing banks to push out that derivatives exposure from their depository banks--the parts that actually hold checking and savings accounts--and to put them into another entity that doesn't have access to taxpayer-backed insurance. Over the past few years, the Dodd-Frank approach to derivatives has started to unravel. At the end of 2014, the swaps pushout was repealed. How? Because lobbyists for Citibank literally wrote the amendment and had a friendly Congressman slip it into the end-of-the-year spending bill--a bill that had to pass or the government would shut down. With the help of other big banks, including personal phone calls from the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, to his personal friends in Congress, the swaps repeal got rammed through Congress. How big was the hole that this Wall Street amendment blew in Dodd- Frank? Well, Congressman Elijah Cummings and I spent a year looking into it, and here's the takeaway: The FDIC now estimates that the repeal allows a few big banks to put taxpayers on the hook for risky swaps to the tune of nearly $10 trillion. And who is gobbling down most of this $10 trillion risk? Three huge banks--Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America--three banks, nearly $10 trillion of risk. These banks will happily suck down the profits when their high-stakes bets work out, and they will just as happily turn to the taxpayers to bail them out if there is a problem--all this because the Wall Street lobbyists persuaded Congress to do just one little favor for them. Meanwhile, last year, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission finally issued a rule that it was required to write under Dodd-Frank. The rule was about margin, the amount of money that financial institutions have to put up when they enter into a derivative contract. Essentially, the CFTC rule was about making sure that financial institutions had enough money to pay off their derivative bets if they bet wrong. It is the kind of money that keeps the taxpayers from needing to bail them out. The CFTC rule was exceedingly weak, far weaker than the one they had initially proposed. The changes in the rule came after months of intense lobbying from giant banks that were worried that a stronger margin rule might cut into their profits. As CFTC Commissioner Sharon Bowen wrote in her dissent to the rule: This action today seems to be a return to blindly trusting in large financial institutions' ability and willpower to manage their risks adequately. Are we really willing to make that bet again? Well, I know that I am not, and that is why I think the recent Republican bill to weaken the CFTC is so dangerous. Rather than strengthening the agency and plugging the gaps in Dodd-Frank that have emerged in the last few years, the bill goes in the opposite direction, weakening or delaying other Dodd-Frank requirements and starving the agency of the resources it needs to oversee a $500 trillion derivatives market. I applaud Senator Stabenow, the ranking Democratic member on the Agriculture Committee, for leading the unanimous Democratic opposition to the bill in Committee. Democrats should not be supporting a bill that weakens financial rules, period. We need strong rules and strong Federal agencies to oversee our financial markets. We learned that lesson the hard way in 2008. While some lobbyists and their friends here in Washington may be trying to forget that lesson, I know that millions of American families remember it all too well, and they will be watching Congress to see who stands on their side and who stands on the side of the big banks. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield my time. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I wish to say a special thank-you to Senator Mikulski for her terrific leadership on all of this. Today is Equal Pay Day. By the sound of it, one would think it is some sort of historic holiday commemorating the anniversary of a landmark day that our country guaranteed equal pay for women, but that is not what it is about--not even close--because in the year 2016, at a time when we have self-driving cars and computers that fit on our wrists, women still make only 79 cents for every $1 a man makes, and we are still standing in the U.S. Congress debating whether a woman should get fired for asking what the guy down the hall makes for doing exactly the same job. So why do we recognize April 12 as Equal Pay Day? It took the average woman working from January 1 of last year until today to make as much as the average man made in 2015. That means she had to work an extra 3\1/2\ months in order to make what a man made last year, and that means, once again, she starts the year in a hole. Equal Pay Day isn't a national day of celebration. It is a national day of embarrassment. We hear a lot about how the economy is improving, and there is good news to point to. Unemployment is under 5 percent, GDP continues to rise, the stock market is up, but too many families across the country feel like the game is rigged against them. They work hard, they play by the rules, and they still struggle to make ends meet. Here is the thing: They are right. The game is rigged against working families, and pay discrimination is part of that. For women, it has been a one-two punch in the gut. For decades, wages have flattened out for American workers, and for women the wage gap just compounds that problem. If we closed both the productivity wage gap and the gender wage gap from 1979 to 2014, women's median hourly wages would be 70 percent higher today. Even though we have solid data, the Republicans in Washington refuse to act. Heck, they would rather spend their time trying to defund Planned Parenthood health clinics and cut women's access to birth control than do anything--anything at all--to give working women a raise. So, yes, the game is rigged when women earn less than men for doing the same work. It is rigged when women can be fired for asking how much the guy down the hall makes for doing the same job. It is rigged when women have to choose between healthy pregnancies and getting their paychecks. It is rigged when women can get fired just for requesting a regular work schedule to go back to school or get a second job. It is rigged when women earn less their whole lives so that their Social Security checks are smaller and their student loans are bigger. The game is rigged against women and families, and it has to stop. I am standing with my colleagues today. I am standing with women and friends of women all over the country to demand equal pay for equal work. It is 2016--not 1916--and it is long past time to eliminate gender discrimination in the workforce. This is about economics, but it is also about our values. It is about who we are as a people and what kind of country we are trying to build for both our sons and our daughters. Today, we recognize Equal Pay Day, and we fight today because we don't want to have to recognize it year after year after year in the future. I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Madam President, today the Senate will vote on the confirmation of Dr. John King to be the next Secretary of Education. While there is only 1 year left in the Obama Presidency, this is still one of the most important jobs in Washington because the Department of Education has a powerful set of tools available that it can use to stand up for people who are struggling with student loan debt and tools to help make a quality, affordable college education a reality for millions of Americans. Secretary of Education must be one of the most difficult jobs in Washington because for years there has been some kind of problem at the Department of Education that has made it practically impossible to get the Department to put the interests of students ahead of the interests of private contractors and for-profit colleges that are making the big money off our students. The Department has powerful tools to make sure that fraudulent colleges aren't sucking down billions of taxpayer dollars of student loans. But for the most part, these tools gather dust on the shelf while shady institutions like Corinthian Colleges spend years gobbling up taxpayer money while they defraud their own students. The Department has powerful tools to help students when they get ripped off by fraudulent colleges. But for years, it has been like pulling out your own teeth simply to get relief for the victims who got cheated by for-profit colleges like Corinthian. There are literally dozens of examples of how the Department of Education's trillion-dollar student loan bank has been putting profits for these companies and for-profit colleges ahead of the needs of students. One of the worst has been the bank's approach to overseeing the student loan servicing companies that are paid by the government to collect student loan payments. Consider the case of Navient, a student loan servicer that got caught redhanded ripping off tens of thousands of active duty members of the military. Two years ago, the Department of Justice and the FDIC fined the company $100 million for breaking the law and overcharging our active duty military on their student loans. But the Department of Education didn't take any action against Navient. Instead of following the lead of the Justice Department and using the Justice Department's evidence--no, the Department of Education announced its own separate review of whether soldiers were harmed. A year later, they released their results, and notwithstanding the fact that Navient was already sending checks to thousands of servicemembers under the DOJ and FDIC agreement, the Department of Education student loan bank concluded that everything was just fine, and the Department's bank had no need to impose any additional fines or restrictions on Navient. In fact, things were so fine that the Department's bank rewarded Navient by renewing a $100 million contract. If that sounds stinky to you, it should. The Department's inspector general took a close look at what was going on over at the Department's bank, and 2 weeks ago they released a scathing report on the bank's whitewash. The IG slammed the Department for a report that was a complete and utter mess, loaded with errors, calling for ``inconsistent and inadequate actions.'' The IG concluded that the Department of Education's happy-face press release announcing that everything was fine with the servicer was ``unsupported and inaccurate.'' When a private company breaks the law and steals from American soldiers who are literally in the field fighting overseas, those companies should be held accountable. The Justice Department held Navient accountable. The FDIC held Navient accountable. But the Department of Education's bank decided it was more important to protect Navient than to watch out for our military students. Let's not mince words. The Navient fiasco is outrageous, but it is not surprising. At a Senate hearing 2 years ago, I asked James Runcie, who runs the Department of Education's student loan bank, how he could turn around and renew the contract of a company like Navient that had just copped to ripping off American soldiers. His answer, essentially, was that moving borrowers away from Navient would simply be too disruptive. Senator Harkin said at the time that sounded an awful lot like too big to fail. And Senator Harkin was right. So long as that theory remains the operating principle of the Department of Education, the American people can forget about the law because there will be no real limits on how much money big private companies and large fraudulent schools can steal from students and taxpayers. Dr. King didn't create any of these problems. These problems have grown and festered over a long time, and they won't be easy to solve. For several weeks now Dr. King and I have talked about these issues, and I believe he understands the magnitude of the task he faces. He has committed in no uncertain terms to a top-down review of the way the student loan program is administered and the way the Department oversees financial institutions. He has announced that he will force all of the major student loan servicers to review their records and make refunds to all members of the military who were illegally ripped off. And he has embraced strong, new proposals to protect borrowers who are taken in by fraudulent colleges so they can get their money back. These are serious steps in the right direction. For those reasons, I will vote for him today, but let's be clear that this is not the end of the story. Dr. King has an enormous amount of work to do to get the Department's higher education house in order, and the American people will be watching closely for results. One of the first things that must be done is a total reform of student loan servicing to make sure nothing like the Navient disaster ever, ever happens again. Here are five simple principles that should guide that reform: First, put students and families first--every time, every decision. The Department exists to serve students, not student loan companies. It is time they acted like it. Second, punish bad actors. Navient broke the law and cheated soldiers, but the Department bent over backward to protect them. Right now Navient owes the Federal Government $22 million it stole in another scam, and the Department hasn't even bothered to collect it. The Department needs to show it is willing and able to punish companies that break the rules, and that includes kicking them out of the student loan program if necessary. Third, change the financial incentives for servicers. Two years ago, the Department renegotiated the servicer contracts and basically ended up paying the companies more money for the same bad outcomes. No more. Our country pours millions of tax dollars into these companies, and it is time to leverage those dollars to make sure the companies are working for students. Fourth, release more data. The Department of Education adamantly refuses to share basic data about the student loan program with anyone, even other folks within the Department of Education. That means nobody--nobody--can even see how this bank is being run. It is time for some sunshine. Fifth, take responsibility for aggressive oversight of student loan servicers. The Department needs to act before this problem metastasizes, and when the Department doesn't have the tools to act, it needs to get out of the way and let the CFPB or other Federal agencies do their jobs. Five simple principles. Everyone in government who is serious about standing up for the tens of millions of student loan borrowers in this country should embrace them because we shouldn't be running the student loan program to create profits for private companies. We should run it for students. We are facing a crisis in higher education. Student debt is exploding, crushing our young people and threatening the economy. Opportunity is slipping away from millions of Americans. The time for reform is now--not in the next Presidency, not 5 years from now but now. Reform starts with the Department of Education, and if he is confirmed today, it is my strong hope that Dr. King will make fixing these problems a top priority from his first day on the job to his last day on the job. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. WARREN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, there is a vacancy on the most important Court in America, and the message from Senate Republicans is crystal clear: Forget the Constitution. It doesn't matter who President Obama nominates because the Republicans will allow no votes on that nominee. They will hold no hearings on that nominee. Their response to one of the most solemn and consequential tasks that our government performs--the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice--will be to pretend that that nominee and President Obama himself simply do not exist--cannot see them, cannot hear them. At the same time they are blocking all possible Supreme Court nominees, Senate Republicans are in a panic because their party seems to be on the verge of nominating one of two extremists for President-- two candidates who think nothing of attacking the legitimacy of their political opponents and demeaning millions of Americans, two candidates whose extremism, Republicans worry, will lead their party to defeat in November. These are not separate issues. They are the same issue. If Republican Senators want to stand up to extremists running for President, they can start right now by standing up to extremists in the Senate. They can start by doing what they were elected to do right here in the Senate. They can start by doing their jobs. The refusal of the Republican Senators to execute the most basic constitutional duties of their office is shocking, but it is not new. Article II, section 2 of the Constitution says that the President of the United States ``shall nominate'' judges, executive officials, and Justices to the Supreme Court with the ``Advice and Consent of the Senate.'' There is no secret clause that says ``except when that President is a Democrat,'' but for 7 years that is how Republicans in the Senate have acted. Since the first day of the Obama Presidency, Republican Senators have bowed to extremists who have rejected the Obama Presidency and abused the rules of the Senate in an all-out effort to cripple his administration and to paralyze the Federal courts. The Constitution directs Senators to provide advice and consent on the President's nominee, and every Senator swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. If Senators object to a nominee's qualifications, they can vote no and they can explain themselves to the American people. President Obama and I are members of the same political party, but I haven't agreed with every single nomination he has made, and I haven't been shy about it. That is how advice and consent works. Learn about the nominee and then use your best good-faith judgment about their qualifications, but Republican extremists aren't voting against individuals based on a good-faith judgment about a specific person. No. They are blocking votes wholesale in order to keep those jobs vacant and undermine the government itself. For years Republicans have executed a strategy to delay votes on confirming government officials across the board. In 2013, only 1 year into President Obama's second term, Republican leaders flatly rejected his authority to confirm any judges to fill any of the three open seats on the second highest court in the country, and Democrats had to change the filibuster rules in order to move those nominees forward. Once Republicans took over the Senate in 2015, judicial confirmations nearly ground to a halt. It is not just judges. For months after the President won reelection, Republicans held up his nominees to run the Department of Labor and Environmental Protection Agency, largely on the suspicion that those highly qualified individuals might actually help those agencies do their work. For years Republicans held up nominees to the National Labor Relations Board--even Republican nominees--in order to cripple the ability of that 80-year-old agency to resolve disputes between workers and their bosses. For years Republicans held up the President's choice to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, refusing to confirm anyone unless the President would agree to gut the agency. Republicans regularly hold up the confirmation of dozens of Ambassadors, undermining our national security and our relationships with other nations. Last year Republicans blocked confirmation of the Attorney General, the highest law enforcement official in this country--blocked her for 166 days--longer than it took the Senate to consider the prior seven Attorneys General combined. For more than a year the Republican chairman of the Banking Committee hasn't held a single vote on any of the 16 Presidential nominees sitting on his desk, not even nominees who are critical to maintaining the financial stability of this country or the ones who are responsible for choking off the flow of money to ISIS. The message couldn't be clearer. No matter how much it damages the Nation, no matter how much it undermines the courts, no matter whether it cripples the government or lays waste to our Constitution, Senate Republicans do pretty much everything they can to avoid acknowledging the legitimacy of our democratically elected President. For too long the Republicans in the Senate have wanted to have it both ways. They want to feed the ugly lies and nullify the Obama Presidency while also claiming they can govern responsibly. Well, that game is over. Candidates motivated by bigotry and resentment, candidates unable to govern, candidates reflecting the same extremism that has been nursed along for 7 years right here in the U.S. Senate are on the verge of winning the Republican Party's nomination for President. Now Republican Senators must make a decision because here is the deal: Extremists may not like it, but Barack Obama won the Presidency in 2008 by 9 million votes. He won reelection in 2012 by 5 million votes. There were no recounts and no hanging chads, no stuffing the ballot box or tampering with voting machines, no intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court. No. President Obama was elected the legitimate President 7 years ago, and he is the legitimate President right now. So if it is true that some Republican Senators are finally ready to stand up to the extremism that denies the legitimacy of this President and of the Constitution, I say to you: Do your job. Vote for a Supreme Court nominee. Do your job. Vote on district court judges and circuit court judges. Do your job. Vote on Ambassadors. Do your job. Vote on agency leaders and counterterrorism officials. If you want to stop extremism in your party, you can start by showing the American people that you respect the President of the United States and the Constitution enough to do your job right here in the U.S. Senate. Thank you, Mr. President. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, across the street at the Supreme Court, four simple words are engraved on the face of the building: ``Equal Justice Under Law.'' That is supposed to be the basic premise of our legal system: that our laws are just and that everyone--no matter how rich, how powerful or how well connected--will be held equally accountable if they break those laws. But that is not the America we live in. It is not equal justice when a kid gets thrown in jail for stealing a car while a CEO gets a huge raise when his company steals billions. It is not equal justice when someone hooked on opioids gets locked up for buying pills on the street, but banking executives get off scot-free for laundering nearly a $1 billion of drug cartel money. We have one set of law on the books, but there are really two legal systems. One legal system is for big corporations, for the wealthy and the powerful. In this legal system, government officials fret about unintended consequences if they are too tough. In this legal system, instead of demanding actual punishment for breaking the law, the government regularly accepts token fines and phony promises to do better next time. In this legal system, even after huge companies plead guilty to felonies, law enforcement officials are so timid that they don't even bring charges against individuals who work there. That is one system. The second system is for everyone else. In this second system, whoever breaks the law can be held accountable. Government enforcement isn't timid here. It is aggressive, and consequences be damned. Just ask the families of Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Michael Brown about how aggressive they are. In this legal system, the government locks up people for decades, ruining lives over minor drug crimes because that is what the law demands. Yes, there are two legal systems--one for the rich and powerful and one for everyone else. Last Friday I released a report about the special legal system for big corporations and their executives. The report is called ``Rigged Justice,'' and it lists 20 examples from last year alone in which the government caught big companies breaking the law--defrauding taxpayers, covering up deadly safety problems, stealing billions from consumers and clients--and then just let them off easy. In most cases the government imposed fines and didn't require any admission of guilt. In the 20 cases I examined, just 1 executive went to jail for a measly 3 months, and that case involved 29 deaths. Most fines were only a tiny fraction of the company's annual profits, and some were structured so that the companies could just write them off as a tax deduction. It is all part of a rigged game in Washington. Big businesses and powerful donors, with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers, write the rules to protect themselves. And when they don't follow the rules, they work the system to avoid any real responsibility. How can it be that corporate offenders are repeatedly left off the hook when the vast majority of Americans--Republicans, Democrats, and Independents--want tougher punishment and stronger new laws for corporate crimes? Well, that is how a rigged system works. Giant companies win no matter what the American people want. Currently, we can see the rigged game in action. Republican politicians love to say they are tough on crime. They love to talk about personal responsibility and accountability when they are back home in their districts. But when they come to Washington, they are pushing to make it even easier for corporate criminals to escape justice. This is one example. It starts, actually, with a great idea: reforming the criminal justice sentencing system to help some of the thousands of people who have been locked away for years for low-level offenses. Legislators in both parties have been working for years to slowly build bipartisan momentum for sentencing the reform. This is enormously important--a first step away from a broken system where half of our Federal jails are filled with nonviolent drug offenders. But now, all of a sudden, some Republicans are threatening to block reform unless Congress includes a so-called mens rea amendment to make it much harder for the government to prosecute hundreds of corporate crimes-- crimes for everything from wire fraud to mislabeling prescription drugs. In other words, for these Republicans, the price of helping people unjustly locked up in jail for years will be to make it even harder to lock up a white collar criminal for even a single day. That is shameful--shameful. It is shameful because we are already way too easy on corporate lawbreakers. And that is not all. Tomorrow the House will be voting on another Republican bill. This one would make it much harder to investigate and prosecute bank fraud. Yes, you heard that right. Tomorrow the House will be voting on a Republican bill to make it much harder to investigate and prosecute bank fraud. When the bankers triggered the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s, more than 1,000 of them were convicted of crimes and many got serious jail time. Boy, bankers learned their lesson. Now the lesson was not ``Don't break the law.'' The lesson they learned was ``Get Washington on your side.'' And it worked. After systemic fraud on Wall Street helped spark a financial crisis in 2008 that cost millions of Americans their jobs and their homes, Federal prosecutors didn't put a single Wall Street executive in jail. Spineless regulators extracted a few fines and then just moved on. But I guess even those fines were just too much for the big banks and their fancy executives. So now they have gotten their buddies in Congress to line up behind a bill that would gut one of their main laws, called FIRREA, which the Justice Department used to impose those fines. It has been 7 years since the financial crisis. A lot of people in Washington may want to forget, but the American people have long memories. They remember how corporate fraud caused millions of families to lose their homes, their jobs, and their pensions. They also remember who made out like bandits, and they didn't send us here to help out the bandits. The American people expect better from us. They expect us to straighten out our criminal justice system and reform drug enforcement practices that do nothing but destroy lives and communities. They expect us to stand against unjustified violence. But they also expect us to protect the financial system and to hold Wall Street executives accountable when they break the law. They expect us to hold big companies accountable when they steal billions of dollars from taxpayers, when they rip off students, veterans, retirees or single moms; or when they cover up health or safety problems, and people get sick, people get hurt or people die because of it. The American people know that we have two legal systems, but they expect us to fix it. They expect us to stand for justice. They expect us to once again honor the simple notion that, in America, nobody is above the law. And anyone in Congress who thinks they can simply talk tough on crime and then vote to make it harder to crack down on corporate criminals, hear this: I promise you--I promise you, the American people are watching, and they will remember. I yield the floor.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, on Thursday, 12 countries will sign a massive trade agreement to change the rules for 40 percent of the world's economy, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership will not go into effect unless Congress approves it. I urge my colleagues to reject the TPP and stop an agreement that will tilt the playing field even more in favor of big multinational corporations and against working families. Much of the debate over this trade agreement has been described as a fight over America's role in setting the rules of international trade, but this is a deliberate diversion. In fact, the United States has free-trade agreements with half of the TPP countries. Most of the TPP's 30 chapters don't even deal with traditional trade issues. No. Most of TPP is about letting multinational corporations rig the rules on everything from patent protection to food safety standards all to benefit themselves. The first clue about whom the TPP helps is who wrote it. Twenty-eight trained advisory committees were formed to whisper in the ear of our trade negotiators to urge them to move this way or that way during negotiations. Who are the special privileged whisperers? Well, 85 percent are corporate executives or industry lobbyists. Many of the committees--including those on chemicals and pharmaceuticals, aerospace equipment, textiles and clothing, and financial services--are 100 percent industry representatives. In 15 advisory committees, no one--no one--was in the room who represented American workers or American consumers. There was no one in the room who worried about the enforcement of environmental issues or protection against human rights abuses. Nope. Day after day, meeting after meeting, our official negotiators listened to the whispers of the giant industries and heard little from anyone else. The second clue about what is going on is that it all happened behind closed doors. The U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman, says that the United States has been working to negotiate this trade deal for over 5\1/2\ years, but the text of the agreement was hidden from public view until just 3 months ago, and when I say hidden, I mean hidden. The drafts were kept under lock and key so that even Members of the Senate had to go to a secure location to see them, and then we weren't allowed to say anything to anyone about what we had actually seen. A rigged process produces a rigged outcome. When the people whispering in the ears of our negotiators are mostly top executives and lobbyists for big corporation--and when the public is shut out of the negotiating process--the final deal tilts in favor of corporate interests. Evidence of this tilt can be seen in a key TPP provision, investor- state dispute settlement, ISDS. With ISDS, big companies get the right to challenge laws they don't like, not in courts but in front of industry-friendly arbitration panels that sit outside any court system. Those panels can force taxpayers to write huge checks to big corporations with no appeals. Workers, environmentalists, and human rights advocates don't get the special right, only corporations do. Most Americans don't think of keeping dangerous pesticides out of our food or keeping our drinking water clean as trade issues, but all over the globe companies have used ISDS to demand compensation for laws they don't like. Just last year a mining company won an ISDS case when Canada denied the company permits to blast off the coast of Nova Scotia. Today, Canadian taxpayers are on the hook for up to $300 million all because their government tried to protect its environment and tried to protect the livelihood of local fishermen. ISDS hasn't been a problem just for other countries. We have seen the dangers of ISDS right here at home. Last year, the U.S. State Department concluded, and President Obama agreed, that the Keystone XL Pipeline would not serve the national interests of the United States. It was a long fight, but the administration, applying American law, decided that the pipeline was a threat to our air, to our water, and to our climate and denied the permit, but the oil company that wants to build this pipeline doesn't think the buck stops with our President. Now this foreign oil company is using the ISDS provision in NAFTA to demand more than $15 billion in damages from the United States just because we turned down the Keystone Pipeline. The Nation's top experts in law and economics have warned us about the dangers of ISDS. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, and others recently noted that if ISDS panels force countries to pay high enough fines, the countries will voluntarily drop the health, safety, labor, and environmental laws that big corporations don't like. That is exactly what Germany did in 2011 when they cut back on environmental regulations after an ISDS lawsuit. Everyone understands the risks associated with ISDS. In fact, the issue got so hot over tobacco companies using ISDS to roll back health standards around, the world that the TPP negotiators decided to limit the use of ISDS to challenge tobacco laws. That is a pretty bold admission that ISDS can be used to weaken public health laws. I am glad tobacco laws are protected from ISDS, but what about food safety laws or drug safety laws or any other regulation that is designed to protect our citizens? Under TPP every other company, regardless of the health or safety impact, will be able to use ISDS. Congress will have to vote straight up or down on TPP. We will not have a chance to strip out any of the worst provisions like ISDS. That is why I oppose the TPP, and I hope Congress will use its constitutional authority to stop this deal before it makes things even worse and more dangerous for America's hardest working families. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. WARREN

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

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, Senate Democrats announced our commitment to end the crushing burden of student loan debt. Our campaign is called ``In the Red'' because we agree with what President Obama said during his final State of the Union: ``No hard-working student should be stuck in the red.'' My special guest at President Obama's final State of the Union address highlighted exactly this point. Alexis Ploss is a student at UMass Lowell. She is a first-generation college student working on a degree in math. She wants to get a master's degree so she can become a public school teacher, but she has already taken on over $50,000 in student loan debt. Think about that, smart, hard-working students who want to build a future for themselves and who want to teach the next generation of kids are weighing the benefits of more education against the fear of an unmanageable debt load. I don't think Alexis will quit, but I want my Republican colleagues to explain to me how America is any better off if a young woman doesn't get a master's degree and become a first-rate math teacher. How is this country any better off if young people get scared by debt, quit school, and take a job that requires less education? What Alexis and hundreds of thousands of other people like her end up doing will be affected by decisions we make right in this room. If Congress does nothing, then Alexis and hundreds of thousands of other students just get squeezed harder. The debts get bigger, they grow faster, and the decision to give up is just a little closer. Seventy percent of students now need to borrow money in order to make it through school. Democrats are here to say: Enough is enough, and that is what this ``In the Red'' campaign is all about. The Democratic plan has two basic parts: debt-free college and refinancing student loans. There are a lot of ways to get to debt-free college. We can give students the opportunity to graduate from community college without student debt by making it completely tuition free. We can increase Pell grants. We can hold colleges accountable for keeping costs low and providing a high-quality education that will help students get ahead. We can also cut the outstanding debt. Some student loans are charging 6 percent, 8 percent, 10 percent, and even higher interest rates. We could cut those interest rates right now. Democrats are ready to go, but the Republicans are blocking us every step of the way. Instead of lowering the cost of student loans, they support the status quo, where the U.S. Government turns young people who are trying to get an education into profit centers to bring in more revenue for the Federal Government. In fact, Congress has set interest rates so high on loans that just one slice of those loans--those issued from 2007 to 2012--are now on target to make $66 billion in profits for the U.S. Government. This is obscene. The Federal Government should be helping students get an education, not making a profit off their backs. The main response from Republicans in Congress has been to claim that refinancing wouldn't save students that much money. Really? There are more than 40 million people currently dealing with student loan debt. When their interest rates are cut, many will save hundreds of dollars a year and some will save thousands of dollars a year. That is money that can help someone out of a hole or money to save for a downpayment on a home or money to pay off those student loans faster--but Republicans say that money is trivial? What comes next? Do Republicans say let them eat cake? Where are all those Republicans who think Washington takes too much of our money? These artificially high interest rates are a tax we impose on students to fund government, a tax that keeps hard-working young people from buying homes, from starting businesses or for from saving for retirement. The Republicans may not want to tax billionaires or Fortune 500 corporations, but evidently they don't mind squeezing students who have to borrow money to pay for college. For 2 years now, Democrats have tried to get a bill through Congress to lower the interest rate on student loans, and for 2 years the Republicans have blocked this bill. As the Republicans have said no, hardworking people who are just trying to build a life have paid and paid and paid. So I am here to ask the Republicans: What is your idea? What is your plan for how to deal with existing student loan debt? Democrats have put a proposal on the table to make college affordable, but I don't hear anything from the Republicans except ``no, no, no.'' Well, it is time for change--debt-free college and lower interest rates on student loans. That is what Senate Democrats are fighting for, and together that is what we are going to win. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. WARREN

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

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, 30 years ago today millions of Americans gathered around their television sets in homes and classrooms all across the country to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger launch toward the stars. Seventy-three seconds later everything changed. We stared at our television sets, stunned and brokenhearted. Today, on the 30th anniversary of that terrible tragedy, we remember the heros we lost: Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis; and we remember one more hero, the special person that so many little boys and girls tuned in that day to see, the very first U.S. civilian in space, Christa Corrigan McAuliffe. Christa was born in Boston, MA, and grew up in nearby Framingham. She attended Marian High School and attended Framingham State University. She married her high school sweetheart, Steve. They had two children, Scott and Caroline. She eventually became a high school social studies teacher in Concord, NH. In 1984, Ronald Reagan announced that NASA would send its first private citizen into space, and that person would be a teacher. A few months later, Christa beat out over 11,000 other applicants to become the first teacher in space. Christa was thrilled. It was like a dream come true. She reportedly told Johnny Carson: ``If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.'' Mr. President, 30 years ago today Senator Ted Kennedy entered an excerpt of Christa McAuliffe's NASA application into the public record, and I would like to reenter it for the Record and read it again today. When asked why she wanted to be the first private citizen in space, Christa McAuliffe wrote: I remember the excitement in my home when the first satellites were launched. My parents were amazed and I was caught up in their wonder. In school my classes would gather around the TV and try to follow the rocket as it seemed to jump all over the screen. I remember when Alan Shepard made his historic flight--not even an orbit--and I was thrilled. John Kennedy inspired me with his words about placing a man on the moon and I still remember a cloudy, rainy night driving through Pennsylvania and hearing the news that the astronauts had landed safely. As a woman, I have been envious of those men who could participate in the space program and who were encouraged to excel in areas of math and science. I felt that women had indeed been left outside of one of the most exciting careers available. When Sally Ride and other women began to train as astronauts, I could look among my students and see ahead of them an ever-increasing list of opportunities. I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies. I watched the space age being born and I would like to participate. Mr. President, Christa McAuliffe never made it into orbit on January 28, 1986. She never got the chance to write in her journal about what it was like inside the space shuttle, how it feels to float around, and all the other sorts of things that people who are not astronauts have wondered about. She never got to go back to her classroom to tell her children about her magnificent journey. But Christa McAuliffe still teaches. Since 1994, the Christa McAuliffe Center at Framingham State University has provided truly remarkable, innovative, integrated STEM education resources to 12,000 Massachusetts students each year. Christa McAuliffe's story of a little girl from Framingham who became a schoolteacher and got the chance to take the ``ultimate field trip'' into outer space keeps inspiring little boys and girls in Massachusetts and around the country, telling them all to reach for the stars. Today, we remember Christa McAuliffe and the six others we lost on the Space Shuttle Challenger. We remember that day as our country stared at our television sets, stunned and brokenhearted. We honor their memory by continuing, as Christa McAuliffe said, ``to touch the future,'' to teach our children and our grandchildren ``where we have been, where we are going, [and] why.'' Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Madam President, we have a problem--money. Six years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court made the problem worse, a lot worse. Thanks to the Supreme Court, our system of elections is riddled with corruption. Money floods our political system--money that lets a handful of billionaires shape who gets into Congress and may decide who sits in the White House. As Congress has become more beholden to billionaires and less worried about the American people, look at what has happened in Washington. Armies of lawyers and lobbyists flood the hallways of Congress and regulatory agencies, urging just a little tilt for every law and every rule--a sentence here, an exception there, and always tilted in favor of the rich and powerful. Corporate executives and government officials spin through the revolving door, making sure the interests of powerful corporations are always carefully protected. Powerful Wall Street businesses pay barely disguised bribes, offering millions of dollars to trusted employees to go to Washington for a few years to make policies that will benefit exactly those same Wall Street businesses. Corporations and trade groups fund study after study that just so happen to support the special rule or the exception that the industry is looking for. Washington works great for a handful of wealthy individuals and powerful corporations that manipulate the system to benefit themselves. It works great for the lobbyists and the lawyers who slither around Washington day in and day out, handsomely paid to troll for special deals for those who pay them. But for everyone else, Washington is not working so well, and if we don't change that, this rigged political game will break our country. Change is needed in many areas, but we can start with how we fund elections. In 2012, about 3.7 million Americans gave modest donations-- under $200--to President Obama and Mitt Romney. Those donations added up to $313 million. In the same election, 32 people gave monster donations to super PACs. Thirty-two people spent slightly more on the 2012 elections than the 3.7 million people who sent modest dollar donations to their preferred Presidential candidates. When 32 people can outspend 3.7 million citizens, it is pretty obvious that democracy is in real danger. We are headed into another Presidential election, and I speak out today because I am genuinely alarmed for our democracy. I am genuinely alarmed because 6 years ago today the U.S. Supreme Court said that the privileged few are entitled under the Constitution to spend billions of dollars to swing elections and buy off legislators. Six years ago today the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a century of established law and in doing so unleashed a flood of secret corporate money into our political system. The Supreme Court created a big problem, but that does not mean that anyone with any integrity must just roll over and play dead. No, it is time to fight back. Sure, the Supreme Court has a lot of power, and, yes, they have used it to do a huge amount of damage. But even under the Supreme Court ruling there is room to fight back against the complete capture of our government by the rich and powerful. Let's start right here with three examples of what this Congress could do right now today--what this Congress could do if we had the political courage to stand up to the superwealthy few and a handful of corporations. No. 1, pass Senator Durbin's Fair Elections Now Act. This legislation would create public funding for congressional elections. Imagine the contributions of small donors so working families would have a louder voice and could begin to compete with the rich and powerful. This is a bipartisan solution--well, at least bipartisan outside Washington. According to a recent poll, Democrats and Republicans both agreed strongly with the idea of citizen-funded elections; 72 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans said yes. No. 2, pass the DISCLOSE Act, Senator Whitehouse's bill to force super PACs out of the shadows and make them tell where the money comes from. According to that same poll, 91 percent of Democrats and 91 percent of Republicans agree that super PACs and other special interests should have to disclose the source of their funding. No. 3, pass the Shareholder Protection Act, Senator Menendez's bill to force companies to tell their shareholders how much money they are giving to politicians and which politicians they are giving it to. This is the shareholders' money, and they have a right to know how it is spent. If they don't like how the money is being spent, they can put somebody else in charge. Those are three things Congress could do right now, but there is even more. No. 4, the President could finalize an Executive order requiring government contractors to disclose their political spending. Why should companies that do business with the government be allowed to give money in secret to benefit elected officials? Seventy-eight percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans want to see this done. No. 5, the SEC has the authority right now to begin to put together rules that would require opinion corporations to disclose the money they spent in elections. Despite Republican efforts to try to block this rule through a rider in the recent government funding bill, legal experts agree that the agency still has all the authority it needs to prepare a disclosure rule. The public demands action. The SEC has received more than a million comments from the people across this country urging the agency to issue this rule--88 percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Republicans. That is right, 88 percent of both sides support public disclosure of political spending. Three former SEC Commissioners, one Republican, two Democrats, wrote a public letter to Chair Mary Jo White urging her to adopt this rule. It is time for the agency to stop making excuses and start doing its job. No. 6, the FEC has the authority right now to require ads run by super PACs include disclosure of the main people or corporations that paid for them. If they want to run the country, then the billionaires shouldn't be allowed to hide in the shadows. Make them step out in the open where the American people can see who is calling the shots. There is one more step we can take, a full-blown constitutional amendment, such as the one pushed forward by my colleague Senator Udall to restore authority to Congress and to the States. I have to say, I am reluctant to take on a constitutional amendment, but we need to defend our great democracy against those who would see it perverted into one more rigged game where the rich and the powerful always win, and that means taking every step possible, including amending the Constitution. These are six ideas that would help bring an end to a corrupt political system; six ideas that Congress, the administration, the SEC, and the FCC could put together right now. A seventh idea is a constitutional amendment that we could begin working on today. This Congress doesn't lack for workable ideas for how to root out the influence of money in politics. This Congress just lacks a spine to do it. Six years ago the U.S. Supreme Court turned loose a flood of hidden money that is about to drown our democracy. We can blame the Supreme Court--heck, we should blame the Supreme Court, but that is no excuse for doing nothing. A new Presidential election is upon us. The first votes will be cast in Iowa in just 11 days. Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club. All of us were sent here to do our best to make government work--to make it work not just for those at the top but to make government work for all people, and it is time we start acting like it. Madam President, I yield back the remainder of my time.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I rise in support of the Every Student Succeeds Act--the bill to reauthorization the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We have only one goal in mind: to give all our children the best possible education. The challenge has been to figure out the right role for the Federal Government to do that. This bill, which will replace No Child Left Behind, moves away from rigid standardized tests and respects the vital work our teachers do every day. I strongly support those changes. However, I voted against this bill when it was first approved by the Senate a few months ago because I felt it lacked even the minimum safeguards necessary to ensure that States would use Federal funds effectively to support teachers and students. I was deeply concerned that without stronger accountability, billions of dollars in taxpayer money would not actually reach those schools and those students who needed them the most. Unlike the bill initially approved by the Senate, the proposal before us has significantly enhanced those safeguards. I argued that it was essential that billions of dollars a year of Federal funding must be accompanied by some minimum expectations for what States are going to do with that money. One of those expectations must be that States target their efforts toward schools that are most in need of improvement and resources. That is why I am glad this final bill includes an amendment I offered with Senator Cory Booker to ensure that States address the 1,200 high schools in the United States, where fewer than two-thirds of students graduate every year. When one-third of a high school's students don't graduate, we know we have a crisis on our hands. We can't just turn our backs. This provision will ensure that States can't ignore those kids, and it will ensure additional Federal resources for those schools that clearly need it the most. This commonsense accountability provision had deep support across the board. It was supported by the Obama administration, the civil rights community, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the NEA. It wasn't in the bill I voted against a few months ago, but I am glad to see it in the final bill before us today because helping schools with chronic dropout rates cannot be optional. This bill also ensures that States cannot ignore any group of students who are consistently falling behind their peers. Let's face it. Historically, States haven't always stood up for their most vulnerable kids, and this bill makes certain that those kids will not be ignored again. That is why we have a Federal education law in the first place: to ensure that when the Federal Government gives States money to buy a good education for kids, that States have to use that money to support all of our kids--especially kids who need those resources the most. Senator Murphy and I offered amendments to achieve this goal when the bill came before the Senate. They weren't included back then, but I am glad to see that the final bill ensures that if States want Federal dollars, they cannot turn their backs on vulnerable students. This has been a very challenging process, but Senator Murray and Senator Alexander kept the door open for improvement, and I am grateful for that. Many allies stood together to ensure that Federal dollars would actually be used to improve both schools and educational opportunities for children living in poverty, children of color, children with disabilities, and other groups of kids who have been underserved, mistreated or systematically denied even the most basic opportunities to get a good education. One final note. States and communities cannot address persistent achievement gaps if they don't have good data. With this bill, parents, researchers, and educators across the country will, for the first time, be able to analyze the performance of African-American boys or Hispanic girls or low-income children with disabilities. The ability to analyze the interaction of race and gender or disabilities and income will help us better understand how our schools are serving students and identify student groups who need more help. I am very grateful to my cosponsor, Senator Cory Gardner, the Presiding Officer this afternoon, in helping make sure this final bill includes this bipartisan data transparency amendment that we offered to achieve this goal. When President Johnson first signed ESEA back in 1965, it was a landmark civil rights law. At the time, he said: I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty--the only valid passport. . . . I believe deeply no law I have signed or will ever sign means more to the future of America. Today, the majority of our children in public school live in poverty--the majority. Think about that. This law is more important today than it has ever been. I am voting for this bill because I believe we have been successful in ensuring that it contains a minimum set of safeguards to protect our most vulnerable kids. I still have real concerns about what States will do with the new flexibility it provides, and many of us here will be watching closely to see if the States deliver for our kids. I am committed to keep fighting for our Nation's public schools, and that includes fighting for more Federal investment. I hope this legislation truly lives up to the promises made half a century ago to support public education fully and fairly enough to create real opportunities for all of our children. If the changes in this law don't move us closer to providing a world- class education for every single one of our children, then we will be right back here to fix it. We owe it to our students, we owe it to our teachers, we owe it to our history, and we owe it to our future to get this right. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, Senator Boxer deserves tremendous credit for negotiating a long-term funding bill for our crumbling roads and bridges. The Fixing America's Surface Transportation, FAST, Act is an important turning point in addressing our Nation's infrastructure needs, and the bill will create quality jobs and stimulate economic growth. The FAST Act ends years of short-term congressional extensions and legislative gridlock that prevented our country from making critical investments in our roads, bridges, and mass transit. The bill reauthorizes Amtrak and provides vital funding for positive train control technology and hazmat training programs. This 5-year reauthorization will allow our States and communities to finally plan for the future and address long-overdue maintenance backlogs. Additionally, the FAST Act takes important steps towards addressing the growing problem of violence against our transit operators. These hard- working men and women deserve a safe working environment, and I will continue to work with my colleagues to make sure we do everything we can to achieve that. However, I must oppose the bill because Republicans have used this strong bill as a vehicle to roll back rules that protect consumers and our financial system. This is the third time in the last year that Republicans have used this hostage-taking approach. Last December, Republicans used the government funding bill as a vehicle for a provision written by Citigroup lobbyists that would repeal a critical anti-bailout rule in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Weeks later, Republicans used a broadly popular, bipartisan bill extending the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act to jam through another provision that weakened Dodd-Frank's rules on risky derivatives trading. And now, in the FAST Act, Republicans have handed out more than a dozen goodies to financial institutions, including a requirement that does little but bog down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with needless paperwork and administrative tasks. If Democrats continue to support bills that include these kinds of rollbacks, it will simply encourage Republicans to use other must-pass bills to repeal or weaken even larger portions of Dodd-Frank and our other financial rules. That is why I must oppose this bill--and why I hope the American people weigh in with their representatives against this kind of cynical hostage-taking.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, a few months ago I asked my Republican colleagues if they had fallen down, hit their heads, and thought they woke up in the 1950s. Today I am back to check on my Republican colleagues because it appears they are suffering from a serious case of memory loss. Before I call the doctors at Mass General, I have to say this really isn't a joke. I truly, honestly cannot come up with a better reason why my Republican colleagues have forced us back to the Senate floor once again to talk about another reckless scheme to defund Planned Parenthood. What is with you guys? Remember this summer? Republicans launched a deliberate, orchestrated plan to defund women's health care centers. Let me just clarify. This was not a plan to defund abortions because for nearly 40 years the Federal Government has prohibited Federal funding for abortion. Nope. The plan was to defund Planned Parenthood health care centers that nearly 2.7 million people use every year, health care centers that one in five women across America has used for cancer screenings, pregnancy and STD tests, birth control, and other basic medical care. To a lot of women and to a lot of men, the effort to defund Planned Parenthood health care centers was an overt attack on women's access to needed and legal health care. When the Republicans forced the Senate to vote on a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, it failed--and rightly so. That should have been the end of it, but Republican extremists just won't quit. In fact, they are doubling down. Today Senate Republicans will use a special maneuver to hold another vote to defund Planned Parenthood, this time needing only 50 votes to pass instead of the usual 60. Even if they pass this reconciliation bill, President Obama has said he will veto it, but some Republican extremists vow to press on, using the most extreme tactics possible, taking the government hostage. They want to attach a rider to the government funding bill and threaten to shut down the government 10 days from now unless the Democrats agree to defund Planned Parenthood. Does that sound familiar? Well, that is because it is the very same tactic used in 2013 when Republicans shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act and flushed $24 billion down the drain--the very same tactic that former Speaker John Boehner admitted was a ``predictable disaster.'' Republicans may like playing politics with Planned Parenthood, but this isn't a game for the millions of women who depend on Planned Parenthood for basic medical care every year and who have nowhere else to go. Threatening to shut down the government is certainly not a game. It is not a game for cancer patients who could be turned away from clinical trials at NIH. It is not a game for small businesses that depend on our national parks being open for tourist visits. It is not a game for seniors who need their Medicare paperwork processed or for the veterans whose benefits could be at risk, and it is not a game for the hundreds of thousands of Federal employees across this country--from park rangers to scientists to cafeteria workers and janitors at government buildings--who could be sent home 2 weeks before Christmas with no paycheck coming in. This radical assault on women's health care and reproductive rights has gone on long enough. So in case my Republican colleagues are suffering from short-term memory loss, let me spell this out again loud and clear. We will not allow you to turn back the clock on women's health and women's rights. If you try to sneak provisions into the government funding bill to defund Planned Parenthood, we will fight you every step of the way, and we will win. That is not a threat; that is a promise. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. I only want to add that I am grateful for all the work my colleague has done on behalf of American consumers and all the work he did to get the consumer agency through Congress and now to protect it when the big banks were coming after it. So I thank my colleague Senator Merkley for all he did.

Ms. WARREN. I think one of the most important parts of this is the consumer agency said--when credit card companies, for example, got caught cheating people, it said to those credit card companies: Look, you have people's addresses to be able to cheat them. Now you have people's addresses to send them checks to pay them back. It is as the Senator said. It was like a warning shot to everyone else out there cheating consumers. It said that this agency is on the level. This agency is tough. So I think there are millions of Americans who don't get cheated, who don't get tricked in one scam or another because we have a real watchdog out there--someone who is on the side of the American family.

Ms. WARREN. I think it is $11 billion.

Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senator Merkley, Senator Nelson, and Senator Reed on the floor today. I thank Senator Merkley for pulling us together. We are here to say no--no to the industry lobbyists, no to their friends in Congress who are threatening a government shutdown if we won't roll back rules that protect consumers and protect the safety of our financial system. It is a pretty neat trick. The lobbyists probably know they can't get a rollback of financial regulations passed out in the open where the American people can actually see what is happening and see which Senators and which Representatives voted to gut the rules that protect working families. So instead they tack rollbacks onto must-pass legislation, such as the upcoming government funding bill, to give their friends in Congress a lot of cover for voting yes. It is cynical. It is cynical and it is corrupt, but it usually works. Just last year, Citigroup lobbyists wrote a provision to blast a hole in Dodd-Frank. The part of the law that was blown up was called--and I am quoting the title--``Prohibition Against Federal Government Bailouts of Swaps Entities.'' The idea behind the rule was pretty simple. If a big bank wanted to engage in certain kinds of risky deals, such as the credit default swaps that had been at the heart of the 2008 crisis, they had to bear all of that risk themselves instead of passing it along to taxpayers. Now the big banks wanted that rule repealed, and the only way to do it was to put it on a bill that had to pass or the government would shut down, and that is exactly what they did. For 1 year, Congressman Elijah Cummings and I worked to document the impact of that Citigroup amendment, and we finally got what we needed. The FDIC estimates that the provision written by Citigroup lobbyists last year that allows a few big banks to put taxpayers on the hook for risky swaps has an estimated value of almost $10 trillion. And who is gobbling up that $10 trillion of risk? It is three huge banks: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America. It is three banks, nearly $10 billion, and $10 trillion is a lot of risky business. These banks will happily suck down the profits when their high-stakes bets work out, and they will just as happily turn to the taxpayers to bail them out if there is a problem. All of this is because the lobbyists persuaded Congress to do just one little favor in a must-pass bill. Now, a year after the Citigroup amendment, there are rumors of new giveaways in the upcoming funding bill: rollbacks that would make it harder for the government to stop the next AIG from taking down the entire economy, rollbacks that would exempt many of the 40 largest banks in the country from tougher oversight, rollbacks that would undermine the consumer agency's rules to clean up mortgage- and auto-lending markets, rollbacks that would stop the agency from protecting consumers rights if they are cheated on credit cards or checking accounts, rollbacks that would allow financial advisers to continue lining their own pockets while robbing retirees of billions of dollars. Why are these rollbacks at the top of Congress's agenda? Are constituents flooding the phone lines begging their Senators to weaken the rules for financial institutions? Are they writing in by the thousands insisting that their Senators make it easier for people to get cheated? Of course not--survey after survey has shown that hardworking Americans want stronger regulation of Wall Street and more accountability for CEOs who break the law. But like so many things around here, this process isn't about doing what hard-working Americans want. It is about pleasing the rich and powerful who are lined up for special favors. I know some of my Democratic colleagues are frustrated by all of the gridlock in Washington. They say: Wall Street accountability is important, but I just want to get something done around here for a change; so let's go along with the Republicans and the special interests. Well, yes, I want to get something done too. Who doesn't? But I didn't come here to carry water for Wall Street and a bunch of special interests. If Republicans think it is time to talk about financial reform, then let's put it on the table. If the industry wants to push rollbacks, then I want to make it easier to send bankers to jail when they launder money or cheat consumers. If the industry wants to chip away at financial oversight, then I want to have a serious conversation on the record about breaking up the biggest banks. If they are too scared to have that conversation out in the open, then Senators shouldn't be handing out special favors behind closed doors. The upcoming debate about a government funding bill is going to boil down to one question: Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of working families who got punched in the gut and want stronger rules for Wall Street or are you on the side of the giant financial institutions that broke the economy, got bailed out, and are once again trying to call the shots on Capitol Hill? Well, me, I am with the families, and I am ready to say no to the bank CEOs, no to the industry lobbyists, and no to all of their buddies here in Congress. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my time to Senator Merkley.

Ms. WARREN. Well, the Senator raises the right question, but I think it is pretty obvious. If these proposals were debated out in public, where everyone in America could see and hear them, they wouldn't pass. People don't want to line up to vote for fewer restrictions on Wall Street. They do not want to line up to vote for more opportunities to cheat American families. So, instead, the idea is just tack it on something else that is going to move through. Then the question is, Will people vote to keep the government open? And that gives a lot of people in Congress who want to help the big financial institutions a lot of cover, and that is fundamentally wrong.

Ms. WARREN. You know, the CFPB works. It works to help protect America's families. It works to help level the playing field. Already that agency has been up and operational for just a little over 4 years, and it has forced the biggest financial institutions in this country to return more than $11 billion directly to families they cheated. It has handled more than 750,000 complaints against big financial institutions, against payday lenders, and against college loan services that are cheating people and that are tricking people. So what is the response? Well, it is helping the American people, but it is costing a handful of the biggest financial institutions in this country real money, and they are trying to find a way to make sure the consumer agency doesn't do its job. They want to find a way to weaken that agency, to tie that agency down, and to keep that agency from leveling the playing field for American families.

Ms. WARREN

Ms. WARREN. Madam President, I appreciate the colleagues who came to the floor today to talk about the SAVE Benefits Act. I suggest the absence of a quorum.