done -- wcialg aside from wipping a few wars -- that were critical to the future of mankind? we've done amazing things when this comes to research. for generations the united states was the un-chawld world leader in support of scientific research but in recent years our lead has eroded. in 1965 the united states spent 25% of our non-defense discretionary budget on the one hand research and development -- 1965 25%. today, 10%. meanwhile, other countries are stepping up. china has increased r&d funding by 20% a year every year from 1999 to 2009. if we stay on course, china will be investing more in research and development as a share of what -- their overall economy than the united states as soon as five years. erogued u.s. funding is particularly troublesome in the

area of bioresearch. the united states' share of global biomedical rsm funding declined -- research funding declined by 13% between 2004 and 2012. lifesaving discoveries are being delayed and young scientists are finding fewer opportunities. a decade ago 30% of the qualified n.i.h. grant proposals. today just 18%. in illinois researchers regularly tell me how difficult it is to find government support for their medical research. they can spend as much time applying for grants and opening rejection letters as they do conducting experiments. there are indications that young researchers are taking their talents to other industries and even other countries. in 1982, 18% of n.i.h. primary investigators were under the age of 36. in 2011, 3% of n.i.h. primary investigators under the age of 36. the young researchers aren't going into government sponsored

research. meanwhile our population is aging. medical conditions from cancer to alzheimer's are touching more and more lives and the need for medical breakthroughs has never been greater. back in ill i had the pleasure of -- back in illinois i had the pleasure of visiting the lab of janet raleigh at the university of chicago. she was an inspiration. four decades ago sitting at her dining room table at hyde park in chicago she had what she called an oh wow moment, a flash of insight that transformed the world's understanding of cancer. until that moment, it was generally assumed that genetic abnormalities were the result of cancer. dr. raleigh's work showed it was the other way around. genetic mutations in fact caused cancer. that revolutionary insight led to targeted drug treatments for previously untreatable cancer and what family, what family on earth has not been touched by cancer? janet raleigh was working under a small grant from the national institutes of health when she

made this historic finding. one of the parts of her story that i love is that when she and her family returned to chicago in 1962, janet told the university of chicago she would like to come back and continue research with a couple of conditions. sthee said i'm a mother of four boys. i can only work part time. and second, she wanted a microscope a desk and a salary. she asked for $5,000 a year. to its ever lasting credit, the university of chicago said yes. ten years later came her oh wow moment that changed our understanding of cancer. one of my deep concerns is this, how many other janet raleighs are being lost in america to medical research because they don't get the financial support for their grants that they need to move forward? how many medical scientists have been forced to scale back or even abandon vital research because of ill advised cuts to the national institutes of health? if america is going to remain a world leader in research that does contribute to longer and

healthier lives federal funding for medical research has to be a national priority. last week i reintroduced a critical bill, the american cures act. it calls for $150 billion in federal research funding to support medical breakthroughs over the next ten years. i guarantee mr. president it won't get more than $150 -- we'll get more than $150 billion in payback. if we can delay the onset of alzheimer's in this country just by weeks or months and god willing, cure it, think of how much we will save. last year it cost our federal government over $200 billion to treat alzheimer's patients. researchers making long-term plans, it's not only the amount of funding but it's reliability. that's why the american cures act would eliminate the year-to-year unpredictability of congressional budgets and politics that set a steady growth rate of 5% for ten years. francis collins, one of the most

extraordinary doctors m america heads up the n.i.h., and he told me this, senator will make a difference. these funds would go to four institutions: national institutes of health, centers for disease control and prevention, department of defense health programs and the v.a. medical and prosthetic research program. the american cures act will make funding for lifesaving medical research less political more predictable. i want to thank my colleagues, senator sherrod brown amy klobuchar, barbara boxer and chuck schumer for cosponsoring and sponsoring this legislation. you might have seen the bumper sticker that says if you think education is expensive try ignorance. if you think biomedical research is expensive try illness. medical research is a great investment. every dollar we spend generates over $2 in economic growth. we more than double our investment.

and that's before counting the value of diseases cured. dr. anthony fauci is a brilliant epidemiologist who heads the national institutes of health of allergy and infectious disease. he said the discovery of teixobactin, he said it was a long shot but it worked. that was also true of the polio vaccine discovered 60 years ago by dr. jonas salk and so many other american cures and breakthroughs that changed the world. private industry doesn't fund this sort of basic foundational science. it can't. this kind of science takes patience and time and a lot of investment. america is blessed with some of the best and most generous medical philanthropies in the world but they can't fill this funding gap. only we can do it. it takes our government to fund the science that leads to breakthrough cures. this shouldn't be a partisan issue and it shouldn't be a low-budget priority. i think it should be the highest. i ask my colleagues join me in

supporting the american cures act. help save lives and restore american biomedical research leadership and strengthen america. as jonas salk who pioneered the polio vaccine would say -- quote -- "the only way we can lose is if we stop too soon." mr. president, i yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from mississippi. mr. cochran: mr. president i

ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum be rescinded. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. cochran: mr. president, i was very disappointed yesterday that the senate did not vote to proceed to consideration of the homeland security appropriations bill. i hope that we will have an opportunity to reconsider that vote and we will agree to take up the bill. the need to fund the department of homeland security for the remainder of this fiscal year should not be in question. we know that we're living in a complex world with ever-chapping threats to -- ever-changing threats to our nation's security. the department that we created specifically to combat those threats will operate better and more efficiently with a full-year funding plan that reflects updated spending priorities. i've heard no senator dispute

that. the leaders of the homeland security subcommittee, both democrat and republican, put a great deal of effort into drafting this measure. the bill provides $10.7 billion for cuss customs and border protection an increase of $119 million over fiscal year 2014. this amount will support border, infrastructure technology needs, roads air and marine assets and higher levels of personnel, including border patrol agents and customs and border patrol officers. the bill provides nearly $6 billion for immigration and customs enforcement an increase of 13%. the bill provides increased

funds to identify, apprehend and remove criminal aliens and it provides increases for investigations to help combat human trafficking. cybercrime child exploitation, and drug smuggling and the bill provides support for the secret service and congressional oversight including $25 million to address security needs at the white house complex. the bill provides more than $10 billion for the coast guard. this includes additional resources to continue the recapitalization of the coast guard fleet. the bill provides funding for the disaster relief fund. when disaster strikes it's important that the disaster relief fund contains the resources necessary to support

an effective response. the bill also includes house amendments designed to reverse the president's unilateral actions on immigration enforcement. but given the time and breadth of the president's action and the challenge to congressional authority that those actions represent, it can come as no surprise that they provoked a congressional response. so mr. president i am speaking to remind senators of the urgent and important need we have for the adoption of funding for the department of homeland security and other provisions that this bill contains. so i urge my colleagues and the leadership to help ensure that we move the senate in the direction of early passage after thorough consideration of

the provisions in this bill the passage of this bill to protect our national security. i suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call: a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from utah. mr. lee: i ask unanimous consent to suspend the quorum call. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. lee: mr. president the electronic communications privacy act was first enacted in 191986. now, i would ask my colleagues, what were you doing in 1986? 1986 was a long time ago. in 1986, i was in the nientd

grade. this was -- ninth grade. this was at an age when not everyone had a personal computer. my family didn't have a computer. most of the people i knew who had a computer had something like the commodore vic20 a very very small computer with very little processing power compared to what we have today. but this law the electronic communications privacy act ouecpa was an important law with an increasingly important objective. that is to ensure that government agencies respect the fourth amendment in accessing an individual's electronic communications. but, mr. president, in the nearly three decades since ecpa became law technology has advanced rapidly dramatically far beyond the capacity of this particular law ecpa, to keep up up. the prevalence of e-mail and the low cost of electronic data

storage have made what were once robust protections vastly insufficient to ensure that citizens' rights are protected. with respect to their electronic communications things like e-mail. there's no reason we should still be operating under a law written in the analog age when we're living in a digital world. this is a little bit like prieght with a dos -- operating with a dos-based operating system in the age of much more sophisticated software systems that help us interact relatively seamlessly with our computers. that's why senator leahy and i have come together to craft this truly bipartisan piece of legislation which would modernize ecpa and bring our constitutional protections against warrantless searches and seizures into harmony with the technological realities of the 21st century. the lee-leahy ecpa amendments

act of 2015 would prohibit an electronic communications or remote computing service provider like g-mail or facebook or twitter, for example from voluntarily disclosing the contents of customer e-mails or other communications. it eliminates the ambiguous and outdated 180-day rule that some government agencies believe grants them warrantless access to the content of older e-mails. that is, any e-mails older than the very young age of 180 days old. instead, all requests for the content of electronic communications would require a search warrant a search warrant required by the fourth amendment amendment, a search aren't based on probable -- warrant based on probable cause. and law enforcement agencies would be required to notify within 10 days any persons whose e-mail accounts were searched

subject to some logical and narrow exceptions, of course. this legislation is also carefully crafted so that it would not impede the ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct legitimate investigative activities consistent with the fourth amendment. i'm pleased to say that our bill enjoys very broad support from the technology industry, from privacy advocates constitutional scholars and policy groups on both ends of the ideological spectrum in america. the lee-leahy ecpa amendments act of 2015 is truly bipartisan in nature. the senate bill, in addition to senators leahy and myself as the principal sponsors, also has six additional cosponsors. we have republican senators cornyn moran and gardner and democratic senators shaheen merkley and blumenthal. i hope and expect that we'll

have a lot of additional senators of both political parties who will join us in this effort. the house version of this bill has 228 additional cosponsors, a very critical majority. by working together as a democrat from vermont and a republican from utah, we hope that all senators will join with us to pass this meaningful bipartisan legislation that would benefit all americans. congress should pass ecpa reform this year and president obama should sign these important privacy reforms into law. i'll end this discussion as i began. what were you doing in 198?6? as it relates to your interaction with the digital world, with computers. i would imagine that even though your life might be in many respects similar to what it was

in 1986 it's very, very different in the way that you interact with computers with technology with the on-line world which basically no one was even aware of in 1986. since 1986, the world has changed. we need to change our law to keep up with the times. we need to change the law to hold in place those protections that have been in our discussion since 1791 to make sure that the privacy rights of the american people are respected. i encourage each of my colleagues to support this bill. thank you mr. president. mr. president, i note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from new hampshire. mrs. shaheen: mr. president i ask that the quorum call be lifted. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. shaheen: thank you. mr. president, as we continue this debate on funding for the department of homeland security we face some fundamental questions. are we going to prioritize the safety and security of the american people or are we going to put the country at risk because of an ideological disagreement? that's the choice we face with this bill. you know, we can debate immigration. i think members of the democratic caucus would be happy to do that. the senate did that two years ago and we passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill with 68 bipartisan votes. but that's -- this is not the time for us to have this debate. now we need to be funding the department of homeland security so they can continue to do their work. so we can either pass a clean bill that makes critical investments in our nation's security or we can pit put our

nation at risk by playing politics with funding for the department of homeland security. and i appreciate the appropriations chair senator cochran from mississippi for coming down and laying out what's in funding for the department of homeland security, for laying out the important work of the department of homeland security. i think most of us appreciate the work that they do and why that's so important to the safety and security of the country. that's why we need to pass a clean bill to ensure that they are funded for the rest of this year. now, for those who are here in the senate chamber and for those watching at home who haven't been following what's gone on here in washington with this bill, i want to just riot proud a little history on how we got to where we are today. in the closing weeks of the 113th congress, senator mikulski then chair of the senate appropriations committee, and congressman

rogers chair of the house appropriations committee negotiated spending bills for the entire government, including the department of homeland security. this was a compromise measure not everyone got what they wanted but the bill funded homeland security priorities at levels that would ensure that the department can fulfill its mission. then sadly politics came into play. some members of the house republican caucus demanded the homeland security bill be removed from the larger budget because of immigration issues, because they didn't like the president's executive action on immigration. and now the entire department is funded on a short-term basis through february 27. just 23 days from now. last month thousands narrowly narrowly -- the house of representatives passed a bill to fund homeland security but added politically divisive language

that rolls back protections for immigrant children among other anti-immigrant measures and it also would roll back some of the efforts for surveillance and efforts to address illegal immigrants who are committing crimes when they come into this country. now, because of these controversial immigration riders president obama immediately announced that he would veto the house-passed bill. and last week, the entire democratic caucus of the senate signed a letter to majority leader mcconnell urging him to put the security of our nation first, put politics aside and work with us to pass a clean homeland security funding bill without controversial immigration riders attached. to pass a bill that the president can sign. mr. president, i ask unanimous consent to place this letter from the senate democratic

caucus into the record. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. shaheen: so cloture was not invoked on the house bill. we saw that yesterday in our vote. it's a bill that cannot become law. we just have 25 -- 24 days left until funding for the homeland security department expires. the house bill cannot move forward, so i urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to work with us to pass a clean full-year budget without controversial riders to fund homeland security. as the ranking member of the homeland security subcommittee, i'm ready to work with my colleague, senator hoeven, who chairs the subcommittee on homeland security and appropriations with chairs -- the chair cochran, ranking member mikulski, the entire committee to pass a bill to keep our nation safe, to avoid

disrupting the work of the department of homeland security and to keep this critical agency operating at full strength. in fact, senator mikulski and i introduced a bill last week, senate bill 272 that would do exactly that. we live in dangerous times. every day new threats emerge that threaten our citizens at home and our allies abroad. the department of homeland security's role in protecting our country from these threats cannot be overstated. and its funding should not be controversial. right now the u.s. law enforcement community on high alert for terror threats after attacks in sydney, australia and ottawa canada, and, of course the carle member dough a -- "charlie hebdo" attack in paris. a man in ohio was arrested when he was planning to blow up the u.s. capitol in an isis-inspired

plan. isis has thousands of foreign firefighters, including americans among their ranks who could return to their home countries to do harm and who say they intend to do that. we were all horrified yesterday by the news of the jordanian pilot, the courageous jordanian pilot who was killed in such a barbaric and disgusting way by the islamic state. we've recently learned of isis plans to take advantage of the syrian are refugee crisis, to 3406 their firefighters into turkey and europe. these are real threats. they are a clear and present danger to this country and because they're so real, we need our counterterrorism intelligence community operating at full strength. and essential part of our nation's counterterrorism and intelligence infrastructure is within the department of

homeland security. as michael chertoff, george w. bush's secretary of homeland security said, intelligence is not only about spies and satellites end quote. intelligence is also about discipline the discipline, daily tasked of -- task of collecting and analyzing thousands of reports and investigations that are ongoing all across our country from our local and state police, our border patrol agents, our port security personnel and our coast guard patrolling our shores. the department of homeland security takes these thousands of bits of information sifts out the critical details coordinates with our foreign intelligence agencies, and gets critical information to our first responders on the ground as quickly as possible. this work is critical to keeping our nation safe from terrorism. now, one of the chief criticisms of the 9/11 report was that we need to improve

intelligence information sharing between the intelligence community and our first responders on the ground. i was governor on september 11. i know some of the challenges that we have in new hampshire with that information sharing. well that's one of the missions that the department of department of homeland security -- the department of homeland security was created to carry out. if you talk to governors and mayors to police chiefs and sheriffs the folks on the ground who are responsible for keeping our citizens safe every day, ask them about their fusion centers. ask them whether they want their law enforcement to go back to the days when all of our intelligence was bottled up in washington, d.c. and our towns and cities were on their own. of course they don't want to go back to being kept in the dark. there's too much at stake. but that's what could happen if the department of homeland security isn't fully functioning, and mr. president, i would like to

point out that we received a letter from the united states conference of mayors, it's signed by tom cochran c.e.o. and executive director. he sent it to senators cochran mikulski hoeven, and shaheen, and i won't read the whole thing but they say a number of things that i think are important in laying out the challenge and why we need to pass a clean funding bill. mr. cochran says i write on behalf of the nation's mayors to urge you to expeditiously report out a clean bill to fund the department of homeland security for the remainder of the current fiscal year. a fully functioning department of homeland security is critical to the security of our nation, our cities, and our citizens. a department operating on a short-term continuing resolution despite its best efforts faces

uncertainty and delays and simply cannot be fully functioning. he goes on to elaborate a number of the important programs and important work that the department of homeland security does and i won't read all of that mr. president but i would like to enter this letter for the record. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. shaheen: i would ask unanimous consent to do that. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. shaheen: let me also point out a letter that we received again, to senator cochran --. the presiding officer: the senator's time has expired. mrs. shaheen: can i ask unanimous consent to speak for three more minutes. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection. mrs. shaheen: thank you. this is from emergency managers and it says -- and i quote -- "the nation's local emergency managers urge you to include full-year funding for programs at the u.s. department of homeland security that support state and local

emergency management programs. these programs are critical to preparing our nation for all hazards including terrorist attacks." again, mr. president they go on at length and i would ask unanimous consent to enter this letter also for the record. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. shaheen: thank you. so there are any number of reasons why we need to pass a clean funding bill for the department of homeland security. we should be working to do that now. we should stop the ideological debate and focus on the risk to this country of our failing to act, of the risk by continuing -- by passing a continuing resolution, by potentially shutting down the department of homeland security none of those options are acceptable. we need to work together, we need to get this done. i urge my colleagues to do that. thank you, mr. president. a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from washington.

ms. cantwell: thank you. i rise today to discuss the importance of the issue of net neutrality and the importance of it to our innovation economy. the internet is a $638 billion economic force and according to a mckenzie global institute it supports millions of jobs across our nation and setting the right policy for the internet is critical for the continuation of american job creation in an innovation economy. over the next 24 hours chairman tom wheeler is expected to announce strong net neutrality standards to support the growth of this innovation economy and according to news reports the f.c.c. will establish clear rules of the road to ensure no content is blocked and that the internet cannot be divided into fast and slow lanes. this announcement would set a clear framework for the innovation economy and millions of jobs that depend on it across our nation. it would make a game changing milestone for american

innovators and consumers because a comprehensive plan would protect consumers while still allowing for flexibility of business growth and investment, and making sure that american consumers and innovators are protected. the commission is expected to vote on this rule later this month, and i hope that all of our colleagues would be paying attention to this decision. because this decision is not just whether i can download or use netflix. it is about equal access to the marketplace, how the future success of these innovators are determined over the last few years we've been debating the future of the web because broadband companies have been tried to remember a two-tier internet those with fast lanes, their ability to pay more and slow lanes for those who can't. well i think the president did the right thing. he called on the f.c.c. to make

the right decision and protecting the internet from cable companies who want to overcharge or slow down connections. the f.c.c. seems to be willing to make to the right call, protecting the consumers and the internet under a new order that just like a utility would give corms the ability to be protected from bad service or exorbitant fees and at this point in time that's what we need to do to protect consumers. according to the news reports chairman wheeler will announce a plan to use the f.c.c. authority in the most comprehensive way to protect net neutrality, to prohibit pay to play fast lanes, prohibit blocking and thoughtling, and to apply the rules to wireless broad bands that are treated like the browser on your desk. this plan would cover the interhe bet or companies like

netflix that pay to bring it to come cast to connect to the end user. these important policies will provide certainty to a start-up and business and they will make sure those products get equal access. last month i had a roundtable in seattle with several start-ups and experts on net neutrality and many of those companies relied on the internet to transform their ideas into successful businesses. they explained how the debate affects more than just tech companies. software, they said, is revolutionizing every industry from retail to health care, from everything about the way you pay for your coffee at starbucks to how you access your personal health information. if we allowed a two-tiered system to develop the big guys would have the ability to pay more while the smaller companies would have disruptions. but what we have done hopefully with announcement today is make sure that we are putting a stake

in the ground to protect consumers. c.e.o. of washington technology industry association put it best when he said -- quote -- "we have a multitrillion-dollar evidence-based study that says the current rules of the game which means an open, neutrality access to the internet, have worked" -- end quote. i couldn't agree more. our innovation depends on equal access for ideas and the proof is in the numbers. over six million u.s. jobs are tied to the internet. that's up to a payroll of $558 billion. and in the seattle metropolitan area alone from 2009 to 214 there were 333 venture companies totaling $2.6 billion. so all of this growth in the internet economy relies on an open internet, no blocking, no threatling of priorities and that's why i support strong net neutrality rules.

they need to be responsible and efficient so i thank chairman wheeler for his leadership in setting up strong rules and i hope the web this information on the web continues to be one of our great economic engines and continues the job development here in the united states. a strong net neutrality rule is the best tool in the toolbox for preserving the openness of the internet today. it will go a long way to help us continue our economic prosperity. i thank the president and i yield the floor. the presiding officer: the senator from georgia. mr. isakson: mr. president i find it tragically ironic that on the same day that the islamic state tragically took the life and murdered a jordanian pilot that the united states senate failed to get a 60-vote majority to vote to move to a motion to proceed to debate the most important issue that's facing the united states of america. i agree with my colleagues that talked about the danger of islamic terrorism the danger of

porous borders all the dangers they talked about but you know you can't solve those problems unless you get it to the floor and you debate it. i was elected in 2004. the number-one issue in my campaign in the general election was immigration policy of the united states of america. 11 years later it's still domestically the biggest issue in the state of georgia. we still have a porous border and we know how vulnerable we really are. it is time we move this bill to the floor and fully debate it. i know there are differences of opinion. i know each one of us would do it differently but we are part of a constitutional government to make decisions for our people. we don't need executive orders dictating what we should do. we need a house and the senate who come to common ground. we need a president who will sign a bill and we need a bill to be upheld. we're not going to get there until we have debate on the floor and move forward on a motion to proceed debate the department of homeland security. i just left a foreign relations hearing. it was on human trafficking. talked about the terrors of what's happening in terms of sexual abuse sexual

trafficking, child labor minority labor all those things that are taking place. you know where they are taking place in our country? they are taking place on the border of the southwest the presiding officer's home state of arizona where our border is porous, and because of that, drugs and human beings are trafficked every single day. that should stop. the number-one issue when we debated the homeland security bill in 2005 was to put in a trigger to ensure that no changes in immigration law took place until we first secured the border. the border is still not secure. we're trying. i commend our brave soldiers. i commend the state of arizona. fort wachuka one of the beakons flying drones on the border of mexico trying to identify the people coming in, but we haven't done enough. we should bring homeland security's bill to the floor. we should make sure the funding for homeland security is sufficient to seal our border. we'll debate our differences and come to common ground, but we can't come to common ground, we can't resolve this problem unless we proceed to the motion

to bring the bill to the floor for debate on this problem. let's get off the sidelines. let's come to the floor of the senate. let's vote on the motion to proceed. let's fully amend and debate the bill. let's send the president a bill that a unified congress sends to the president that says we want a secure border, we want an immigration policy that works and we want to once again be a government of checks and balances not a government of executive orders. and i yield back the balance of my time and would note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

mr. sessions: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from alabama. mr. sessions: mr. president i would ask that the quorum call be dispensed with. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. sessions: mr. president i would ask consent that i be allowed to speak in morning business for up to ten minutes and be asked to be notified at nine minutes. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. sessions: thank you. mr. president, we are in the odd situation of which i -- by which our democratic colleagues are

complaining that we are blocking funding for the department of homeland security when the house has passed a bill that fully funds homeland security, it's sitting at the desk today the majority leader mitch mcconnell has moved to proceed to that bill, and they're blocking it. and so senator mcconnell moved to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to just get on the bill and he's indicated, as he has before, that they would be allowed amendments to the bill and this would be the way you move forward with an appropriation bill in the regular order. so it's unbelievable, really, that we have -- we have our colleagues on the other side of the aisle trying to contend that the majority republicans in congress of both houses are trying to block funding from

homeland security when nothing could be further from the truth. looking at today's cnn headline this is on their web site. democrats blkd funding for d.h.s., department of homeland security to protect obama's immigration orders. why are they blocking it? to protect obama's immigration orders that are contrary to congress' will, clearly overwhelmingly rejected by the american people and contrary to law. why should congress fund unlawful activities? why should it fund policies it does not approve of? why should it fund policies that the american people strongly reject? it has no duty to do that.

congress is not a potted plant. it's not a rubber stamp. congress has a duty to the people. it's to ensure that the laws of this country are followed, that the american people have defense against -- for the homeland and funding homeland security, and they have done that. what they have said is we're not going to fund actions by homeland security that undermine the law. we're not going to give money that undermines the laws of the united states, and we're not going to allow the president to take money that was given to homeland security to enforce the law and give it to him so that he can undermine the law. so what has the president done with his executive orders? it's a stunning action.

he said 20 times that he didn't have the power to do this. he doesn't have the power to do what he did and he just did it because political pressure, i guess, caused him to do so. and so he's going to provide legal status -- not for children 5 million people in november-december when he issued these orders, 5 million adults. they'll be given social security numbers. constitutional scholars have told us, colleagues, that the utilization of the idea of prosecutorial discretion is not appropriate in such a massive way as this. but what i want to tell you is, it goes well beyond prosecutorial discretion. what the president has done, he's going to provide a social security number to people unlawfully here. he's going to provide them a photo i.d. for people unlawfully in america.

he will provide a work permit for them, the right to participate in the -- medicare, and the right to receive checks from the federal government in the form of earned income tax credit to the tune of billions of dollars. now, what are the first things you do to try to establish a lawful system of immigration is not provide financial benefit to people who come unlawfully. so this is a problem. i just got to say it's a big problem. and my -- my friend and able member of this senate, senator durbin the democratic whip, assistant minority leader said this i guess last night -- yesterday. "it's incredible to me that we have refused to provide funds the department of homeland security needs to keep america safe."

he said, "it's incredible to me" that we haven't passed a bill that the house sent over here that fully funds homeland security. i'm not blocking the bill. we want to go on the bill. we want to be able to amend the bill to keep america safe. and who's blocking it? it's my democratic colleagues. senator durbin is the leader of the blocking gang. he's the feighansive the offensive line. the center, i guess. he goes on to say "there's nothing wrong with a debate over immigration policy. in account far the republicans now in the majority control the house and senate, could have started the debate weeks ago. they didn't." look we debated senator durbin's vision. it was rejected by congress, his ideas. many supported the bill in this body. didn't come back this fall, in

part because of their actions on immigration. president obama had the choice to go from state to state trying to elect people to pass his immigration bill but he either didn't do it or it didn't work. the american people do not want this kind of legislation. and my friends senator durbin, said further "indeed they attached five riders to the department of homeland security appropriations bill and they said we will not allow that department to be fully funded unless the president accepts these five immigration riders." just a normal bill that says how the money is going to be spent and it's going to be spent for enforcement and we're not going to spend money to not enforce the law. it doesn't change -- the bill the house has sent to us does not change one lawful immigration policy in america not one. it is the president who's adopted a radical new

immigration policy contrary to law, contrary to the american people's wishes. and, in fact, quite a number of democrats urged him not to issue such an order but he did it anyway. congress has a duty. senator durbin talks about the dream act that he offered. it had a chance to passage a number of times but every time it was carefully read, it was an overreach, it went too far. but the point of which is it was rejected by congress. congress didn't pass that. so i'm -- i just would want to say, we need to be clear who's objecting to what in this body. who wants to fund homeland security and who wants to advance a radical unlawful,

unpopular amnesty agenda that the american people don't like. so yesterday on the floor senator schumer asked if it wasn't possible for the senate to pass a department of homeland security bill without language that would ensure the president complies with the constitution. of course and then send it back to the house. well the answer to that is this and senator schumer's one of our more able members for sure in the senate and i respect him and his abilities. but the answer is this. the house passed a d.h.s. bill bill -- it is the only vehicle because the house of representatives would blue slip a bill that originates in the senate. that's a basic tenet of how a bill becomes law, article 1 section 7 clause 1 of the constitution states -- quote -- "all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the house of

representatives but the senate may propose or concur with the amendments on other bills." so over the years the house of representatives have asserted and assisted and successfully asserted that this law apply to revenue, spending bills as well. according to the congressional research service, as a result, the house customarily originates all money bills including appropriations bills the congress research service states -- quote -- "in practice, the senate has generally deferred to the house's insistence on originating appropriations." indeed it has generally deferred because they won't move anything that doesn't start over there. they've successfully asserted that gray area to their benefit and perhaps it's consistent with the views of the constitution.

staff has been unable -- my staff has been unable to find a single instance where the house took up a senate originated appropriations bill in over a hundred years since 1901. [inaudible] mr. sessions: our friends in the house have been unequivocal the senate had to pass the house bill. "senate democrats and senate republicans must stand together with the american people and block the president's actions said boehner. hall rogers said -- quote -- "the senate should pass a bill which finds a very vital national security agency but also turns back this blanket amnesty which is illegal and unconstitutional." well that's where we are. the house has sent over the right bill. it does the right thing. it defends the integrity of the

congress. it defends the wishes of the american people. it defends the policy decision of the congress of the united states and prohibits the president from doing what he himself said 20 different times he did not have the power to do. and professor after professor and historians have said the president doesn't have the power to do. if the president can do this, if he can execute laws, congress has rejected -- execute laws congress has rejected, what will he be able to do in the future. the presiding officer: the senator's time has expired. mr. sessions: mr. president i thank the chair and would yield the floor. mr. sanders: mr. president, i would ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection. mr. sanders: thank you. mr. president, the good news is that our country has made substantial economic progress in

the last six years since president bush left office. instead of losing 800,000 jobs a month, as we were during the final months of the bush administration we are now creating some 250,000 jobs a month and have seen steady job growth over the last 58 months. instead of having a record-breaking $1.4 trillion deficit as we did when president bush left office in january 2009, the federal deficit has been cut by more than two-thirds. today the 10-year deficit projection is now $5.5 trillion lower than what the projections were back in 2010. six years ago the world's financial system as we all remember was on the verge of collapse. today that is not the case. in fact, some might suggest that wall street is doing too well.

while we can take some satisfaction as to what has been accomplished in the last six years one would be very naive not to appreciate that there is also a lot of very bad news in our economy especially for working families. most significantly the simple truth of the matter is that the 40-year decline of the american middle class continues. real unemployment is not 5.6%, including those people who have given up looking for work or people who are working part time when they want to work full time real unemployment is over 11%. youth unemployment something we almost never talk about in this country, is an horrendous 17%. and african-american youth unemployment is over 30%

totally unacceptable. real median family income has declined by nearly $5,000 since 1999. all over this country in vermont and in every other state in this country, we have people working longer hours for lower wages. we have husbands and wives working 50, 60 hours a week just to pay the bills. incredibly despite huge increases in productivity in technology and all of the global economy we hear so much about the median male worker now earns $783 less than he did 42 years ago. let met repeat that. that american male worker right in the middle of the economy --

half above half below -- now earns an adjusted -- inflation-adjusted for wages $783 less than he did 42 years ago. the woman worker right in the middle of the economy now makes $1,300 less than she made in 2007. so when you ask why people are angry why people are stressed, why people are frustrated that is exactly why. further, this country continues to have shamefully the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on earth and 40 million americans still have zero health insurance. in the midst of this tragic decline of the american middle class, there is, however another reality and that is that the wealthiest people and the

largest corporations are doing phenomenally well. the result? the united states today has more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the great depression. today the top .01% own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. let me repeat that because that truly is a startling fact. today the top .01% which is what this chart is talking about about, own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. today one family -- one family -- the walton family owners of wal-mart own more wealth than the bottom 40% of the american people some

120 million americans. now, mr. president i don't believe that most of our people think that this is what the american economy should be about. in fact, this is not an economy for a democracy. this is what what oligarchy is about. .01% owning almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%; one family owning the equivalent of what 123 -- 131 million americans own. that's wealth. in terms of income which is what we make every year, what we have seen in the last number of years since the wall street crash is that virtually all new income is going to the top 1%. last year, just as one example

the top 25 hedge fund managers earned more income than 425,000 public school teachers. does anybody really believe that that makes sense? 25 hedge fund managers making more income than 425,000 public schoolteachers. and that gap between the very, very rich and everybody else is growing wider and wider and wider. mr. president, the fact of the matter is that over the past 40 years we have witnessed an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 1%. in other words what we are seeing in our economy today is the robin hood principle in

reverse. we are taking from the poor and the working families, and transferring that income and wealth to the very, very wealthy. from 1985 to 201 the share of the nation's wealth going to the middle class has gone down from 36% to less than 23%. if the middle class had simply maintained the same share of our nation's wealth as it did 30 years ago it would have $10.7 trillion more in cumulative wealth than it does today. almost $11 trillion would have stayed with the middle class but has disappeared since 1985. but while the middle class continues to shrink, while millions of americans are

working longer hours for low wages, while young people cannot afford to go to college or leave school deeply in debt, while too many kids in this country go hungry, we have seen since 2009 that the top 1% has experienced an $11.5 trillion increase in its wealth. so the top 1% in recent years sees an $11.5 trillion increase in wealth while in roughly the same period the middle class sees a $10.7 trillion decrease in wealth. this $11.5 trillion transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 1% over a five-year period is one of the largest such transfers of wealth in our country's history. now, here is my point

mr. president. this is not just a moral issue although it is a profound moral issue, and pope francis, by the way, deserves a lot of credit for talking about this issue all over the world. are we satisfied as a nation when so few have so much and so many have so little? are we satisfied with the proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as we have millions of children living in poverty? is that really what america is supposed to be about? that is the moral component of this debate. but this is not just a moral issue. it is also a fundamental economic issue. as you know, mr. president 70% of our economy is based on consumer spending. and when working people do not have enough income, enough

disposable income, they are unable to go out and buy goods and services that they would like or that they need. the so-called job creators that my republican friends often refer to are not the c.e.o.'s of the large corporations. the c.e.o.'s of large corporations can't sell their products or services unless people have the income to buy them. you can come up with the greatest product in the world but if people don't have the money, you're not going to sell that product you're not going to hire workers to produce that product. the truth is that the real job creators in this country are those millions of people who every single day go out and purchase goods and services. but if they do not have adequate income the entire economy

suffers. mr. president, there was just a very interesting article, i believe it was yesterday or today, in "the wall street journal" written by nick tamaros and chris hudson, talking about how a two-tier economy is reshaping the u.s. marketplace. [no audio] wage growth. indeed such retailers as jcpenney sears and target have slumped. the consumer has not bounced

back in confidence we were looking for macy's chief executive told investors last fall. i would ask unanimous consent to put this article in the record. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. sanders: so what we are learning basically what this article tells us is people's income is going down, they're not going to macy's, they're not going to target, those stores are not hiring workers getting rid of workers because the middle class does not have the income that it needs. now, here is a very blunt point also. within president obama's recent budget -- by the way i think the president's budget is beginning to move us in the right direction. there was a very interesting projection that, unfortunately got very very little attention. and here is the point -- over the last 50 years g.d.p.

growth in the united states averaged around 3.2%. what the president's budget is suggesting that more or less over the next ten years we'll see 3% growth, 2.7%, 2.3% and the rest of the decade 2.3%. the bottom line here is if we continue along the same type of economic growth we've had over the previous 50 years our employment would be substantially lower people would be paying more taxes social security, among other programs, would be in much stronger shape. now, the debate we are going to be having in the budget committee, i'm the ranking member of the budget committee are two very different philosophies. our republican friends believe

in more austerity for the middle class and working families. their goal over a period of months and years is to cut social security, cut medicare, cut medicaid, cut nutrition programs for hungry children, not invest in infrastructure, and then reduce taxes for millions and billionaires. in other words more austerity for the middle class, tax breaks for the wealthy and the largest corporations. i believe that that philosophy is wrong for many, many reasons. the most important being that if you want to grow the overall economy, if you want to create jobs, we have got to put money into the hands of working people and you don't do that by cutting cutting cutting

and imposing more austerity on people who are already desperately hurting. a far more sensible approach is to create the millions of jobs that our country desperately needs by investing heavily in our crumbling infrastructure. last week i introduced legislation that would invest $1 trillion over a five-year period into rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges rail, airports water systems wastewater plants. if we do that, we'll make our country more productive, safer, and create up to 13 million jobs, putting money into the hands of working people. it not only will improve their lots but they will go out and spend their money in their communities, creating further economic growth. that's the direction we should

be going. this past year -- we have also got to raise wages. people cannot survive on the starvation minimum wage imposed at the federal level of $7.25 an hour. if we raise the minimum wage over a period of years to $15 an hour, you'll have billions of dollars in the hands of people who need it the most, improve their lives allow them to go out and invest in our economy to spend money and to create jobs. we need pay equity for women workers, not acceptable that women are making 78 cents on the dollar for men who are doing the same work. we need to adjust the scandal of over-- we have supervisors at mcdonald's who work 50, 60 hours a week but because he are so-called supervises do not get time and a half. we need to make college affordable for all of our

workers. in a global economy, we need the best educated work force in the world not one where people cannot afford higher education. we need training people that benefit working people and not just large multinational corporations which is why we would defeat the trans-pacific partnership. there is a lot of work that needs to be done but the bottom line here is if we are serious about dealing with the deficit if we are serious about growing the middle class, we need an agenda which creates jobs, raises wages makes college affordable demands that corporate america start investing in this country and not in china. we need a pro-worker agenda, not an austerity agenda which will strangle the middle class of this country even more than it's hurting today. and with that, mr. president i

will yield the floor. a senator: harm vermont. --. the presiding officer: the senator from vermont. mr. leahy:. i agree wholeheartedly with him. we're not a wealthy state we're a proud state and we're not a state that believes in such a huge disparity of income. so i thank him for what he said not only here but what he said similar things around the country. mr. president, on another issue i want to talk about privacy. privacy is not a partisan issue. mr. leahy: it never has been, never should be. remember, 30 years ago i was in the minority, the republicans were in the majority and controlled the senate, and i

worked with my colleagues and i led an effort to write the electronic communications privacy act ecpa. one that required a lot of education of everybody because back then, electronic mail was an emerging technology. the worldwide web was unimaginable. electronic data storage was astronomically expensive. no one could have envisioned the way mobile technologies would transform our lives. fortunately many of us in congress had the foresight to anticipate that these electronic communications would also need privacy protections. that was 30 years ago. look what has changed since then. and so now three decades later, that law is out of date. and so today the senator from

utah senator lee and i are reintroducing the ecpa amendments act of 2015. we want to bring this law into the 21st century. our legislation is very straightforward. it ensures that the private information that we americans electronically store in the cloud gets the same protection as the private information we americans physically store at home. and just as it did in 1986 i hope that the senate will come together on a bipartisan basis support these commonsense protections. just think mr. president all of us have the expectation that the things we store in our house, that they are private. somebody wants to go and see them, law enforcement wants they have to go through all types of search warrants and so forth to go in there.

but there seems to be an idea that if they are stored electronically elsewhere that those rules shouldn't apply. i believe they should. and the bill that senator lee and i introduce today protects america's digital privacy. their emails and all the other files and photographs they store in the cloud. it promotes cloud computing and other new technologies. it promotes it because i believe it will build consumer trust but it also provides law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to ensure public safety. i remind my colleagues that several years ago the u.s. circuit court of appeals the sixth circuit found that the young people was fully protected by the fourth amendment. they said that the fourth amendment must keep pace with the inexorable march of technological progress or its guarantees will wither and

perish. this bill takes up that challenge. obviously, we have technologies today that just a couple generations ago nobody would have dreamed of, but we have a constitution that has protected this country for well over 200 years, we hope will protect it for hundreds of years in the future and we want to make sure that our laws keep up with the protections that we americans we americans expect from our constitution. so first and most importantly the bill enshrines the statute the fundamental fourth amendment warrant requirement for email text and other electronic data. it requires that the government have a criminal search warrant based on probable cause to obtain the stored content of americans' email and other electronic communications from third-party providers the same way the government would have to have that same kind of search

warrant to go into your home and start going through the files that you have in your home. the second major component of the bill requires law enforcement agencies to promptly notify individuals when the government has obtained their emails from their service providers. there is a small exception for delay to protect the integrity of ongoing investigations no differently than we do in other law enforcement matters. and i think because we have worked so hard on this, this is not a republican or democratic issue. it's not liberal or conservative. in fact, senator lee and i would note that we have a broad coalition of more than 50 privacy civil liberties civil rights and technology industry groups and leaders from across the political spectrum that have endorsed this ecpa reform effort. this support spans the heritage

foundation americans for tax reform, to the center for democracy and technology in the aclu. i would ask that a january 22, 2015 coalition of support bill be entered into the record at this point. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. leahy: i'm also pleased that senators shaheen gardner blumenthal have joined this effort with senator lee and myself. i commend them because we do have an opportunity this year to make progress on bipartisan, commonsense legislation to protect the privacy of americans' email and update our laws to keep pace with technology. the last congress, the senate judiciary committee unanimously supported this bill, republicans and democrats alike. you continue the hard work of building a broad bipartisan coalition in support of this bill. now is the time to act swiftly

to bring our privacy protections into the digital age and i will continue to work with senator lee and senator cornyn and senator shaheen senator merkley, senator gardner and senator blumenthal on this because, one i'm proud to have them as cosponsors, but i'm also proud that we're doing the right thing. mr. president, i would ask my full statement be made prior to the record. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. leahy: with that, i would yield the floor and suggest -- i yield the floor. mr. cornyn: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from texas. mr. cornyn: mr. president yesterday, our friends across the aisle blocked -- filibustered really, a funding a $40 billion funding bill that would have paid the funds

necessary to keep the department of homeland security up and running through the rest of this fiscal year. now, i understand that they had some differences over the content of the legislation that the house passed, but it's undenial that the house acted responsibly by passing a -- this appropriation bill, particularly in a time of heightened security concerns not only here at home but around the world. and of course the part that, i guess, confused me the most is our democratic friends said well we don't want to debate the bill, but what we want is a clean d.h.s. appropriation bill. so they wanted to get to the end of the process without even starting the process which strikes me as odd. as i pointed out last week during the senate debate on the keystone x.l. pipeline, senator

durbin from illinois, the assistant minority leader, spoke very sincerely in support of a process surrounding that bill. we didn't all agree that the keystone pipeline bill should be passed but we did at least have an open amendment process that allowed everyone to express their point of view and to get votes on amendments, up or down, before concluding that piece of legislation. of course, this was something that i think the most notable part of that was that we actually had more votes in the united states senate during the three weeks we were on the keystone x.l. pipeline than we had all of last year under the previous management. so it was amazing to me that -- to see that the democratic leadership the senate minority, worked so hard to marshall their caucus together to block debate on this $40 billion appropriation bill to fund the

department of homeland security. especially considering the promise of the senator from illinois to continue to work with us to foster an open debate process and an open opportunity on both sides of the aisle to offer good ideas and to put them up for a vote on how to improve legislation. it was also amazing to see this outcome, considering what so many of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle said last fall when the president made his executive action on immigration. again, i said yesterday and i want to repeat it again, we are not upset with people who are seeking a better life here in the united states. all we're asking for is a legal process. we are very upset with the president violating his oath of office and purporting to make unconstitutional executive

orders. that is the problem and that is what the house is focused on like a laser. the fact is this president's actions were a stunning display of executive overreach. you don't have to take my word for it. take his word for it. at least the first 22 times that he talked about it. he said he didn't have the authority to do it 22 different times. and then there is the view of some of our colleagues in the minority. for example the senior senator from west virginia put it simply last november when he expressed i think the feeling of a lot of democrats when he said i wish he wouldn't do it. this was echoed also in a very straightforward manner by the junior senator from minnesota who said i have concerns about executive action. and of course it's easy to understand why because this is a uniquely legislative responsibility and the

president doesn't have authority to make laws on his own. at least he's -- that used to be his position. and then the senior senator from missouri said of the president's unilateral action, she said -- quote -- how this is coming about makes me uncomfortable and i think it probably makes most missourians uncomfortable. well the public opinion polls i've seen bear that comment out that while many people think that we do need to fix our broken immigration system, the majority of people in the public opinion polls i have seen disagree with the way the president has tried to act by doing this unilaterally or purporting to do it unilaterally. well, i have good news for senator mccaskill senator franken, senator manchin. the house of representatives has actually passed a piece of legislation that addresses their concerns and should give them

some comfort. the legislation we're trying to open debate on fully funds as i said the department of homeland security while reigning -- reining in the president's unconstitutional actions. this is one of the tools available to the united states congress using these legislative riders on appropriation to in effect express disapproval and defund certain acts by the executive. that's one of the tools we have available to us. i will renew my request to senator reid, the democratic leader from yesterday and ask the assistant minority leader to honor his commitment that he made when we were debating the keystone x.l. pipeline. please work with us to achieve at least debate on the floor if not some significant legislation, but to just throw a

fit and say we refuse to even start debate on the legislation strikes me as more of a political move than it is a legislative solution. so i'd ask my friends on the other side of the aisle who so boldly stood up to express their concerns with the president's executive actions only a few short months ago to again stand up this time to their own leadership and to join us in reining in the president's executive overreach and to not hold hostage the $40 billion that the house has appropriated to help fund the department of homeland security through the end of the fiscal year, through september 31. if there are parts of the house bill that you don't like -- and there are parts of the house bill that i have concerns over and that i hope we have a chance to vote on -- that that's the way the senate and the house are supposed to relate to one

another. the house passes legislation the senate passes legislation and if they are different then they get reconciled in a conference committee or through a ping-pong back and forth before they go to the president. but to just throw a fit and say we refuse to do our job of legislating, just because you don't like where we're starting to me is extraordinarily counterproductive and is an unfortunate return to the dysfunction that i believe the voters repudiated in their vote on november 4. so we'll see whether there is a different point of view. i know the majority leader, senator mcconnell will come back to the floor and ask to reconsider the vote yesterday and so it will be another opportunity for our friends across the aisle to reconsider their vote, blocking even

beginning considering this legislation, and i hope they will reconsider and join us in trying to come up with a consensus solution. mr. president, on another note, i have 11 unanimous consent requests for committees to meet during today's session of the senate. these have been approved by both the majority and minority leaders. i'd ask unanimous consent that these requests be agreed to and that these requests be printed in the record. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. cornyn: mr. president with that i would yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. a senator: mr. president. mr. cornyn: i'm sorry. i will withhold. i didn't see my friend from missouri here, so i will withhold that request. the presiding officer: the senator from missouri. mr. blunt: mr. president, i want to follow up on what the majority whip has been talking about. clearly, the country is and should be concerned by the president's unilateral executive

action on immigration. he announced this action november 20 of last year. the majority whip has already gone down that list of a number of our colleagues on the other side who said this is the wrong way to do this. the house happens to agree. in fact, the house of representatives has passed legislation that agrees that this is the wrong way to do it and try to come up with a remedy. frankly, mr. president if there is a better remedy, you're not going to find that better remedy if you don't have a debate. you're not going to find that better remedy if you don't come to the floor and say here's how we think that bill should be changed. this clearly -- the action taken last november by the president was clearly an executive overreach. it was an affront i believe to the rule of law and it was an affront to the constitution. article 2 section 3 of the constitution states that the president quote shall take

care that the laws be faithfully executed. that's the end of the quote right out of the constitution, but it couldn't be clearer. shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. that's why we call the president the executive. the president's job is not to make the law. the president's job is not to rule as a court would on the law. the president's job is to execute the law. the question here is does the law matter or not. the question here is what do we do when the house of representatives has passed a spending bill that would allow the funding for the u.s. department of homeland security for the rest of the fiscal year, between now and september 30, their bill does try to stop president obama's executive amnesty plan. many people, it appears if you believe what people have said, a

substantial majority of the senate agrees that the president shouldn't have done what he did. what's our obligation to try to undo that? the house has done their part by sending a bill over that does that. the president himself said 22 times that he didn't have the authority to do what he eventually did. i guess this is one case where i agree with the president 22 times. if anybody's thinking i don't agree with the president here's 22 times i agree with the president that 22 times he said he can't do or couldn't do what he eventually decided to do. and what was that? the president said he can't unilaterally change the country's immigration laws. he didn't have that authority the 22 times he said he didn't have that authority. he didn't have that authority on november 20, thowrt, when he took -- november 202014 when he took actions not to enforce the

law and he doesn't have that authority now. the house sent a bill over that tries to clarify that the president doesn't have that authority. the legislative branch of the federal government is the house of representatives and the senate of the united states. it's not whoever gets to act last. occasionally the president will say i'm going to take executive action if the congress doesn't do its job. well the key point there is it's the job of the congress to pass laws, not the job of the president. if the president wants to repeal the law, if the president wants to change the law nobody is in a better position than the president of the united states to encourage the congress and the country to do that. but that doesn't mean the president has that default option, if the congress doesn't act by some certain date, i'll just do it myself. that is not in the constitution. the president's is not going to

find it, i continue to believe the house-passed funding bill is the way to send a message to the president that he can't act unilaterally that there is a constitutional way to do this. i've not given up on winning over six democrats in the senate that clearly we need. everybody understands the importance of 60 votes in the senate and there are 54 republicans, not 60. but there are more than six democrats who said they didn't agree with what the president did. i think in all cases they say we agree with the funding levels, or we would vote for the funding levels for the department of homeland security. it seems to me those two things come together pretty nicely. you get a chance by debating this bill to undo what the president did and to fund the department of homeland security. there are at least six democrats who said that those are two different things that they are

for. well, this is a case where we get to do that. we need to do this by passing the house measure that ensures spending at an important time, with critical needs of homeland security. but it also would stop the president's illegal amnesty. we should not let that stand. you don't know where these legislative fights wind up until you have them. maybe that's why no democrat yesterday was willing to have this debate. because maybe they don't know what happens if really the attention is called to the past positions they have had or the need to fund the department of homeland security, but you don't know how these legislative battles work out if you don't have them. i think we need to have this one. leader mcconnell said our first choice is to try to pass the house bill. mr. president, if the law

shouldn't be followed, advocate it be repealed, advocate it be changed. don't advocate that it be ignored. the ignore clause of the constitution doesn't exist. there is no ability of the executive to do that. the united states is a nation founded on rule of law. every trade agreement we enter into all our relationships with other countries people who come here we talk about this is a country where you can look at the law and rely no matter what your status is on the law itself. the president is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. yet, president obama repeatedly has found ways to circumvent the congress by picking and choosing which laws he wants to enforce. or in the case of the overwhelmingly complicated health care law picking and choosing what dates the law is to be complied with, even though

the law often has very clear other dates. the president well, i think there's a better day. this is a bill the president was a major advocate was. he had a chance to put the dates in there and didn't. i recently reintroduced, madam president, as the senator from iowa has taken the chair i recently reintroduced the enforce the law act to ensure that the president can't just continue to blatantly not do what the law says has to be done. this is a bill i introduced in the last congress where it passed the house with a bipartisan vote, but in the last congress we weren't allowed to vote on it. apparently there are a number of my colleagues here who think that not only are we no longer allowed to vote on bills. now it's even a bad idea if we debate the bill. that's what the vote was yesterday. let's debate the bill. this wasn't approving anything

except let's debate the bill. that's what we should be moving forward now so we can fund this part of the government that the president complicated the funding for with his action last november. the enforce the law act permits the congress, if the congress believed that the president isn't enforcing the law, to go to court. not to wait months and years for an aggrieved citizen to have to go to court with their own money and say we don't believe the government has the authority to do this. but the congress could go to court and go to court early and let that judge decide if the law is being enforced as written or not. the enforce the law act would reestablish the proper limits of the executive branch. it would restore checks and balances. it would also provide a defender of citizens who in their capacity don't have to defend -- fight the government by

themselves if the congress itself believes the president has taken authority that he doesn't have or is enforcing the law in a way that wasn't intended. i think we have to stand up for the rule of law. i've joined in a court case supporting the state of texas who is suing the administration over what they believe is a all kinds of added expenses put on them by the president's power grab in deciding on his own which immigration laws will be enforced and which shouldn't. senator cornyn, senator cruz and i were signatories to this brief filed this december. 24 house members joined us, including the chairman of the judiciary committee saying we agree with these states that many responsibilities have been placed on them because the president of the united states chose not to enforce the law as written. 26 states have now joined on to that lawsuit filed by the state

of texas and i look forward to the conclusion of that suit because i think the judge is likely to decide that, no, there isn't the selectivity of which laws you enforce that the president has applied here. and there are great costs created for states as a result of that. every senator in this chamber madam president, has a constitutional obligation to curb the unilateral executive overreach. we have a chance to do that with the bill that could be before us. we have a chance to do that with the bill that the house has sent over. this whole issue goes to the very heart of the stim of checks and balances in our country and reiterates the importance of the constitution following the constitution adhering to the rule of law. i'd like to see us have a chance to do that as this department of homeland security funding bill should and eventually i'm confident will come to the

floor. and i would yield. a senator: madam president? the presiding officer: the senator from new york. mr. schumer: first it's good to follow my good friend, chair of the rules committee which i am ranking member. i don't agree with him but he's a fine man. now, i rise to dispel attempts by the other side of the aisle to dodge responsibility for funding the homeland security department in a responsible way. here's what's happening. the right wing of the republican party is risking a d.h.s., a department of homeland security, shutdown to get their way on immigration. they're saying take our hard right stance on immigration or we won't fund national security. now most americans don't agree with that view. most americans are for a

rational immigration policy. the large majority in this body, bipartisan led by senator mccain and myself, voted on that in 2013. but you have a small group led by the junior senator from texas who says it's our way or we're going to shut down one of the premier agencies dedicated to our security. as i engaged in a colloquy with my good friend from texas the majority leader, our republican colleagues have the majority, they can debate immigration any time they want. and in fact, we welcome that debate. we think the american people are on our side. we're willing to have that debate. we're eager to have that debate. but not with a gun put to the head not only of us, but of the american people. don't do what we, a narrow

minority want or we're going to shut down the department of homeland security at a time when security is of utmost importance given what's happened around the world, what we just saw happen to the jordanian pilot yesterday. this strategy makes no sense. the junior senator from texas is leading his party at best into a cul-de-sac. at worst over a cliff. we are not going to be taken hostage. and if he thinks -- if my good friend, the majority leader, senator mcconnell thinks that by bringing this bill up again and again it's going to change what happened yesterday it's not. so we're saying to the other side now that you're seeing the vote now that you've shown speaker boehner that we can't pass his bill, or even in the

senate get real. i say get real to my friend, the majority leader, and to speaker of the house. roll up your sleeves. let's work out a d.h.s., a department of homeland security, bill and pass it. let's not hold that agency hostage. let's not just renew them every couple of months, as the secretary of d.h.s. said yesterday, that's like getting a car and only having -- giving it five miles of gas at a time. it just doesn't work. so get real. let's negotiate a d.h.s. spending bill. i know that our senator from maryland the ranking member on the appropriations committee the ranking member on the

homeland subcommittee are eager to fund a bill we can agree on. then we can debate immigration. then we can debate immigration. but no hostage taking. none of this bullying. if you don't do it my way i'm going to hurt a whole lot of innocent people. it didn't work in 2013 when republican numbers plummeted after they tried to shut down the government. it won't work today. we will not allow a government shutdown. we will not allow hostage taking. we will ask our colleagues to get reasonable, do things the way they used to be done, debate each issue on the merits. they have the floor. they can debate any issue they want. and move forward. now, i would just say one other thing to my republican colleagues. the junior senator from texas has you tied in a knot.

i'd say that to speaker boehner as well. speaker boehner the junior senator from texas has you tied in a knot. now you're going to have to find a way to untangle it. but we will not be bullied. we will not be told we have to negotiate because you seek to hurt innocent people and hurt our security. we will move forward. so let me suggest the way to go forward. let's put a good, clean homeland security bill on the floor. let's make america secure. and separately we are happy to debate immigration to the republican's heart content. but let's stop this governing by crisis mentality especially when national security hangs in the balance. so madam president i urge speaker boehner i urge senator mcconnell to come to their

senses end this wild goose chase, and let us vote on a clean bill forth with. i yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

mr. nelson: madam president? the presiding officer: the senator from florida. mr. nelson: madam president i ask consent that the quorum call be lived. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. nelson: madam president, i want to talk about the necessity of having an appropriations bill for the department of homeland security and the fact that it is being held up over the issue of

folks down in the house of representatives that want to not appropriate money for the actions that the president has taken in trying to improve a dysfunctional immigration system system the fact that this is happening, holding up the fund funding for the department of homeland security appropriations is absolutely ridiculous, in the opinion of this senator. now, the fact is, the clock is ticking because the funding runs out in just a couple of weeks february the 27th.

well what does the department's name imply? keeping the homeland secure. so in one regard that means cyber attacks. well doesn't it occur to someone that we have had an extraordinary number of cyber attacks recently? most everybody will remember sonnysony. people were attacking us because they wanted to stop the expression of free speech in this case with regard to a movie that the sony company had produced and because they got in and got all of the personal data and were manipulating the

internal controls of the company with this cyber attack, i.t. it's the department of homeland security that is charged and hopefully if we can ever pass a cybersecurity bill that can be signed into law the portal through which the early warnings will come will be the department of homeland security. and, oh, by the way that costs cost thesony corporation about peds is 00 million. what about all of the customers of target? that was addresses phone numbers e-mail addresses taken from 70 million americans. they were customers of target. how about yahoo -- pass words

and user names were exposed to cyber attacks? how about ebay -- users' pass words because of the cyber attack had to be changed because they were compromised. how about a number of major banks, including j.p. morgan? 76 million households and 7 million small business accounts were affected by the attack. how about home depot? 6 million accounts were put at risk. now, if -- that ought to be enough to continue the funding of the department of homeland

security. but there's a lot more. most folks understand that t.s.a. that checks us as we go through the security at airports at seaports t.s.a. is a part of the department of homeland security. are you going to cut off the funding for t.s.a.? t.s.a., that is now trying to stop the new kind of attacks with nonmetallic explosives? well you remember because of our intelligence apparatus workingworking through liaison partners in other countries ... remember about two years ago the cartridge in a printer that was

discovered ultimately going on an airplane that was bound for the united states? that's a nonmetallic explosive. we were fortunate we got that. but they. these folks that are trying to attack us -- but they continue. these folks that are trying to attack us all over the world are trying very ingenius ways to avoid the security, and we rely on t.s.a. especially at american airports, to protect us. now, we simply in a couple of weeks can't afford for the appropriations to stop. well how about immigration and customs and border protection? again, another responsibility of t.s.a. -- of the department of homeland security.

and we're going to cut off the funding on what kind of folks are coming across our borders and what kind of folks we are going to be checking and rechecking and what kind of things that they're bringing into the borders? there are a lot of people that want to get into this country to do us harm. that's the responsibility of the department of homeland security. and so it just is not only ridiculous to this senator it's almost silly. but the problem is it's tragic, and it could be horrendous given the fact of the people around the world that are trying to harm us as we try to protect

ourselves in our national security every day. this is a debate that we should not be having. unfortunately, it is a condition that our politics has come to, and we need to stop that condition. now, madam president i leave you on a happier note as we will recess this session with a conclusion of my remarks. happily, all of the senators are going to a bipartisan luncheon where we're going to talk about things that we can do together. indeed that's the happiest thing that i've heard today. madam president as i yield the floor, i would ask consent that pursuant to the previous order the senate stand in recess.

the presiding officer: morning business is closed. under the previous order the senate stands in recess until 2:00 p.m. >> so the senate is now in recess to attend a bipartisan conference luncheon. that luncheon has been put together by republican conference chair john thune and senator chuck schumer. it will be hosted by senator susan collins who will be the first formal joint lunch for the party caucuses in nearly two years. the senate will return at 2 p.m. eastern. at some point there could be a procedural vote on the house passed homeland security spending bill. yesterday the senate failed to move forward with the bill. that measure also block funding for president obama's executive order on immigration. now we will take you live to detroit where former florida governor jeb bush will be discussing tax reform,

middle-class issues and the economy today. this event is hosted by the detroit economic club and should be getting underway in just a few moments. >> [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> as you can see we are live in detroit. the detroit economic club today hosting a speech i former florida governor jeb bush. mr. bush is expected to talk about tax reform, middle-class issues and the economy. is remarked should be getting

underway in just a few moments live on c-span2. we can bring this to because the senate has gone into recess for a bipartisan conference luncheon, the lunch has been put together by republican conference chair john thune and senator chuck schumer. it's the first formal joint lunch for the respected party caucuses in nearly two years. the senate will be back in session at 2 p.m. eastern today. live coverage will continue then on c-span2. at some point there could be a procedural vote in the senate on the house passed homeland security spending bill. yesterday the senate failed to move forward with that bill. that measure also blocks funny for president obama's executive order on immigration. also the senate armed services committee today is holding a daylong hearing on the confirmation of the nomination of ashton carter president obama's nominee to be the next secretary of defense. that is live on c-span3, through

the day today. if you missed any of it we will have it for you in its entirety tonight at 8 p.m. eastern on our companion network c-span. here we are waiting for former florida governor jeb bush, his remarks should be starting shortly. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. my name is beth chapel, on the president and ceo of the detroit economic club, and what a pleasure it is to welcome you here to this very special meeting today. if you would kindly take a moment and silence any cell phones or any devices that might be disruptive we would appreciate that very much. then i would like to invite you to stand please enjoy me for the pledge of allegiance and an invocation. the flag is to my right.

of the united states of america, and to the republic for which it stands: one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> kiley remain standing. are invocation will be delivered from reverend don right. >> let us pray. .com we meet again in a time of crisis and despair from violence in our cities to atrocities committed by isis. -- >> we are having some technical problems with the audio at this event with jeb bush. we hope to bring it to you live. we work on the problem and we will have it for you later in our program schedule. the senate is in recess right now to attend a bipartisan conference luncheon tickets the first formal joint lunch for the party caucuses in nearly two years. the senate would be back at 2 p.m. eastern time. live coverage will continue on

c-span2 at that point. at some point this afternoon that could be procedural vote on the house passed homeland security spending bill. that measure the senate yesterday failing to move forward with that bill. the measure also block funding for president obama's executive order on immigration. now from today's "washington journal," representative gene green who is the ranking member on the energy and commerce health subcommittee joined us today to talk about republican efforts to repeal the affordable care act, the white house budget for fy 2016 and other issues. >> host: gene green, democrat from texas and a member of the energy and commerce health subcommittee rick member. good morning. we know now because of the vote that took place yesterday come up with some type of alternative to the affordable care act. which the energy and commerce department or the committee's

role in this? >> guest: i would be glad to be a part of fixing what's wrong with the affordable care act. it's been five years now and my republican colleagues talk about eliminating the affordable care act but they haven't come up with a solution forward. that's the problem. what we did is not perfect. there's never a perfect piece of legislation that passes congress or any legislative body but if you want to go back and say let's fix some of the things that's wrong with it, i would be glad to be a part of that. but the repeal is just not come yesterday we voted for the 56th time to repeal that. how often get to be told know it's not going to happen that you 86 times? i would love to see what they would do to replace it. michael has always been access to health care for my constituents. i do represent a wealthy area in houston did we have a high percentage before the affordable care act of people who worked who didn't get insurance through their employer.

20000 of my constituents did during the first law of the affordable care act, the insurance now that they didn't have before. >> host: do you believe the republicans can come up with a viable alternative? >> guest: they talked about for good well. it is difficult. when the democrats did we win the majority. it was tough. we fought with each other over how to do it. it is not difficult because you have to make some decisions. obviously, people want health care but how to get there is the tough part. >> host: but to the question to think they can come up with something that works? >> guest: i wish them luck to can't like to see what they come up with because i would like to work with them. >> host: you said you had issues. what would those be? >> guest: we had a house bill and our bill for example, they should teach a great of growth payment for medicare doctors we fixed that permanently. the senate when they did they didn't do it so here we are back trying to work again on trying to fix how we pay our doctors and treat medicare patients.

that should've been done but i'd like to do that. the house did not include the medical device tax. we paid for it in different ways and so if there's a way we can come up with the money other than medical device tax time for it because that wasn't something we wanted to do. i think there's domestic manufacturing and some creativity to an extent where as our european friends, you know they don't have to pay that tax. >> host: with several callers talk about cost specialist of the engines under the affordable care act. what has to be done to control cost? >> guest: in the big picture the control of cost has gone down the last few years the first time in our history. part of it is because the affordable care act. our system before come my constituents didn't have insurance they used the emergency room for their health care. that is probably the most expensive way you can ever get health care. what we are trying to do with the affordable care act and this is not a democratic idea. republicans talked about it. let's create a medical home

whether health center, physician that the insurance policy that they can treat that medical so that'll have to wait until they of a diabetic episode to show that emergency room. they can go to the doctor. i have sinus. i've had it since my '20s but i would need to the emergency room when they have a sinus problem. although that isn't happening a lot of times for those. >> host: i suspect you get your constituents will save my cost for this, they keep going on up, it would keep going on at the how to respond to that? >> guest: historically health care costs have grown dramatically. when i was in business i had to negotiate for my employees i helped manage every year this is back in the '70s and '80s. every year we would say 10 15% increases on her insurance premium for our employees. that was the '70s 80s. our jobless job was to get decent health care plan at the lowest cost. that happens everyday but in the

last few years since the affordable care act the growth of our health care costs have gone down. it's saving the federal budget a lot of money right now. >> host: a member of the health subcommittee, ranking member, representative gene green of texas from the energy and commerce committee joining us to talk with issues of health care and other matters but if your questions for him, here's how you can ask them questions. -- ask him. if you want to send a tweet and ask questions on that line come you can do so at cspanwj and send e-mail to at journal@c-span.org. echoes of the rule and the health subcommittee a question that measles. a lot of discussion about measles. for so what you think of the reports you were hearing? what's the best with the government respond if there should be a response to? >> guest: vaccinations are the

cheapest think we can do for health care. in fact, i don't know why my children, when they were growing up they got their vaccinations. my grandchildren get their vaccinations. you and i know even at our age there are things we can do. instead of getting shingles you can have a shingles vaccination. that wasn't available a generation ago. vaccinations save lives and they also say dollars. in our district again not a wealthy area. for 20 years this your we've been doing vaccinations through our hospital district, to our local committee school districts. vaccinating children before they go to school. the measles as a part of the. one year we had an outbreak of adult measles and we had to extra serum for the families who came in, not just for the children. the measles vaccine was issued a few years ago that's still around to you can go to the internet and say measles may cause off this him, the vaccine. there's just no scientific basis for that. >> host: john boehner is

bigger thousand asked about this issue said this. i don't know that we need another federal law, but i do believe all children should be vaccinated. is that you believe? >> guest: that's my belief. yesterday is probably building nancy pelosi and john boehner agreed on. they both believe in measles vaccination. we've had great success. back in 2000 recently conquered measles. with people not getting that vaccination we're seeing that happen, what happened in disneyland literally across the country house of representatives let's go to calls. leon is from fort royal pennsylvania independent line, good morning. >> caller: good morning. i wanted to ask you, to a little bit about your -- >> host: leon go ahead. >> caller: can you tell me a little bit about how you're covered personally? dummy how much your premiums are and how much your deductible is? and also, and also how can we be

18 trillion heading to $20 trillion in the red and we will be able to afford this affordable care act? >> guest: first of all the affordable care act was totally paid for under the congressional budget when we pass that in 2010. people didn't like it was going to be paid for but it was paid for. it's not costing one dime. it's saving money from the national debt. personally i've always worked at a job, a company that had insurance but, in fact, i said earlier i learned to print a newspaper. after got a college i helped manage a negotiated insurance premiums. we've always had one. my personal interest right now is up until the affordable care act, members of congress were under the federal employees benefit plan but there was an amendment in the bill -- >> "washington journal" of everydayeveryday at 7 a.m. eastern but we leave this to take you live to

the detroit economic club for remarks by former florida governor jeb bush. >> i am very proud of my son who got the highest vote total force% choice of a candidate running for statewide office in texas george is going to great job on the part of the but i'm pretty but also of 41 and 43. i love them very much. i know that's hard for the political world to accept. [applause] but it's pretty easy for me to love them. i love them unconditionally. now that therapists can opine about the niger to talk about that. sandy, i really appreciate the chance to be here. i'm delighted to be your because you are part of a great story the revival of the city that means so much to all americans. these past few years when confronted with great challenges, you've seize the opportunity to reform the city you love.

you've begun to repair the damage done by decades of mismanagement and empty promises. i want to congratulate governor rick snyder for his leadership. i want to acknowledge secretary of state with where the johnson and general shooting for being here. and mayor mike duggan for his determination to serve the city of his birth but also want to recognize as will the hard work of kevyn orr who i'm proud to say is a son of florida. and find a want to recognize all those who involved in making really difficult and often painful decision to look, your work is not complete but your efforts have captured the attention of our nation because across the united states were asking ourselves the same questions. how do we recapture prosperity and opportunity that once defined cities like detroit? how do we restore america's faith and the moral promise of our great nation that any child born today can reach further than their parents? this is a really urgent issue.

far to me americans live on the edge of economic ruin. and many more feel like they're stuck in place working longer and harder even as they are losing ground. tens of millions of americans no longer see a clear path to rise above their challenges. something is holding them back. not a lack of ambition not a lack of hope, not because they are lazy or see themselves as victims. something else. something isn't artificial weight onto their shoulders. today and the coming weeks i will address this critical issue and i will offer a new vision, a plan of action that is different from what we've been hearing in washington, d.c. it's a vision rooted in conservative principles, and tethered to our shared belief in opportunity and the unknown possibilities of a nation given the freedom to act, to create, to dream and to rise. we see that believe every day in

action, in the oil and gas fields once given up for dry we now assuring america's energy security. in hospitals we are extending life and beating back once untreatable diseases. in charter schools we are connecting students to their incredible potential. in labs and hacker spaces invention comes from every corner of society. and the world still comes to america to learn how to create and to innovate. people know this country can be more than it is today and that each one of us can and must be part of it. but i also know this as well. we have a lot of work to do. today americans across the country are frustrated. they see only a small portion of the population writing the economies of escalator. it's too enough we've seen recent good games with welcome news for the economy but it is very little and it has come very late. six years after the recession ended, median incomes are down, households are on average for

common millions of people have given up looking for work altogether. roughly two out of three american households live paycheck to paycheck. any unexpected expense can push them into financial ruin. we have a record number of americans on food stamps and living in poverty. the recovery has been everywhere in the family paychecks to the american dream has become a mirage for far too many. so the central question we face here in detroit and across america is this. can we restore that dream that moral promise that each generation can do better? if we can't answer that question look, no tax no welfare program will save our system for our way of life. because america's moral promise is broken when someone is wealthy. it's broken when achieving success is far beyond our imagination. america is a place where as lincoln drink any person quote they look forward and hope to be hired i hired labor this year and the next work for himself,

and finally to hire men to work for him, unquote. america though has not given up on the dream of lincoln. the dream of lincoln is alive at 5 a.m. at a bus depot in a distant suburb or an inner-city as workers get the jobs in hotels and restaurants and hospitals. the dream is alive in the breath of a construction worker running cable under a city street in the bitter nightmare. the dream is alive in a in the college student driving and newburgh our part-time graduate debt-free. lincoln's dream is alive every day and that every moment when people choose to buy a home start a business enroll in school or save for the future. they know such commitments are not easy and they don't pay off right away but they're worth doing. if americans are working harder than ever, or in less than they once did, our government, our leaders should step up offer a plan, fix what's wrong, or they should step aside.

let's ask him we got to this point and let's start in detroit. because in essence the troubles of detroit those that they face, or an echo of the troubles facing washington, d.c. decades of big government policy, heady politics impossible to meet pension promises, chronic mismanagement and broken services combined with the massive loss of jobs in the auto industry drove tens of thousands of people from the city and this region. for example, detroit under the previous administration or under a previous admission was so proud of shutting down businesses that have not paid or licenses and. they bragged about it in press releases. the city threaten nearly 900 businesses with closure and follow-through on nearly 400 businesses literally shutting them down. many of these were small businesses run out of homes and ally face and rogers run by people who just wanted to take that first step up the economic ladder. one of those business owners,

derek little, had a simple way to describe his frustration. i'm running a legit business. they could be doing something better. and while the city was shutting down people who were trying to build a business it couldn't do its job correctly. the city was losing money writing parking tickets. i don't know how you can manage that. of course, on amtrak they lose money on the snack cart. they literally have a captive audience. it's an incredible feat but a government inefficiency isn't just irritating, it's instructive. if the government can't collect parking fines over self max -- sell snacks are doing, how would government enable every system to move up in life? that's why i have launched the right to rise backs as a wispy druggable don't want to wait for the government to deliver prosperity. they want to earn it themselves. government isn't the only issue here. there's far more at work. fixing government policy is the easiest problem to solve and

it's the one that is most responsive to the demands of voters. so in getting involved in politics again because that's where the work has to begin. the opportunity gap is the defining issue of our time. more americans are stuck at their income levels than ever before. it's area are for people to go from the bottom rungs of the economy to the top or even to the middle. this should alarm you. it has alarmed me. the problem starts when we fear the one thing that could help unlock the economic status quo, the freedom to compete and work as a team to build great things. competition is messy, but it's essential. we have seen all the battles. the cab companies fight the web enabled car services. the restaurants fight against the food trucks. the brick-and-mortar retailers fight against the internet companies. look, i'm not here to take sides and i don't think government should be there. when government protects one business against another or tilts the field of competition,

there is a clear loser. anyone who wants to read something is the team to anyone who wants to innovate and shake things up anyone who wants more choices and better service, and we know that in the end standing against the petition and dynamism is a losing battle. in 1955 60 years ago the fortune 500 list first appeared. of the companies on that list fully 88% don't even exist today or have fallen away. today's fortune 500 will be replaced by new companies that are just starting today. this is hard for some people to accept. because entrenched interests don't like giving up what they have. that's why they fear small companies who have nothing to lose. you know the stories. the president of michigan savings bank impart some wisdom to a young lawyer or a small startup company. the horse, the bank president said, is here to stay. but the automobile is only a

bad. the small startup that lawyer represent was the ford motor company. we can laugh about it now because ford and the other innovators of detroit and economic freedom to compete and to prove the doubters wrong. our nation has always found such economic freedom because and economic freedom each citizen has the power to propel themselves forward and upward. this really is not understood in washington, d.c. you can see why. it's a company can. the company is government. it's all they know. for several years now they have been right closely degrading the value of work, the incentive to work in the reports of work. we think about the definition of a full-time job for 40 hours to 30 hours, slashing the ability of the paycheck garners to make ends meet. we have seen them great welfare programs and tax rules that punish people with lost benefits and higher taxes for moving up.

those first rungs of the economic ladder. instead of a safety net to cushion our occasional false they have built a spider web that traps people in perpetual dependence. we have seen them way the rules that help so many people escape welfare. the progressive and liberal mindset believe that to every problem there is a washington, d.c. solution. but that instinct doesn't solve any problems. other than the problem of how to keep washington's regional economy well lubricated and the cost is enormous. let's say you're a hard-working middle-class family. you work hard pay your mortgage on time. as president obama likes to say you play by the rules. but for president obama one of the rules is this. he reserves the right to change the rules. just last month he thought was a good idea to tax by 29 college savings plans but remember, i 29th are great to be tax-free ways to save for college. and literally hundreds of thousands of people have done so. millions in fact have started them for the kids and grandkids.

so it's no surprise people hated the president i didn't, thankfully he dropped it. but it was instructed us a lesson. saving for college is the responsible thing to do but instead of embracing 529's the liberals moved to tax them. it's frustrating but it shows how they think. if you want to know how to act ask sharon to delay. sharon found a recruiting company in westerville, ohio. here's what she said. it's as if the politicians and regulators in washington want me to fail. and spent all the time thinking up new ways to ensure that i do. you either want me to be the engine of the economy or you don't. here's a message for sharing and millions like her. there is a better way. let's define this path first by four principles of the right to rise society. because once we do the policies the laws and the way

forward becomes a lot clearer. let's start with the first principle. when it comes to ensuring opportunity and a chance at success, the most important factor isn't government. it's a committed family. social science us across the ideological spectrum agree on this. you want to predict whether someone will graduate from school, go to college and move forward in life, you just have to find that one thing. where the race and 11 household by two parents? if you didn't, you can overcome it but it's really hard. if you did have a built-in advantage in life. the evidence is overwhelming. every child has a greater chance that opportunity when they're raised by loving caring supportive parents and a committed family. this isn't the work of government but it's critical that government leaders recognize that and support it. a second principle, and this one is often overlooked growth above all. a growing economy weather here in detroit or throughout this country is the difference between poverty and prosperity

for millions. you want to close the opportunity gaps, grow the economy this is a principle that concentrates the mind. if they a law or a rule does contribute to growth, why do it? if the law subtracts him growth why are we discussing it? and for what it's worth i don't think the united states should settle for anything less than 4% growth a year, which is about twice the current run rate estimated by most economist at that rate the middle class can thrive again and in the coming months i intend to detail how we can get there with a mix of smart policies and reforms to tap our resources and capacity to innovate, whether it's in energy manufacturing, health care or technology. third, the right to rise depends on a government that makes it easier to work them not to work. that means fewer laws restricting the labor market and reducing the penalties that come with moving up from the lowest rungs of the ladder. fourth, to address the income

gap let's close the opportunity gap. that starts with doing everything we can to give every child from every neighborhood a great education. this won't happen overnight trust me, i know. but it takes every tool we have every tool. accountability for teachers and school administrators assessment for student learning, high, rigorous standards and school choice across the board. these are the key elements that makes education worked for more and more of our students. and we have the results to prove it. finally, let's embrace reform everywhere especially in our government. let's start with the simple principle of who holds the power. i say give washington last and give states and local governments more. we make multibillion-dollar infrastructure decisions based on a labor law written in 1921. president obama proposes making rules on the internet using laws written in the 1930s. we regulate global airlines

using laws written for railroads. our immigration laws were written half a century ago. government policy seems frozen, incapable and fearful of change. it's been the way to be honest with you and we deserve better than this. if we don't transform ourselves to meet the new challenges and seize new opportunities, we know what happens next. look around this city it in its history there's a warning to all of us. a century ago detroit was america's great innovation hub at the silicon valley of its age but it was bigger than chicago. it was the nation's wealthiest city in 1960. detroit with the world on wheels and created the jobs that lifted millions of americans into the middle class. this city was the arsenal of democracy and delivered deliver the arms needed to defend freedom across two oceans. detroit promise prosperity, and it delivered. sunset sharecroppers coming up from the south, south, farmhands from the upper midwest, immigrants

who spoke polish jewish, greek and arabic. their children settled. they prospered. some of their grandchildren are in this room today. and now you are rebuilding the city. i know you will be that great city again because americans by nature work and strive to succeed. it's already happening. in the madison building not far from your new companies are rising to one of them i've rule, is led by two young men one born in russia, the other initial. they left secure jobs as automotive engineers to start their business in 2009 at the very bottom of the recession. i imagine it wasn't a terribly popular decision with their spouses here's what one of them said. we know detroit has its baggage that we believe we are part of a solution. three years later 21 employees including the father of the cfo. must be nice to higher your dad. i thought about it but these

kind of retired. this activities happening downtown in an area once ignored. another detroit entrepreneur grew up in the suburbs. he rarely came downtown as a child but today he works here. he lives here. and here's what he said. we see this city for what it can be, not for what it was. that's how we should see everything, not just detroit but in all of america. i know some anything conservatives don't care about the cities, but they are wrong. we believe that every american in every community has the right to pursue happiness. they have the right to rise. so i say lets go where ideas will matter the most them where the failures of liberal government policies are most obvious. let's deliver real conservative success. and you know what will happen? we will create a whole lot of new conservatives. i know because i've lived it. i come from ina, another city that faced the same struggles as

detroit has faced. in my city the schools were failing to opportunity with scarce were too many. simply being born in the wrong neighborhood meant the american dream was cruelly out of reach. i join with my friend the longest-serving head of an urban league in the united states and a courageous leader in the civil rights movement. we decided the right to rise is also a civil right. so we went to work to change education in florida. and boy, did we. we great school support the true accountability so moms and dads know exactly where schools stand. we raised expectations and standards and we assessed faithfully to the standard. we made sure every child counted in the system that they were cast aside if they're there struggling readers or had problems. we eliminated social promotion in third grade. this insidious halted that exist in most parts of our country where if you're functioning illiterate your passed along to fourth grade with the caps begin to grow and grow and grow, and

the social cost grow as well. we expanded school choice programs in every capacity weather was digital learned, vouchers or for the expansion of charter schools. and the net result after 10 years of struggle, and believe me, that tire marks on my forehand are there for this reason, we moved the needle in student learning. florida is the state that has consistently improved the gap between outcomes amongst african-american and white students. florida's hispanic kids are the best of any hispanic group hispanic students in the united states. in fact, two grade levels ahead of the average in the united states. our graduation rate was 50 of out of 50 states. we have moved it successfully each and every year to the point where if something without a 25- 25-26% gain in the graduation rate and that will continue to grow. so don't let anybody tell you that it's not possible with reform and leadership to be able

to move the needle. my guess is that hundreds of thousands of kids that now can read and write are going to be living productive lives in miami. and we will be blessed as a community because of that. all communities ought to be able to do that, and having a reform orientation is part of that strategy. while there's much to do, much more to do because this is a continuous journey, we have seen lives change and hope restore. you can do it and he toured. we can do it across america. because this morning, 320 million americans got up and they are on 320 million different paths of life. it's our goal to see them succeed. it's our responsibility to do everything possible to help them. because by their success they will not only build prosperity for themselves, they will renew the promise of this nation. where everyone has the right to rise. those are the stakes. that's why we are here. please join me in this cause.

thank you all very much, and may god bless detroit and they can't less america -- and may god bless america. [applause] >> governor, thank you so very much. we have some questions for you. actually we have a lot of questions for you. start with the first one. you talk a lot about education. want these education such a big issue for you as your time as governor and now that you're potentially considering a presidential run? >> well, it was important for a lot of reasons. one, you ask governors around the country what's the number one thing that they can do to create the best business climate. increasingly it's transforming the k-12 system and making sure

that the community college system and higher education is oriented towards helping deal with this this opportunity gap excellence in economic development issue for sure. but it's also i think a great moral issue of our time. a third of our kids around of their, depending on how you measure a third of our kids are truly college or career ready. that's just slow-motion tragedy. in the world we are moving towards where automation and acceleration of innovation is making it harder and harder for the first job to be great for people that are unskilled. imagine what it would be like 10 years from now or 20 years from now if we continue to just blame it on poverty plan of this complaint on that, excuse the way why we have so few kids that can enter the military or so few kids that have to take don't have to take remedial classes if you want to go to college. and so few kids that have the

career skills to be up to get a job. so it's an economic issue but it's also a huge moral issue. our country doesn't do this well. these huge gaps that exist that are not increasingly because of education outcome this is not the america that is lead the world. other countries might be able to deal with this better. we do better when everybody has a chance to rise up. unless i'm missing something if you don't have a quality education, if you can't read and write and calculate math, have a sense of why this matters in your own life no matter what drive yes i think a lot of young people have huge drive and determination to succeed but they won't have the skills the capacity to do so. i hope everybody -- i would like to see more people marching in the streets for rising student achievement. less people marching in the streets that might important for them but rising student achievement should be the highest calling for all of us and we should be outraged that it's not happy to the degree that it should. >> your last name is bush.

>> that's what i've been told. >> many people wanted to make sure you knew that. what impact is having a father and a brother who have served as president way on your decision to potentially run? >> well, on one level i got a front-row seat to kind of watch history unfold, a unique seat, has given me some perspectives that are helpful. and on another level i know it's an interesting challenge for me. one that i have to, if i'd been a degree of self-awareness, this would be the place where it might want to be applied. and so if i was to go beyond the consideration of running i would have to deal with this and turned this, this fact into an opportunity to show who i am to connect on a human level with people so people began, and offer ideas that are important to people so that when they

think of me they think that i'm on their side, that i care about them and that the issues i'm passionate about will help them rise up. so that's a really compelling strategy but that's the god's honest truth. i've done this as governor. i ran when my brother was governor and my dad was just out of president, and there i ended up losing the first time, which by the boy for those who are thinking, it's always better to run against a bad candidate been a good candidate. i proved that 1984. i lost against a guy who never lost. i had better luck the next time. and gain that experience i knew i had to share my heart. i had these deeply held views about education, for example but people didn't connect with me. so when the attack started they didn't shrug their shoulders. a problem in politics but you've got to care for people before you can get their vote.

so 1998 i had the same views about education by which a visit 250 schools. trust me, by the end of that journey people knew that it wasn't just the brother of george w. and the son of my beloved dad. i was my own person but i earned it by working hard to connect with people on a level that truly mattered. so that experience on a national scale has got to be part of the strategy. i love my my dad. and i find that is the greatest man alive and if anybody disagrees we will go outside unless you are 6'5" and 250 and much younger than me, then we will negotiate. i'm still not going to change my mind for sure. and i love my brother and i think he's been a great president. it doesn't bother me a bit to be proud of them and love them but i know for fact if i'm going to be successful going beyond the consideration that i'm going to have to do it on my own. >> a couple years ago you spoke at the mackinac policy conference and he spoke a lot

about immigration reform. you touched on it in your remarks. where does this nation need to go in terms of immigration reform and what are its prospects for actual success? >> great frustration. this should be the lowest hanging fruit, to be honest with you because this is a huge opportunity. immigration is not a problem. the immigrant experience in our country makes us unique and special and different, and it is part of our extraordinary success over time. so while the political fights go on we are missing this opportunity. i view it as that. iv fix a broken system as a huge opportunity to get to that 4% growth. it were going to stick around to the 2% run great, a little higher this quarter a little bit high the last but that's what economists say, the new normal. have you heard that term? the new normal is european-style growth. if you're going to do that than the demands are going to overwhelm all other people. if we grow at 4% but all sorts of policies but immigration has

to be part of that. we need young dynamic people that can make an immediate occupation to our economy. we shouldn't be careful of this. we should say what an incredible opportunity. and so i would hope that that mentality of shifting just an economic issue rather than a political issue will be helpful. it starts with reading confidencconfidenc e that the federal government can enforce the border. they need to secure the border. first and foremost to there's no denying that. that ought to be the highest priority. i don't think the president should use his executive authority we is gone beyond his constitutional power. that creates a greater doubt as well. i don't think that people are totally confident that the e-verify system we have in place right down is working to the extent that it needs to so we need to fix that. i know for a fact that people are surprised that 40% of undocumented workers undocumented people in our country have come with a legal visa and they just overstated their time.

a great coach i figure out a way to deal with the issue. so once we got that done, then it seems to me we ought to be strategic about this. shift away from family reunification being almost the sole driver of illegal immigration to narrowing that do what every other country has spouse and minor children, and dramatically expanding immigrants that are coming to work. a guest worker program to do in the areas where there are shortages. the high skills agenda that is desperate important for us where h-1b1 visa holders language and don't get, don't get their status improved. investors, dreamers, people that come to our great universities all these people should be welcomed in a in the country and the unwritten contract ought to be embrace our values and you can pursue your dreams in this great country. and by doing so your greatest opportunity for more people. because if we don't do that, 10

years from now i'm guessing and i hope this is the case that everybody in this room will be 10 years older. and family formation rates in this country are at an all time low. and birth rates are below breakeven. there are more single women than married women in this country for the first time in our history. our demography could be huge strength or high sustained economic growth, or if we do nothing of it will end up becoming a significant problem. they be not as bad as japan or as your buddy significant problem. shifting just an economic driver i think is important to sandy one other thing that is really important and that is we see the struggles of immigration in places like japan where race is the identifier basically of national identity. or europe where there are many immigrants that come but they are not necessarily embraced as full europeans were full french or german or whatever. the american experience works when people embrace a set of

shared values. it doesn't work when we divide ourselves up in our disparate parts. so i would urge every state to focus on how do we expand civic education as well. we should love our country. we should have come we should embrace our heritage and we should encourage immigrants to do so as well. and that will reestablish this unique american experience which is you come you work hard to embrace these values and your as un-american as a but who came on the mayflower. that's the america that will yield great, great results. [applause] governor, any truth to the rumor that you approached about being nfl commissioner back in 2006? that java might be open again. >> yes, it's kind of a true actually. i saw roger's pay package wow.

he's got a tiger by the tell right now. it's not as easy a job as it appeared in 2007 but actually i was encouraged to consider it's not as though it's going to be granted me but there were owners that asked me about it. and it was nine months prior to my tenure as ending my tenure as governor. to be honest with you that is the greatest job in the world, being governor of us david and i could never have imagined abandoning that job because i thought when i put my hand on the bible it was to swear to uphold the law for all eight years not seven years and three months. and so it took me about 10 minutes after the flattery of a couple of calls for owners to realize this is just this is not possible. and so i finished strong as governor, and strong as they could. it was a blast. that's another thing i encourage. if you're going to run run against a bad candidate and run for governor because it's the best job in the world. >> vaccinations are in the news.

a few potential presence of candidates have stumbled on the this week but what are your views? >> parents need to make sure their children are vaccinated. [applause] >> do we need to get into any detail of that? just seems look, it's easy, i've done this. i've said things that are misinterpreted or partially interpreted ending and then heads explode and all source of media, just create all this controversy. i think it's better just to say parents have a responsibility to make sure their children are protected, over and out. >> lots of political questions. so if i were to summarize them, it would be this. the 2012 republican presidential primary system looked like the canteen scene in star wars. how do you anticipate the 2016

-- >> heck, i get in trouble -- i'm going to get in trouble just listening to that. so look politics is chaotic. it's not the idea that there's some smoke-filled room where big dogs, men and women of all this power decide who's going to be what. that was gone a long time ago. and as the old order has been disrupted, it's been replaced by a little more of the wild west kind of process. i think this time around there's a couple things that will help republicans. one, the desire to win. it slowly sticking your head through the white house did but i'm wondering what's going on. eight years is in exile is a longtime. i think it will be some discipline to be able to recognize how important this race is for the future of the country. secondly the rnc itself has narrowed the number of debates which i think is probably helpful.

and shortened the primary process, which is as well probably helpful. so they have done what they can to take away some of the chaos. but look it's a big deal. there's a lot riding on this. so my guess is to be a lot of people running and people will hopefully focus on what therefore, why them. as i asked by a student to answer the why question why are you doing this? why you and what are you doing it? those are huge questions to answer. and not to tear down the other people all the time. i just don't see how that's productive. people are tired of it and this unity that exists is because people are being preyed upon. the anxieties are being preyed upon by people that are causally sticking their finger to the tv set saying this is bad you bet ashley or better whatever. i don't think you can govern effectively and solve problems. my belief is four or five big obligated things if they are fixed in this is the greatest

time to be alive as americans. i totally believe it and i'm not delusional. it's the gods honest truth the if anybody wants to disagree with me on that, we can go outside too. this is the time of enormous possibility. we've got to fix these things and just making points all the time and tearing down somebody is not going to work. if i go beyond the consideration of the possibility of running i hope i have the discipline not to turn back and get into the food fights that seem to been prevalent on both parties by the way. this is not just uniquely republican. >> we shall see. >> we have had a slow recovery, but more than just the u.s. economy recovery, how do we get the rest of the world to continue to grow? >> well, our growth, which because of our unique scale and the fact that we are not as dependent upon we are increasing depend but not as

dependent upon foreign economies given our scale and given the size of our consumer base and a lot of reasons, we have the chance if we can create an energy policy based on america's innovation and north american resources canada, mexico and the united states, to great the lowest cost energy source in the world over the longest period of time, to help consumers with their disposable income and to help we industrialized the country. we have a chance to lead the world. if we fix our immigration system and turn it into an economic driver for high sustained economic growth over the long haul. we can lead the world. if we fix outdated rules and a tax system that is just convoluted beyond belief, that actually is now a seat on the creation of the next generation of job creators, business start up rage right now are lower than they were i believe in the 1980s. we have seen dramatic declines. workforce participation is back to that level as well.

and so fixing a few of these things, we could grow at 4%. and trust me if we grow 4% incomes rising for the middle and people having a chance to leave poverty, we would help other countries that were prepared to policy. that countries that are not going to make it are the ones they can't deal with their endowment issues and believe that more stimulus to monetary policy and more fiscal stimulus is the answer. all you've got to do is just, you know look at greece look at these countries that haven't made the necessary structural changes and you end up with serious problems that they will never get out of. but the countries that embrace the kind of reform that we need to embrace, they are going to be fine. >> final question. how would you handle the threats that we face with a new kind of terrorism? >> so these new asymmetric threats are going to go away. you can't you can't think they are proclaiming our.

the many people back and the minute you're no longer nurturing the alliances and relationships that make this a global fight, boys are filled. so as we pulled back from the middle east -- voids national look what happened to the would have with isis and see. look at what happened with isis in iraq. the big victory in yemen at the present has talked about lasted about six months and now we are closed, the are no embassy personnel in yemen these capital. we have to be engaged. and it doesn't necessary mean boots on the ground in every occurrence. this is not a zero-sum game. our president always wants to frame in a way that makes it appear like he's engaged and those that don't agree with them think me those who don't agree with them he placed the are war mongers. engaged diplomatically in terms of intelligence gathering come in terms of military that we are totally engaged that we have relationships with our strongest

allies where they never doubt us. ask israel today about what does the united states have their back? ask eastern european countries are the baltic countries, does the united states have their back? there's growing concern that we have pulled back to ask the middle eastern countries do we have her back? and the answer there is not with great certainty that they believe that. so being engaged doesn't have to mean, you know launching attacks but it does mean that engagement creates the possibility of dealing with this over the long haul. we have to be engaged in this because this is a significant threat to our own national security and economic growth and prosperity for america. i don't know what that makes me but everybody has to have a title. what would you call me sandy? >> president? [applause] thank you.

i need to make one shameless plug if you don't mind. i have come if you're interested in learning more about the right to rise pac and the right to rise in general you can text 44144 and put rise in it and you'll get information to thank you all very much. thank you for letting me. >> thank you so much, governor. [applause] ..

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> sydney awards are given for the best magazine essay that they hear and they can be in journals or "the new yorker," the atlantic or it's your literary magazines. any idea if they all come out around christmas we train christmas and new year's. the idea is that it's a good week to sit back and not read newspaper articles, but to step back and have the time to read something deeper and something longer and to celebrate those longer pieces. i do believe magazines change history. the new republic, until its recent destruction was the most influential magazine in the 20th century. it created a voice for modern liberalism. it barely existed until the national review gave it a voice.

>> the senate returns at 2:00 eastern for further work on the house passed homeland security spending bill. we understand there will be a boat at 2:45 eastern time. funding for the security department runs out at the end of the month. we spoke with senate historian donald ritchie laster about investigations held in the kennedy caucus room including the truman committee investigations of world war ii and the fulbright hearing sunday at non. this runs about 30 minutes. we will show u.s. much as we can before the senate returns. >> the run russell senate caucus building has noticed many senate investigations. in the second of a two-part program, senate historian don

ritchie tells us about the 1940s to the present day including a 1954 army-mccarthy series and the watergate investigation. >> people come into this room all the time. it is used for lunches. it is used for receptions. it is used for lectures meetings, awards ceremonies all sorts of things happen here. it is a great room. it is just a wonderful setting. immediately, people are impressed by the dimensions of the room. the wonderful carvings of the fixtures here, the great chandeliers and a history that even has a plaque on the wall and the famous events that take place in this room. i was once asked by radio correspondent to describe this room to a radio audience that couldn't see it. i said this room always reminds me of grand opera because it's a magnificent setting. when there's investigation, it usually has a large convoluted

lot and everyone sits around waiting for the witness. television came along in 1947. the first televised hearing was general george marshall on the foreign relations committee. it was that he was the american foreign-policy secretary of state at the time and it was one of the big issues of the day. >> europe is still emerging from the devastation and dislocation of the most destructive war in history. within its own resources, europe cannot achieve within a reasonable time economic stability. the solution would be much easier if wars if all the nations of europe were cooperating, but they are not. >> the real excitement of television right here didn't happen until 1950, when a freshman democratic senator from tennessee name estes kiefer we

can especially investigation into organized crime, the mafia or the crimes and cities of the country. and he started going around with the committee to the cities rather than have everyone come to washington, they went to new orleans, st. louis, kansas city, detroit, chicago, new york and made the circuit. well, when it got to new orleans the local tv station preempted howdy duty, which was a big kid's show at the time and pressed the hearing and that got a lot of attention in new orleans and people were glued to it because this was senators and mobsters. it was a great combination of investigation. a lot of really shocking evidence is coming across. so as kefauver traveled from the tv started picking up on this. it was a little bit like a broadway show getting to the great white way in new york

networks were national networks. so wasn't just local television anymore. one of the witnesses was frank costello who was a monster in new york and they came to washington and came into this room to cover it. housewives were holding parties and inviting all their friends over to watch this because it was the best daytime television ever at this point. and it turned estes kefauver into an unlikely presidential candidate. he ran in the 1952 primaries. he did very well. he didn't get the nomination. in 1956 he ran for vice president. a lot of other senators obviously noted that television really identified them as a major player with the stature and certainly turned them into presidential candidates. and then in 1953 senator joseph mccarthy from wisconsin, chairman of the old

truman committee, the permanent subcommittee investigation. mccarthy had been a senator since 1947. he had gotten into the anti-communism business in 1950 when he went to wheeling west virginia, to give a lincoln day talk and held up a piece of paper and said i can't give all the names, but i hold in my hand a list of the known communists in the state department and the secretary is not doing anything about it. he had a specific number. at the time mark mccarthy was reading from notes, not a speech. even he couldn't remember what he said. he may choose lines all around the country in mccarthy's suddenly became the nation's number one red hunter and this was a time when alger hiss case was going on, the rosenberg case was going on. mccarthy had nothing to do with his and rosenberg that he

was making charges against all the people including marshall and secretary of state dean acheson and all sorts of other people who are implicating the vast communist conspiracy. when he got to be chairman of the committee the investigation, the senate sort of felt that he would get off of that issue because there already was an anti-communist subcommittee and it had jurisdiction over the communist issues. the mccarthy thought that is investigating committee had jurisdiction over everything and he could do what he wanted. and he was looking around to hire a chief counsel. he had some senior people and some people with decent reputations people like john sirotka who later became a judge in the watergate case. he looked at robert kennedy as a possible counsel, but instead he hired roy can all come a prosecutor from new york who worked in the justice department. this was a big mistake because

mccarthy needed somebody to slow him down. we sometimes lose control and needed a mature force. for this very yard and a totally ruthless person and hate mccarthy on and brought out the worst. he had done a lot of oral history with people who worked here at the time. mccarthy had sort of a villainous image in the history books. almost all the people who worked for him really generate light general brecon. he's the only senator who gave us half a christmas present, for instance. he's the kind of person you went out of his way to help people. he was lending money to capitol police. but when he would get in front of the cameras it was dr. jekyll and mr. hyde. just a different side of his personality came out. he was shocked that people liked him. >> mr. simons, i am glad we run television. i think the millions of people

can see how low a man can think. i repeat, they can see how low an alleged man can sink. >> the cameras were turned off. he would walk out the door and throw his arm. he was just a very odd person in a lot of ways. he was a totally an act investigator. he was not focused enough to be able to do the hard work. cohen was also not a really good investigator in the long run. they called up hundreds of witnesses to calm to talk in closed session. we recently published the closed session. it was clear they were reversals. mccarthy was looking for her to bring out before the tv cameras. if a person groveled at the carthy or if a person absolutely stonewalled mccarthy, they were likely to be called to a

public session. if on the other hand the person said it's true in 1932 i was a member of the communist party and the economy is collapsing, but after all of every last mccarthy was ridiculous and i got out and signed germany in 1939 and this is now. they had to have a reasonable explanation of the behavior. they were much less likely to be called out in public. mccarthy wanted people who were either going to humble themselves or were going to look at stonewalling the investigation. we know now that because of the inner set that there were spies in the government in the 1940s. practically no one that mccarthy paid a great amount of attention to was involved in spying. he missed the boat. the activities committee actually has a much better track

record in terms of investigating. mccarthy floundered around. at the end of 1953, however, roy cohen started investigation of the army signal corps in new jersey. and he convinced mccarthy that they had finally found a link because julius rosenberg went to work there and he was sure there was still a rosenberg fiery network. and eventually the army left 32 engineers be suspended because of the investigation. as the investigation was going on, it turned out mccarthy didn't have evidence on these people and most all of them or offer their jobs back some of whom refuse to go back to work. it really actually wound up hurting the investigation. the army was one day they were being able to track what was happening in the world and that

crippled the mccarty investigation. in the middle of all of this one of mccarthy staff members an unpaid man named david shyne got drafted. he was a young man and he got hired as an army private. no mccarthy and roy cohen. he totally had a crush on david shyne. cohen tried to get shyne and win in as private. they try to bombard the army with requests for david shyne to get weekends off. he was going to lead into all the rest of it. the army tried to placate mccarthy. they did want to make you mad. after all it got to be too much. finally the army charged that mccarthy was continuing the investigation that blackmailed them into special treatment for

private shyne. mccarthy responded that the army was holding him hostage to stop the investigation. said on the senate had to investigate and this is senator mccarthy's own committee, but he's one of the plaintiffs essentially. he had to step down as chairman and then it became the army versus mccarthy. of course, the president of the united states with republican president, dwight d. eisenhower spent his entire adult life in the army. so the one institution that president eisenhower identify the most with was the institution that mccarthy was invested in. so now the entire eisenhower administration came down on the other side and a lot of republicans who had been supporting mccarthy realized they needed to support the road at this point. the mccarthy hearings were on

television. abc, which was that their television network at the time covered it gavel to gavel during the day. abc had very little daytime programming. cbs and nbc covered it at the beginning, but they went back to their soap operas pretty quickly and at night they would do the highlights. they would make a special program in the evening. so if you would work during the day, you would still catch up with mccarthy at night. during the day again i do oral histories, and a lot of people came out from school and my mother was sitting up watching television. she never did that. she was watching the army-mccarthy hearing. senator mccarthy was no longer chairman of the committee, so he couldn't control it, that he had away as make ensure that he was a major dough ball and olive this by interrupting.

as soon as the first witness tried to speak point of order mr. chairman, point of order. with badger the witnesses and raise questions about their credibility and imply that they were all communists. [inaudible conversations] >> the chair has the floor. mccarthy is speaking to a point of order. make a point of order and then speak to it. >> ladies and gentlemen, may i suggest, i'm getting awfully tired of sitting at the end of the table and having whoever wants to interact in the middle of the senate. >> even cohen that watching television at night said that it was sort of a bullying cumulus perseverance. the army had the wisdom to higher a very talented lawyer,

the boston robert welsh, who was an old-school just a country lawyer type and a very cagey truth. he badgered the white cohen and he badgered her carthy with humor through the program that developed and really got under mccarthy's skin. eventually, mccarthy attacked not welch but one of his assistant attorneys wideband a member of the national lawyers guild which was the department on the communist run. it didn't mean the people in her communist, but there were communists using this as a front organization and therefore implies that his attorney were secretly a communist. basically welch had worked on a deal with the cohen at the time. there were certain things that i didn't want him doing at the time. we will bring those up as long as you don't bring up anything

about the county attorney. and when mccarthy just couldn't control themselves and brought this up cohen was aghast and try to stop him. that is when welch at long last that have you no source of decency. he made a speech of that. >> last night -- have you no sense of decency sir at long last? have you left no sense of decency? >> i say mr. chairman as a point of personal privilege come i would like to finish this. >> there is some evidence that welch suspected mccarthy would do this and impact was prepared to do this and wasn't quite as shocked as he appeared on television at the time. but the television audience was shocked and mccarthy's personal standing really are wrote it as result of all of this. interestingly enough hollywood

hired robert welch and if you see him he's a very cagey judge. he had a certain theatrical side along the way. but he really did show maccarthy what he was and that undermines mccarthy standing among the other senators may begin investigation and in december of 1954 two months after the hearings the conduct unbecoming of a senator. all of the democrats except for john kennedy and about half of the republicans including prescott bush who was father and grandfather to president wound up voting to venture senator mccarthy. senator mccarthy was never able to regain his national standing after that. he went into a tailspin and died at the age of 48 a few years later. when way cohen stepped down as

chancellor of the committee the committee hired robert kennedy to replace him. if you go through the records of the national archive, you can see the moment kennedy leaves and cohen takes over. it's a nice tight deposition and it looks like a serious attorney is in charge. kennedy brought together a very talented staff and they began investigating and continue some of the investigations that mccarthy took up including the investigation of general lack trick in a union that was a communist dominated union. general electric is the result of this try to improve his public relations and hired ronald reagan to do the general electric theater and be a spokesman had >> at evening. john forsythe on the general electric theater and you will see product reports that show how the things that lead to a better life. a general lack ricks progress

is our most important promise. >> it changed reagan and made him less of a hollywood actor and more of a public spokesman and public figure. kennedy then, when the democrats came to chief counsel of the committee and launched investigations and so in the late 1950s this is the room where robert kennedy interrogated jimmy hoffa and other labor leaders. and his brother john f. kennedy and republican senator barry goldwater. it was for the first time that national television audiences got a chance to watch the two kennedy brothers and senator goldwater had a big impact on all of their careers. >> you can't tell us who we talk to besides you, mr. hopper and the other gentleman. i am asking you. >> you're the one who made the report to the committee and now we find that there are no

records. he merely talk to you and the other gentleman involved. >> that investigation went on to about 1960 when robert kennedy became the campaign manager for his brother's presidential campaign. john f. kennedy declared it in this room and january 1960. >> senator john kennedy of massachusetts, democrat throws his hat in the ring at a press conference. >> i am today announcing my candidacy for the presidency of the united states. >> a lot of the staff of the president investigation, who during the day investigative mccarthy at night were in the back room plane to john f. kennedy's campaign and peter salinger and mary o'brien and kenny o'donnell and a lot of people who became major players in the kennedy at the station started out on the senate staff subcommittee investigation. that was a special committee

that was created out of the labor committee and the permanent subcommittee. so there was a hybrid created. robert f. kennedy announced in 1968 that he was running for president in this room. senator edward kennedy as chairman of the judiciary committee and other committees involved. so when senator kennedy died in 2009, the senate named this room for the kennedy presents all who have served in the senate john robert and edward and i'll have some major event in their career from the jimmy hopper hearings announcing their candidacy, to chair in other investigations and nominations that were held in here. this room is now called kennedy caucus room. in 1973, the watergate hearings

opened here. watergate was a real turning point. it was a turning point for the nation and the nixon administration, but also returning point for the investigation. joe mccarthy had given a bad name to investigation. the supreme court gave a certain stigma to congressional investigation. there's a number of thoughts that came out from those that were real similar, denouncing investigations in general and saying that they really weren't good for the nation and congress was responsible. and then the watergate break-ins happen in june of 1972. i want the "washington post" covered it pretty much the rest of the press really let watergate story draw. they followed the campaign. president nixon versus george the governed in in the end nixon won an enormous victory over the government in 1972,

despite the "washington post" investigation and the stories appearing. but by january of 1973 and the stories are coming out an investigative reporter for "the new york times" and the discovery of a white house connection to the hush money that had been paid to the burglars from keeping them from spilling the beans when they were being tried. and at that point congress realized that they needed to look into it. so the senate voted to hold an investigation. like nancy pelosi, the majority leader at the time usually when a revolution is submitted to a special investigation, the person who said that the resolution he comes chairman. edward kennedy had been sure of the subcommittee at the judiciary that started looking into watergate and he suggested the creation of the special committee. people thought of edward kennedy as they president. they realized he should not have

anybody on this committee who could be seen as a presidential candidate. so he prevailed on sam urbach who is really at the end of his career. very conservative, constitutionally oriented lawyer and judge from north carolina and not a president and several other senators i kerman college joseph montoya and daniel and away who are respected by other senators but not seen as presidential candidates. republicans picked howard baker as their ranking member on the committee and sort of a mix of numbers from their caucus as well. and they began investigations. it began as closed-door amendment two public hearings. again i was in graduate school at work in the library of congress and we were just fixed on watching the hearings. pbs is broadcasting the hearings

live and the other networks were doing highlights. i had a group of college students we watched loads of watergate stories. i took a day off from work and at the library and set on the stairs for hours waiting to get my turn to come in here and i stewed over here by the column in the very back of the room and watched john dean while he was maybe in the third or fourth day of his testimony and there were all the senators up there. the room was bright light, especially in the front because of all the tv like that were there. it was like watching a hollywood set. these were tv personalities and it was just a really electric time to be here for the hearing. >> i began by telling the president that there is a cancer growing on the presidencpresidenc y and if the cancer was not renewed, the president himself would be killed by it. >> really this program now to return life to the u.s. senate. you can see the full program at

all of our capitol hill coverage and a hill coverage anytime in our hill coverage anytime in our video library at c-span.org. the senate is returning momentarily from their bipartisan conference lunch to continue work on a house passed homeland security spending bill. they will have another procedural vote at 2:45 eastern time. 2:45 be equally divided in the usual form with senators permitted to speak to up to 10 minutes each. thank you madam president. madam president, i come to the floor in my position as the vice chair of the appropriations committee, and to urge the senate to pass a clean homeland security appropriation bill. now, yesterday the senate rejected a procedural vote to take up the house homeland security funding bill. that's this is not about debating the this bill versus

that bill. there's two distinct differences. the house bill has both the funding for fiscal year 2015 in it that would take care of every single agency under the department of homeland security to defend and protect the nation but at the same time it is loaded with five immigration riders that we call poison pill riders because the president said if legislation to fund homeland security passes with these five immigration rideers, he will veto the bill. the president wants to fund an appropriation bill, so do i. the house homeland security bill if taken up by the senate would simply be a delaying tactic. we could talk, we would

debate we would offer lots of amendments on immigration and after we did lots of fast amendments on immigration it might go to the president, the president would veto it, it would come back and after all is aid and -- said and done, more gets said than gets done. we've got to pass the funding for the protecting of the homeland. yesterday the entire world was just gripped with poignancy and sorrow about the ghoulish murder of a jordanian pilot. the threat of terrorism is in the world. attacks by isil on people, the possibility of a lone wolf in our own country a cyber attack and retaliation because we dare fight back against isil or we're willing to challenge some of the other international predators directed at us. you know, we've got to protect the united states of america.

that's what the department of homeland security does. the department of defense protects us over there, the department of homeland security protects us here. after 9/11, one of the worst days in our country's history the congress came together shortly and we passed legislation to create the department of homeland security so we would take every agency that is involved in protecting the homeland, put them under one umbrella so that they could look out for us. now, we need to look out for them. every day we ask men and women who serve in the coast guard in secret service on border control, protecting our borders, in customs, making sure, you know, fraudulent products like counterfeit drugs are not crossing our borders into our country.

now we need to pass believe that. -- that bill. we need to make sure we do not have a shutdown or a slamdown when the funding expires february 27. in december, when i chaired the committee, in the closing hours of the past congress, i worked with my subcommittee chairman, senator landrieu, the vice chairman of homeland security, senator coats and we put together a crucial funding bill that totaled $46 billion to investigate in agencies that protect us. it was $1 billion more, $1 billion, and a continuing resolution. we could have taken that bill up then but there was a desire because of controversy over the president taking executive action on immigration not to do

it. so now here we are in february. now it's our time to fund a clean homeland security bill. immigration is a serious policy issue. i don't dispute that. it deserves serious debate. but don't add it as a series of riders on a funding bill. rather let's take up immigration separately. now, i remind our colleagues that in the last congress, this senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill only to have it die in the house. so we say let's pass our bill again, let's have the house take it up, and let's have a real debate on it, but in the meantime, we will have funded the homeland security bill. now, this just isn't barb mikulski talking about more government spending. every past head of homeland

security the department of homeland security, has urged the senate to pass a separate bill. tom ridge, the original chief executive of this agency. michael chertoff, who also served under president bush and janet napolitano, they're calling for it. and so am i. madam president, right now our coast guard is out there safeguarding our waterways. we in maryland, we just love our coast guard and we love them because number one they're always there for search and rescue. number two they're always there to protect our bay whether it's against a possible oil spill or drug dealers trying to sneak up the bay they're there. we also know how brave they are. we all recall how with helicopters they went in and rescued people during the horrific hurricane katrina and they to it every day. then there's secret service. secret service is in the process

of reforming itself. they need to protect the president, the vice president the first families, but you know what, they're also out there being the government g-men fighting things like credit card fraud and then there's the cyber warriors protecting our critical infrastructure, our critical infrastructure, our banking, our power grid. then there's fema. right now responding to disasters, whether it's blizzardsor hurricanes. and then there's state and local first responders. one of the programs i'm so proud of in the department of homeland security is the fire grant program. the fire grant program is a competitive grant program not an earmark program a competitive grant program where local fire departments particularly those in our rural communities, can apply for a grant to buy the necessary equipment they need to protect them so they protect us.

madam president, i know you're familiar with this in nebraska. turnout gear for a firefighter the respiratory equipment to protect their breathing the telecommunications the fire retardant, repellant material, that can cost as much as $1,000 to $2,000 per firefighter. you can't do this on pancake breakfasts. you can't do it on fish fries and chicken dinners. they need the help of their own government to be able to help them. so madam president i just say let's pass a clean homeland security bill. let's stop terrorist threats let's secure our borders let's safeguard our waterways let's make sure we're protecting our homeland and be able to move to a clean bill. madam president, i yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll.

ms. mikulski: and the abc of a quorum as we call for a quorum i ask that the time be equally divided. the presiding officer: without objection. mikulski: i note the absence of a quorum and have a unanimous consent request the time be equally divided between the parties. the presiding officer: without objection. the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from new hampshire. mrs. shaheen: i ask that the quorum call be lifted. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. shaheen: i was very pleased to hear the ranking member of the appropriations committee senator mikulski, who has done such great work on the committee and in putting together the bipartisan agreement that was negotiated last december with the chairman of the house

appropriations committee congressman rogers, that was a bill that as she pointed out funded the efforts of the department of homeland security to keep people safe, to address emergencies, to try and protect us from cybersecurity threats a whole range of efforts that go on within the department. and i wanted her to hear a comment that i just -- understand was made by the house appropriation security committee chairman john carter, a republican from texas who when he was asked about what the outcome of this debate would be on funding the department of homeland security, his comment was -- and i quote -- "ultimately, there may be a clean bill." well senator mikulski, if the house republicans the chair of

the subcommittee in the the house are acknowledging that ultimately there may be a clean bill to fund the department to do what was negotiated by you and congressman rogers last december doesn't it make sense that we should get a clean bill done now as soon as possible so there's some certainty for the department of homeland security so they can continue the planning efforts so they can continue to address the threats to our national security, shouldn't we just get this done now and stop this ideological fighting and putting at risk people in this country because of somebody's got an ideological concern about this bill? ms. mikulski: first of all, i thank the gentlelady for bringing representative carter's comments to my attention. i absolutely do agree with your analysis and actually even the comments by representative

carter. we should have a sense of urgency in passing the homeland security bill. the terrorists and the bad guys whether they're organized crime trying to get across our borders, whether there's the terrorists watching us, they're saying hey, they're so busy fighting each other they don't have time to think about fighting for ourselves so they're watching us, they're laughing at us because while we squabble and quibble and dribble, they're out there plotting against us. and, madam president -- and i say to the chair -- the ranking member of the subcommittee, i do think that there is a sense of urgency. i also want to comment on the house. when we were working in the closing hours on the actual money part of the bill, i found remarkable bipartisan consensus. left to our own, you know, analysis about how to be, you

know wise stewards of the taxpayer dollar, make those important security investments there was widespread bipartisan agreement. oh maybe a priority here or a different line item there but by and large we knew exactly what public investments to do it. and you know what, we did it within the caps, we did it within the allocation, and we got the job done. we could do this job this afternoon, i feel a great sense of urgency because while the bad guys are plotting against us, we're busy plotting how we can fight each other. mrs. shaheen: i certainly agree with the ranking member of the appropriations committee and i would just point out we have heard in the last two days from the national -- the conference of mayors, who have urged us to pass a clean bill fund the department of homeland security. we've heard from the emergency managers across this country who

are concerned about the risk to assistance for disaster relief and for fema, and we just today got a letter from the national association of counties urging the passage of a clean bill to ensure that the safety of our communities can be maintained. so this is, as you said, we should not put at risk these communities, the efforts that are going on across this country to keep the nation safe, because there are those people who are angry at the president about an executive action. we can have that debate, but we should be having that debate separately. now we need to fund this department of homeland security to ensure that there are no risks to our citizens. thank you very much, senator mikulski and thank you madam president. i yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum. a senator: will the senator

withhold? mrs. shaheen: i will. the presiding officer: thank you. the senate will receive a message from the house of representatives. the majority secretary: a message from the house of representatives. the house reading clerk: madam president, i have been directed by the house of representatives to inform the senate that the house has passed h.r. 596 a bill to repeal the patient protection and affordable care act and the health care provisionses in the health care reconciliation act of 2010, and for other purposes, in which the concurrence of the senate is requested. the presiding officer: the message will be received. mrs. shaheen: i suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from north dakota. mr. hoeven: are we in a quorum call? the presiding officer: we are. mr. hoeven: i ask the quorum call be suspended. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. hoeven: madam president yesterday i spoke about the importance of voting yes to proceed to the department of homeland security appropriation bill for 2015, h.r. 240. we are here again because that motion was unsuccessful. despite all the voices from the other side of the aisle expressing support for the department of homeland security, they refused to actually proceed to debating the bill. my friends on the other side of the aisle have expressed concern that the bill isn't 100% of what they want, but in my experience, it's rare for anyone to get 100% of what they want when it comes to passing legislation.

that's certainly true when it comes to passing an appropriation bill. i'm not talking about a vote on final passage or even a vote on amendments. i'm talking about a vote to proceed to the debate on this bill. mr. president -- madam president, in addition to the opportunity to offer amendments an important part of the debate on a bill is the ability of any senator to raise a budget point of order. my counterpart the distinguished ranking member of the department of homeland security appropriation subcommittee has pointed out that there are budget points of order against the bill, but the point i would make, in order for her to raise the budget point of order, you actually have to proceed to the bill. so i'm certainly willing to acknowledge her budget points of

order which she brought up on the floor yesterday but the point i would make is we have got to proceed to the bill in order to debate those budget points of order and in fact vote on them. mr. president, the minority -- madam president, the minority refuses to move to the bill -- mr. president. you changed on me. mr. president, the minority refuses to move to the bill because they object to the amendments added by the house of representatives. the house went through its process. the house went through its process, and now it's time for the senate to go through our process. that's how the system works. that's regular order. last week, we passed the keystone x.l. pipeline with a bipartisan vote of 62 senators after the consideration of many amendments, roll call votes on 41 amendments. since i introduced the keystone bill i certainly would have

been satisfied. we thought it would have been great if we could have just passed it with an up-or-down vote but that's not how the senate is designed to legislate. instead, we vote to proceed to a bill so that we can debate it, we can offer amendments, we can work to develop consensus. now, i'm aware that it's been a long time since we have had regular order in the senate. we're not used to bringing a bill to the floor and debating amendments. but instead of embracing regular order, something we were denied in the previous congress, we can't even proceed to debate and offer amendments on this bill, an important bill that we need to take up and address. the contents of h.r. 240 represent the bipartisan prerogatives and priorities of congress. again, the house went through

its process. what we are asking for now is for the senate to do the same, to go through our process, to go to this bill, to do the work that we were sent here to do. i discussed the merits of the bill at length earlier but i'd like to go through some of the highlights again just to remind my colleagues what's in the bill why we're here. to support the economic prosperity public safety and security of the american people. this bill provides $39.67 billion in net discretionary appropriation plus $6.4 billion in disaster funding. that includes $10.7 billion for customs and border protection, c.b.p. an increase of $119 million over fiscal year 2014. it supports record levels of

personnel, tactical infrastructure technology and air and marine assets. the bill provides $5.96 billion for immigration and customs enforcement, i.c.e., and maintains a record 34,000 adult detention beds, 3,828 family detention beds. the bill provides strong support for the secret service an organization that requires congressional oversight given some of the recent incidents. with $81 million above fiscal year 2014 funding. the bill provides the funding necessary to construct the national bioand aburo defense facility in month kansas. it provides more than $10 million for the coast guard including the eighth national security cutter that takes the

steps to secure heavy icebreaker needs with $8 million to preserve the ship polar ice. the bill supports our cybersecurity efforts both protecting government operations and working with the private sector to share threat information and protective measures. since homeland security is a national effort, the bill provides continued funding of grant programs to state and local firefighters, emergency managers and law enforcement. the bill also provides for research and development t.s.a.'s aviation security screening operations, the federal law enforcement training center and everify which supports businesses across the united states in hiring legal workers. finally, the bill provides a requested $7 billion for the disaster relief fund to assist with recovery costs for communities when they're hit by natural disasters. as indicated previously, what

this bill does not fund, what the bill does not fund is the president's executive actions. the house bill includes several amendments that are targeted at reversing the president's actions and articulating priorities for immigration enforcement. if that is concerning to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle then allow us to proceed to the bill so that we can debate these important issues. mr. president, we have returned to regular order in this chamber, and with that comes the responsibility to debate, offer amendments and vote on legislation. that's what we're asking to do. that's what we're calling on our colleagues to do. that's what the american people want us to do. that's what we're here to do. i urge my colleagues to vote in favor of proceeding to h.r. 240 so that we can do our work. with that, mr. president, i

yield the floor. the presiding officer: the senator from new hampshire. mrs. shaheen: mr. president will my colleague from north dakota the chairman of the committee on homeland security and appropriation yield for a question? mr. hoeven: mr. president, i will. mrs. shaheen: i appreciate the work that my colleague has done on this funding bill, and i think we certainly agree on the funding that's in the bill. that's not what the debate is about that we're having. but i would ask the senator from north dakota if he's heard the comments by the house appropriations homeland security subcommittee chair john carter, republican from texas who has said -- and i quote -- "ultimately there may be a clean bill." end quote. well, if the house is

acknowledging that ultimately we may have a clean bill to fund the department of homeland security, doesn't it make sense that we would move forward we would get this funding done, we would make sure that there is certainty to address the risks facing this country. we can debate immigration. i don't think there is anybody on the democratic side who doesn't want to have an immigration debate. we're happy to have it. but we should have that as a separate debate, as the republican majority knows you control the debate in the senate and so you can decide to bring up an immigration bill as soon as we pass funding for the department of homeland security. i would hope that if the house suggests ultimately there's going to be a clean bill, that we would pass it as soon as possible provide certainty and move on to debate the other issues facing this country. can i ask if my colleague from

north dakota has talked to the house appropriations homeland security subcommittee chair? and do you share his view that ultimately there may be a clean bill? mr. hoeven: mr. president i'm pleased to respond to the question from my counterpart on the department of homeland security subcommittee in the senate and i want to begin by acknowledging and stating that i enjoy working with her. we worked together on other committees and other issues and i think there will be other things we will work on together, and i'm pleased to have this discussion because this is exactly the kind of debate that we're asking for. we're asking to proceed to this bill so we can debate and in fact offer amendments. and so what we're saying is whether it's our colleagues on the house side or whether it's the members of the senate, let's follow regular order, have the discussion, have the debate, offer amendments and see where we end up.

now, i believe that the president's actions exceeded his authority in regard to his executive orders on immigration. let's have that debate. let's go to the bill so we can actually do the work we were sent here to do, where we discuss it, debate it and offer amendments. and if my esteemed colleague feels that there is an amendment she should offer that would change this bill to bring it in line with the opinions of house members or senate members then she will have the opportunity to do that, as will her colleagues, as will we. that's the point. so the answer to the question is, we don't know where we end up if we don't get started. so let's get started. that's what we're saying. please join with us. just like in our committee, we will have many committee meetings where we will debate issues and where we will take amendments from our fellow senators that are on that committee. but we can't do that if we don't bring the bill to the committee

and get started. that's what we're asking to do here on the senate floor. i yield back. mrs. shaheen: mr. president, i would just point tout my colleague that senator mikulski and i have introduced a clean bill that addresses funding for homeland security. but the fact is we find ourselves in this situation on the appropriations bill because of the riders that were attached by the house of representatives. those riders defund immigration directives that were issued by the president last year. yesterday the senior senator from texas suggested that senate democrats don't want to debate immigration. in fact, we're happy to debate immigration. and in fact this body in 2013 passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill with a very strong bipartisan vote. but the debate that we're having today is about whether we're going to fund the department of homeland security or not.

and the bill that's before us raises concerns about what's in the original clean bill that funds the department of homeland security. so as the senator from north dakota and i were just discussing senate republicans control the senate. if they want to vote on immigration measures, they can bring a bill that would do that to the floor by the end of this week because they control what we consider in the senate. but the issue that's before us today is whether or not we are going to fund the department of homeland security. and this is an issue that's critical because right now our nation faces serious national security and terrorism threats. this bill is not about the president's executive action. it's about whether we're going to fund the department of homeland security. but since we've heard from so many of our republican

colleagues that they want to discuss immigration and border security i spent some time yesterday talking about all of the important investments that a clean full-year funding bill for homeland security would make in our border security. if we don't pass a clean funding bill, we'll fail to make significant upgrades to technology on the border. we'll fail to fund expanded enforcement activities for immigration officers. if we're serious about border security, we should support a clean full-year bill to fund the department of homeland security. i also think it's instructive to note for the record that -- the presiding officer: the senator's time has expired. mrs. shaheen: i ask unanimous consent to speak for three more minutes. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. shaheen: thank you. i also think it's instructive at this time to note for the record that included in the executive actions that the republicans are trying to defund are provisions

that increase border security, prioritize enforcement resources and ensure accountability in our immigration system. the house bill that is before us today defunds takes away the money, for the new policy of prioritizing criminals and national security threats for removal from the united states. so that one of the orders that's been issued by d.h.s. that republicans want to defund directs law enforcement officers to place top priority on removing national security threats, convicted felons, gang members and illegal entrants apprehended at the border. the house bill also defunds increased and strategic border security. another one of the memos issued by d.h.s. is the southern border and approaches campaign that establishes three joint task forces to reduce the terrorism risk to the nation, combat transnational criminal organizations and prevent the

illegal flow of people and goods along our border. so that's another part of this legislation that our colleagues want to defund. it doesn't make sense if you're concerned about border security that you would want to pass a bill that includes measures to defund these efforts. so mr. president, i understand that my time has expired but i certainly hope that everybody understands what the bill before us that has those five house riders would actually do. thank you very much. i yield the floor. a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from north dakota. mr. hoeven: i'd like to take just a minute to respond to some of the points made by the senator from new hampshire. she indicated defunding provisions but understand that relates to executive action undertaken by the president. the very same prioritization in terms of enforcement is funded in the underlying bill for

enforcement of immigration law. and those prioritizations are there. and the other point i would make is the senator talks about funding the department of homeland security and their desire to fund the department of homeland security -- and their desire to do it. that's exactly what this bill does. this bill fully funds the department of homeland security. and there's really consensus between the house and senate that it does it very well. that's what this bill does. it funds the department of homeland security. so they're saying they want to fund the department of homeland security; that's what in bill does and that's why we have to proceed to it in order to accomplish a full-year funding for d.h.s. the third point i would make briefly is the senator referred

to a bill that she is sponsoring with the senator from maryland to fund d.h.s., to fund the department of homeland security and wants to proceed to that bill. the way to do that is to vote with us to get on the bill before us, h.r. 240 and you can offer that as an amendment. and we'll debate it and we'll have the vote. so if you'd like to have the opportunity to debate your legislation and vote on your legislation, then let's vote cloture on this bill. let's proceed to the bill and we'll allow you to offer amendments that amendment other amendments which we can debate and vote on. so we are offering you the opportunity to do exactly what you've asked to do. but most importantly again, i want to go back to the point i just made. this bill fully funds the

department of homeland security for the full year, and we are being blocked from going to the bill debating the bill, allowing amendments on the bill, and getting to a final product for the american people, and working with the house -- remember we've got to get something that passes the house too, to fund the department of homeland security for this ciewnt. mr. president, with that, i yield the floor.

mr. mcconnell: mr. president? the presiding officer: the majority leader. mr. mcconnell: are we in a quorum call? the presiding officer: we are not. mr. mcconnell: i notify troated motion to reconsider the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to h.r. 240. the presiding officer: question is on the motion. all in favor say aye.

those opposed no. the ayes appear to have it. the ayes do have it. the motion is agreed to. mr. mcconnell: mr. president? the presiding officer: the majority leader. mr. mcconnell: i move to reconsider the motion to ip voke cloture on the motion to proceed to h.r. 240. the presiding officer: question is on the motion. all in favor say aye. those opposed no. the ayes appear to have it. the ayes do have it. the motion is agreed to. the clerk will report the motion to invoke cloture. the clerk: cloture motion: we, the undersigned senators, in accordance with the provisions of rule 22 of the standing rules of the senate, do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the motion to proceed to h.r. 240 making appropriations for the department of homeland security for fiscal year ending september 30 2015, signed by 1 senators. -- by 17 senators. the presiding officer: by unanimous consent the mandatory quorum call has been waived. is is it the sense of the senate

that debate on the motion to proceed to h.r. 240, an act making appropriations for the department of homeland security for the fiscal year ending september 30, 2015, and for other purposes, shall be brought to a close upon reconsideration? the yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule. the clerk will call the roll. vote:

vote:

vote:

the presiding officer: are there any senators wishing to change their vote? if not on this vote the yeas are 53 and the nays are 47. three-fifths of the senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative the motion upon reconsideration is not agreed to. a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from indiana. mr. coats: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent the senate be in a period of morning business with senators permitted to speak therein for ten minutes each. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. coats: mr. president,? the presiding officer: the

senator from indiana. mr. coats: mr. president i'd like to make some remarks here relative to the president's budget which was presented to us on monday of this week. as his annual proposal to congress. given our country's enormous fiscal challenges and the results of the 2014 midterm election there was hope from many of us the release of this budget would be an opportunity for the president to submit to us a budget which he could work together with us to achieve. a lot of talk about working with congress working together, the message of fewer than in november -- 2014 from the november election was we want you to get some things done. and, by the way, what about the continuing deficit? are we ever going to get back to

the fervor that was taking place --. the presiding officer: the senate will be in order. mr. coats: are we going to get back to this draconian knife holding over our throats that the budget continues to put us in a position where debt and deficit continue to be the plague which is going to have enormous negative consequences on the future of this country. and given these enormous challenges there was really hope that the president having been reelected with his last two years would see his part of his legacy to see an opportunity to work together to put us on a sound fiscal path. like the salk's decision on the 1 yard line, the president chose to make the wrong call. in this case in my opinion and the in my the opinion of many would be a plan that puts us on

a path towards a balanced budget that reforms our outdated tax code. these are hopefully ideas that both republicans and democrats could agree on that they would be in our national interest to move forward with this that the time is now with a democrat president and republican congress to work together to achieve what ronald reagan and tip o'neill agreed, what a number of other major initiatives that have been undertaken in a divided congress with support from both parties could be addressed. but instead of pursuing a path to consensus on these issues the president comes forward with $2.1 trillion in additional tax increases over the next ten years. is there any end to the obsession the president has for raising taxes on the american people? all the debate at the end of the last cycle previous cycle

before the last cycle was over the fiscal cliff let's raise the taxes on the richest people in america and the high earners, and that will address the problem of taxes. but we never could get to the spending issue. so if you like government to just keep increasing, it's send your tax dollars to washington, and we'll spend it. that seems to be what the president is saying. rather than looking at the dire consequences of not addressing these long-term problems. the president proposes to spend nearly $4 trillion in fiscal year 2016, a 7% increase from 2015 and about a trillion dollars more than what was spent in 2008. and the president wants to eliminate the very budget caps that his administration proposed and he signed into law in 2011. it may be one thing to adjust those budget caps, particularly

as it impacts our national dent and national security, but if that was done in conjunction with the larger proposal to address this out-of-control mandatory spending and wasteful spending and unnecessary spending that's taking place here in washington under a discretionary spending, that would be one thing to consider. but this simply is just more of the same going in the same direction, adding -- proposing unbalanced budgets each year and adding more and more to our deficit and to our debt. the president likes to talk about his veto pen and with the release of this budget we can only conclude that that pen only contains redoing. the president has taken a pass on the golden opportunity to move forward and work together and instead his budget takes us in the same direction we've been going in the last six years without any proposal to address it in any kind of serious way.

and i think it's imperative that we do that. just last week, the congressional budget office increased its -- released its latest economic report and the findings were once again very sobering. this nonpartisan report warned current law -- and i quote -- "our large and growing federal debt will have serious negative consequences including increasing federal spending for interest payments, restraining economic growth in the long term giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to unexpected challenges and eventually heightening the risk of a fiscal crisis." the c.b.o. projects that the gross federal debt is expected to rise another $10 trillion over the next decade and the report also says we will spend down almost $800 billion of the social security trust fund over the next ten years. ten years from now, it is

projected that spending on mandatory programs and interest on the debt will consume almost 94% of all federal revenues, leaving far fewer funds for other important national priorities such as strengthening our infrastructure, national defense, medical research, and -- education any number of issues that could be dealt with on a national basis that would affect the future of the country but will not able to be done because we not have taken these steps. mr. president, i think time is running out to make the tough fiscal choices now so future generations will not be saddled with an even higher burden of debt. i regret that the president has yet to come forward with a serious intent of working with us to deal with one of our country's most challenging and most necessary problems with

creative solutions. we will only be able to accomplish the result that we need unless we work together as the president has said, but it takes his engagement if we're going to succeed. mr. president, with that i yield the floor. a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from virginia. mr. warner: mr. president, first of all i want to commend my friend, the senator from indiana for his good work on laying out with the senator from oregon one approach on reforming the tax code and his willingness to look at this issue of our national debt. let me echo at $18 trillion, he cited some statistics, interest rates go up 1%, that's more than $120 billion a year off the top, that's more than we spend on the issues that i'm going to speak to, homeland security the department of homeland security. the only thing that i would raise with my friend is we do need that grand bargain but no one who has looked at this problem hasn't said you're not

going to solve it without revenues being part of the mix. have you to do entitlement reform but even with the so-called revenues from the fiscal cliff let me just point out that we brought the country to the brink of potential financial unforeseen financial areas to raise $600 billion we've in the last few years we've had unprecedented one-time revenues from the federal reserve north of $400 billion $200 billion plus that c.b.o. counts as revenue from paybacks to fannie and freddie. we do not have the revenue extreme stream. if we can get back to the revenue stream of the late 1990's when the economy was booming and there was bipartisan collaboration, i think that combined with entitlement reform to make sure that social security and medicare are truly sustainable for the next 50 years, there is a path there and i thank him for his work. mr. coats: mr. president if i could request the gentleman -- the senator from virginia to yield for a response without

yielding the floor i'll yield right back to him i just want to say the perception of the public is this is a divided partisan issue. it is not. the democrat senator from virginia has taken a lead in this effort and committed an extraordinary amount of effort only to come up short. i've been privileged to work with him in a number -- and a number of members from the other side of the aisle together with republicans seeing the need for us to work together on this. we've lacked one thing and we've lacked support from the executive branch and until we have that i don't believe we'll be able to take serious steps forward in addressing this problem. but this is -- that's something that can be defined as one party versus another. many of us, most of us on both sides of the aisle have recognized the disastrous potential consequences of our not taking action and i appreciate the work, the tremendous work that the senator from virginia has done, leading this effort, and i know we both regret that we haven't achieved success. i thank the senator and yield

back. mr. warner: i thank the senator from for his comments. we might agree or disagree on the role the president has played but that doesn't beg the fact that we need to continue our efforts in this body and the body down the hall. and that's really -- that really brings me to the subject of our debate today. i believe it is wholly inappropriate that at this moment in time some in congress are deciding that they're going to hold hostage homeland security funding unless they get 100% of what they want. i think immigration reform is a terribly important issue. i was proud to join in one of the broadest bipartisan votes in the last few years to pass bipartisan immigration reform. i was disappointed when our friends in the house didn't take up that legislation and pass it. subsequent to that failure to act on the house's part the president acted.

and i believe there are even folks here watching these proceedings now who were beneficiaries of those executive actions. some of the dreamers. now, if this body wants to redebate immigration that's a fair topic a fair subject, and i for one would welcome that full-throated debate again but it should not it should not be tied to a critical part of national homeland security funding. the remarkable thing is this is actually an area again where both parties came to agreement on the size of the budget, the program prioritization. there was an agreement but instead extraneous items were added that now some are saying if we don't get these items, we are willing to roll the dice or

intentionally shut down one of the most essential parts of our government at a time of enormous enormous international and potentially domestic challenge. all of us obviously can come and speak about the unspeakable tragedies that we saw reported coming out of the middle east. we see as well challenges that isil presents, potentially not just in that region but to the homeland and in terms of trying to encourage home-grown terrorists. the notion that there would be members of this body or any body that would say it's okay to cut off funding to d.h.s. at this moment in time is remarkable. the american people as someone who just went through a refreshing reminder of what they're looking for through my

last election process they don't want us legislating this way. they want us to get things done. they want us to actually find common ground. and on homeland security, we have made the hard choices on where the dollars ought to come from and where they ought to be prioritized. but if the loudest voices get their way and hold this funding hostage, not only would it put our country more vulnerable to terrorist threat, but a d.h.s. shutdown would jeopardize our national security by disrupting important other programs like grants to train local law enforcement and to protect our communities, and as many as 240,000 people responsible for front line security, many of them in the commonwealth of virginia more than 80% of d.h.s. employees of that 240,000 will have to show up to work, whether they get paid or not get paid. this is a threat to the

homeland, it is a threat to our law enforcement, it is a threat in terms of our ability to respond to crises through fema, and it is a threat even without those potential tragedies of the normal course of an american citizen as they pass through airports and other venues. and ultimately for an agency that has been under some strain, these 240,000 people who are working hard to protect our homeland, they have to provide for their families. now, this is not the way this body should operate and i want to commend the majority for trying to say how we bring back an open process but the notion that we will have a repeat of what we saw when we self-inflicted damage upon this whole economy when we shut down the government a few years ago because of the unwillingness of a few to compromise, if that is

repeated now around homeland security, it would be a dreadful mistake. now, mr. president i want to switch for my last couple of moments, because originally prior to this debate arising, i was planning to come down and continue a tradition that was begun by my esteemed former colleague, the former senator from delaware, ted kaufman. senator kaufman would cop to -- come to this floor from time to time to celebrate members of the federal work force who exemplified excellence in public service. in that tradition mr. president, i want to -- wish to honor a great federal employee anthony rigabotto. he is a constituent of mine from burke, virginia. he currently serves as the chief of the u.s. coast guard's office of international and domestic port security but in fact, he has spent his entire adult life

in service to the coast guard. 31 years on active duty and worked more than 12 years as a civilian. a total of 43 years of service. in this role, he has been responsible for addressing the security weaknesses facing our nation's ports. he has also assisted other countries with improving the safety of their own ports. more than 90% of the united states imported goods go through our ports. the security risks facing the ports are many, and workers like anthony help ensure that they remain safe and secure from threats. for our nation's ports to remain safe we must ensure that our foreign shipping partners follow established international port security requirements, so part of this job is to make sure foreign countries want to conduct business using u.s. ports adhere to these requirements. mr. rigabotto has developed a solution a model that countries

could use as a guide to strengthen their own laws to improve the security of their ports. he also oversaw the creation of the maritime security risk analyst model. it helps the coast guard analyze and address major port security weaknesses by measuring a variety of factors. this risk analysis model has helped the coast guard evaluate more than 30,000 potential targets, 100,000 attacks across the country. furthermore, this data helped to efficiently allocate more than $2.7 billion in grants where they can best help improve port security and get the best bang for taxpayer dollars. anthony is just one of many federal employees. he also happens to be a federal employee that would potentially be affected by department of homeland security funding, which is the current issue on the floor of the senate. one of the challenges we have, even as we move past this particular debate, is to make

sure in these tight budget times, going back to the comments of the senator from indiana, that we husband our resources. we are going to have to do more with less. one of the things that's terribly important is somebody who has spent more time in business than i have in politics. if you want your work force to do more, you find ways both psychically, monetarily, and through appropriate review to reward them. too often members come to this floor and sometimes tend to demonize our federal work force. too often over the past few years, the federal work force is the first to receive cuts in funding. if we're going to make sure that our country remains strong, we're going to make sure that folks like anthony keep our ports and keep our homeland safe we need to recognize their service, and by all means make sure that we don't put public the d.h.s. through another ill-fated, politically driven government shutdown. with that, mr. president i

yield the floor. a senator: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from utah. mr. hatch: mr. president today i'm introducing a resolution proposing to constitutional amendment to require the congress and the president handle the american people's money responsibly and balance the nation's debt and budget. like the last two congresses, the entire republican conference has cosponsored this proposal. i know that the constitution sets a high threshold for congress to propose an amendment, but it is critical that we do so for three reasons. first, piling up more debt year after year to impose greater and greater harm to our economy and to our society. last week, congressional budget office director douglas elmendorf testified before the house budget committee noting that the national debt is expected to swell by another $7.6 trillion, with a t trillion dollars over the next ten years. he said -- let me just refer to

this chart. he said -- "such large and growing national debt would have serious negative consequences, including increasing federal spending for interest payments, restraining economic growth in the long term, giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to unexpected challenges and eventually heightening the risk of a fiscal crisis." he is the director of the congressional budget office, and he said this on january 21, 2015. just think about that. that is a -- and he's a democrat. he has been a very good budget director, as far as i'm concerned. and i have enjoyed looking at his analyses over the years. our nation is on an unsustainable path, and we simply cannot wait any longer to make responsible decisions for our future.

second washington will not keep our fiscal house in order unless required to do so by the constitution. congress has pretended that good intentions alone would keep our checkbook balanced. congress has tried putting limitations in place. congress has stuck our head in the sand or at other times cried that the sky would fall if we really did get our fiscal act together. over many decades, we have demonstrated that nothing short of a constitutional requirement will work. third, the american people have the right to set rules for how washington handles their money. the constitution is the rule book for government, and it belongs to the american people. proposing an amendment does not add it to the constitution but only sends it to the states for debate and consideration. well it takes two-thirds of congress to propose an amendment to the constitution, it takes 3/4 of the states to ratify.

that high level of national consensus may or may not exist but the american people deserve the opportunity to find out. mr. president, on june 7, 1979, nearly 36 years ago i stood on this floor when i introduced the senate joint resolution 86, my first balanced budget amendment. in today's dollars the budget deficit that year was $95 billion, and the national debt was $2.6 trillion. which is about 30% of our gross domestic product. i said that only in washington could this situation be described as anything less than obscene. the more things change, the more they stay the same. i concede that a few things have changed since 1979. for example the deficit for the current fiscal year is six times higher than it was in 1979. and the national debt is seven times as large.

to put that number in perspective, the national debt is now larger than our entire economy. and the situation is not only getting worse it's getting worse faster than ever. more than 40% of our national debt accumulated since our founding has piled up under president obama and he has two more years in office. well, those things have changed and changed for the worse. the choice before us remains the same. some of my colleagues might disagree with the c.b.o. director and think that piling up trillions and trillions of dollars in debt is no big deal, that these are just numbers in the air with no impact on the real world. perhaps they think that our large and growing national debt won't have any negative consequences won't impede economic growth, won't restore any policymakers' flexibility to responding to challenges and won't heighten the risk of the fiscal crisis. some of my colleagues might believe that we have no

obligation to handle the american people's money responsibly, or perhaps they believe that this money belongs to government and not to the american people at all. some of my colleagues might insist despite decades of demonstrated failure that congress can somehow get its fiscal act together on its own. one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. and some of my colleagues might say that the american people should not be able to set fiscal rules for the government they elect. perhaps they think that the federal government should control the constitution, not the other way around. i say to my colleagues who think those things, i can understand why you would oppose sending this balanced budget amendment to the states for consideration but now a word to my other colleagues. if you think that this growing mountain of debt is dangerous and must be stopped, if you believe that we have exhausted every other means of stopping it and if you say that the american people have the right to decide how their government

should operate then i invite you to support this resolution. s.j. res. 6. mr. president, the senate has on four separate occasions voted on a balanced budget amendment since i introduced that proposal in 1979. we can see it on this chart. we actually passed one in 1982 when the national debt was $2.5 trillion, but the house controlled by democrats at the time did not take it up. the senate voted on another balanced budget in 1994 when the national debt was $6.9 trillion but fell a few votes short. three years later when the national debt was $7.9 trillion we came within a single vote of passing in 1997, and in 2011, in 2011, the fourth one from the left, we voted on the last

balanced budget amendment that i introduced. at that time the national debt had grown to $15.1 trillion. it is almost $3 trillion higher today. c.b.o. tells us not only that the national debt will swell by an additional $7.6 trillion in the next ten years but that interest on that debt will be larger and -- will be a larger and larger portion of the budget. the low interest rates we see today, after all will not last forever. c.b.o. warns on our current path interest rates will quadruple in ten years. in only six years if we do not change course, spending on interest will surpass either defense or non-defense spending. every dollar spent to service debt cannot be spent protecting our country or helping our citizens. this is the fiscal equivalent of

fiddling while rome burns. the debt keeps growing. the danger keeps building while congress keeps pretending and stalling. what if we had sent a balanced budget amendment to the states in the 1970's, 1980's or even 1990's? how different would the budget process be today? when i spoke here in june 1979, i offered two additional reasons for adopting a balanced budget amendment. first i said that a fixed spending ceiling -- quote -- "requires that congress think in order of budget priorities. second i said in my mind a balanced budget or spending limitation amendment offers the potential to impose new limits upon the national government, replacing those that have largely been eroded over the years." that is why the american people have never been able to use their constitution to set fiscal rules for washington, because doing so would set limits that

the national government does not want. but our liberty depends on setting and enforcing such limits. i will repeat what i said in 1979. this is certainly not a trivial objective. rather it goes to the heart of what our system of government is going to be in the future. unquote. that is the choice before us and before the american people. now, i have to say that if you look at the current budget, it's a fraud that the president has submitted. it's pathetic. and even with that current budget saying that they're going to save us money you're about $500 billion in debt. further debt, i might add. it's piling up in irreducible ways. it's something that we've got to do something about. we can no longer sit around and just pretend that somehow congress is going to take care of it when congress doesn't have the will to take care of it.

a balanced budget amendment is an important part of changing that. i will speak later on the actual amendment and what it says and what it means and how it will work and i believe that it's an appropriate way of bringing this country under control and getting us to live within our means. it will take time, even if we start today. and we're not starting today. this administration could not get anywhere near what it wants in this budget without a huge tax increase. we've had tax increase after tax increase after tax increase. and it never makes it -- it never makes a dip in the federal debt. we've got to wake up around here and start doing some things right or this country the greatest country in the world will not be able to remain so. but it has to. if you look at the rest of the word we're in terrible shape throughout the rest of the world. there is no other country in

this world that can lead like ours can except for evil. there are countries that can really lead but they would lead for evil. we've got to stop that, and the only way we can is to have a nation that lives within its means, does what's right and balances its budget. that's going to take years if we pass this amendment to balance the budget. the amendment if passed, and then if it's supported by three-quarters of the states, 38 states this amendment will do the job. whatever we do, it's going to be tough. but that's better than a profligacy that is continuing to go along under all kinds of phony arguments that when you look back on them are really phony. they act like they're really trying to do something about

this, while spending us into bankruptcy. and just more and more causing us to not be able to live within our means. mr. president, we've got to change this, and i'm convinced that the only way you will is with a balanced budget amendment to the constitution. it's the only way you can find enough people in this country who respect the constitution to really cause the result that we live or at least start living within our means. mr. president, i suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

mr. sessions: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from alabama. mr. sessions: i would ask that the quorum call be dispensed with. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. sessions: mr. president the house of representatives has voted to fully fund homeland security as the president has requested. he has funded to do that. he sent a bill to the senate that fully funds all the lawful

policies and programs in homeland security. the bill will not deny a penny of funding. in fact, it says, mr. president spend the money but on enforcing the laws of the united states. don't spend money undermining the laws of the united states. don't spend money in violation of the laws of the united states. don't spend money in violation of the established policies of congress which rejected the president's ideas that he's now executing. and don't spend money in violation of the will of the american people who overwhelmingly oppose the president's unlawful executive amnesty. so that's what we're talking about today. and my colleagues continue to suggest that somehow republicans are not funding homeland security department. nothing could be further from the truth.

our colleagues have now voted to block going to the bill. if they don't like what's in it, some of the provisions that came over from the house well, let's get on the bill and let's have some amendments, relevant amendments and let's vote on them. that's what congress is about. that's the way we're supposed to do business here. but our colleagues have gotten spoiled. they think if they can just block anything and turn around and blame republicans for it, and that somehow everybody is going to agree with it. look the american people get this. the president is not entitled to spend money to implement a system of immigration that congress representing the american people rejected. if our colleagues, our democratic colleagues are unhappy, then, as i said, they can offer amendments.

i just feel like for sure that it would be a stunning event that the united states senators remove language from a bill that simply restores the separation of powers and prevents the president from overreaching and violating the constitution. but if they want to bring up an amendment that would allow the president to do this activity, let's do it, let's bring it up and let's vote on it. they might win it perhaps. so i think it's untenable constitutionally and it's untenable legally because it's contrary to law and the will of the american people. so my good friend, senator schumer, he's one of the more able members of this body. he spoke earlier today and he said -- this is what he said: "the right wing of the republican party is risking a

d.h.s., department of homeland security, shutdown to get their way on immigration. they're saying take a hard right stance on immigration or we won't fund national security." that is not so, senator schumer. give me a break. come on. you're blocking the bill. the house has voted to fund homeland security. it's on the floor. we need to pass it. and we'll give you an opportunity to offer your amendments if you're not happy with it. it's absolutely not so that they're doing it. and so, well, how is it being reported? republicans frequently complain they don't get fair reporting in the press but let's look at this u.s. news and world reports today senate democrats block bill undoing immigration actions. that's the headline. big headline.

undoing immigration actions. those are president obama's unlawful actions. so they're defending his actions, not defending homeland security. how about this one, "usa today," democrats block effort to derail immigration order. the effort would derail the president's unlawful executive amnesty, but it funds homeland security as the article makes clear. fox news, "senate democrats nix debate on homeland security bill blocking it in protest over immigration." who's blocking the bill? "politico," "democrats filibuster department of homeland security bill." that's exactly what's happening. the bill has passed the house. it's on the floor. we're trying to bring it up. we're trying to have debate. we're trying to have amendments, and they're blocking the bill, according to "politico," no

right-wing publication. "the washington post," senate democrats block d.h.s. spending bill targeting obama's immigration actions. "the atlantic," this is a good one. for those of us who have been around here for a long time and i think for reporters who cover it, this is really humorous to have our democratic colleagues having complained for years about what republicans do, this is the headline in "the atlantic," mr. president. "new democratic obstructionist" now isn't that true? here's "the new york times," "senate democrats block republicans' homeland security bill." that's the headline on the "new york times." i would say colleagues, we're

not -- the american people know better. the media knows better. they know who is blocking this bill. they know that the congress of the united states, that the house of representatives and the united states senate, is not required to fund any program it doesn't like. it's absolutely not required, and it has a duty not to fund presidential expenditures and actions that are illegal. the department of homeland security is provided funds to enforce the laws of the united states and the president right now is taking money that was sent to homeland security to enforce laws with, he's redirecting it and moving it over to a building just across the river in crystal city, and is in the process of hiring 1,000 persons to process

applications of people illegally in the country and to provide them earned-income tax credit, which is a direct check from the united states of america provide them a social security number the right to participate in the social security, legal status in the country the right to work in the country when the law of the united states says if you're here unlawfully, you cannot work and participation in medicare. so that's what this is all about, and i just want to push back and i urge my colleagues, at least seven of you democratic colleagues have said you oppose president obama's action. well when do you have a clearer chance to confront that action and to demonstrate with conviction that you meant what you said than on this vote?

so it allows the bill to come forward, allows us to have a vote allows anybody in the senate to offer amendments that would be relevant to the bill. so i just would feel strongly about that. mr. president, i see the junior senator from new york -- and i think she was on line to speak before i was and i was able to grab a few minutes here. so i would just say this: colleagues please review your position on this. let's move to this bill. let's fund homeland security, and let's discuss and have amendments and vote on the president's executive orders. and the one who wins the votes so be it. that's the way the congress of the united states works. i thank the chair and would yield the floor. mrs. gillibrand: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from new york. mrs. gillibrand: i rise to urge my colleagues to do the right thing and pass a bill that

will fully fund the department of homeland security without the politically driven riders that are focused on this debate. protecting our country from terrorist attack should be our top priority in congress, and we should not be playing political games with homeland security funding. that is the least our constituents expect of us. i know that for many of my colleagues here the question of immigration is a very contentious one and an important one worthy of debate. we should have that debate without risking the safety of our families by once again putting an immigration bill on the floor of the senate. but this funding bill, for such a vitally important part of our national security, is simply not the place for an i had logic an idiologic debate. if we fail to pass and fund department of homeland security,

the consequences for our safety could poe teptionly be devastate -- potentially be devastating. take, for example the urban area security initiative. this is the program that helps our cities pay for things like surveillance equipment secure communications systems training for law enforcement personnel all in order to increase our security and prevent terrorism. these grants ensure that all of the places terrorists have targeted and will continue to target are able to effectively prevent those violent acts from happening. new york city is in my home state. i.t. theit's the number-one terror target in the nation. it relies on these urban security programs to keep its millions of residents and tourists safe. it also relies on our homeland security network to stop the plans of would-be terrorists.

since 9/11, new york city has thwarted at least 16 terrorist attacks and it's done so because of the constant support of the department of homeland security -- that the department of homeland security provides. if we can't pass this bill, the urban area security initiative and the extended network of security systems guarding new york city would lose their funding and every visitor to an urban area in this country including right here in washington d.c., would be less safe. if we can't pass this bill, not only would our security suffer, but the inspectors at our ports would not be paid, our security personnel would not be paid, and our border patrol agents would not be paid if we don't pass this bill then we have failed at our most solemn

responsibility: to keep the american people safe. i urge all of my colleagues to please put politics aside vote to pass a bill, free of the divisive policy partisan riders and fully fund the department of homeland security. thank you mr. president and i yield the rest of my time. i suggest there is an absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

quorum call:

a senator: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from hawaii. mr. schatz: i ask unanimous consent that we vacate the quorum call. the presiding officer: without

objection. mr. schatz: thank you mr. president. i rise today to urge my colleagues to pass a clean homeland security funding bill for fiscal year 2015. this is an issue of national security and we cannot allow politics to divert attention from our responsibility as senators. the majority in the house sent the senate a bill with five poison pills that they know will prevent the passage of this legislation. yesterday and again today and i think tomorrow, my senate colleagues and i sent a clear message that these politically divisive immigration provisions have no place in this bill, and so i urge my colleagues to dispense with any further delays and allow for an up-or-down vote on the bill as originally drafted. the department of homeland security created in the wake of 9/11 as senator durbin reminded us earlier is not the place to litigate immigration policy. rather those issues are appropriately addressed in a

comprehensive immigration bill, and i hope the house will draft and vote on that type of legislation soon. the recent executions of the japanese and jordanian hostages by terrorist group isil and the attacks in paris ottawa and australia serve as reminders of the very real threat that we face. each day that we delay in providing adequate and reliable resources to the department of homeland security we undermine the department's efforts to defend the home front. that's why i'm calling on my colleagues to take up and pass a clean bill. my colleagues on the appropriation committee senator shaheen and vice chairwoman milulski have reduced a bill that reflects the bipartisan agreement reached between the house and senate appropriators. this bill funds a wide range of programs that keep americans safe and secure.

for example the clean version of this bill funds a host of counterterrorism intelligence and security functions investments in cybersecurity defense technologies and personnel, investments to detect and protect against biological threats research and development of nuclear detection technologies, t.s.a. and the coast guard operations, to keep our skies and our waters safe. $6 billion in disaster funds to help states, localities, businesses and individuals rebuild after a natural disaster staffing nearly 24,000 customs and border patrol officers who ensure legitimate travel of individuals who seek to enter the country. staffing 20,000 border patrol agents who protect the 6,000 miles of our land border with 2,000 miles of coastal waters. homeland security secretary johnson has been clear that while the department operates

under the current c.r., they cannot fund key homeland security initiatives. a short-term c.r. would prevent the department from awarding new disaster preparedness grants that support our local emergency responders. it will delay the hiring of more investigators for cases related to human trafficking and smuggling. it would also prevent the secret service from training for the next presidential election. and the list goes on. we cannot expect d.h.s. to do long-term planning with short-term funding. the department needs reliable funding to operate efficiently and effectively. the house majority is, unfortunately, playing politics with our homeland security because the president has done something that every president since the 1950's has done, he has provided commonsense direction to our immigration enforcement efforts. the president's executive actions on immigration are

fundamentally aimed at keeping families together, making our communities safer, and using our resources efficiently. it's hard to understand how someone could oppose that. the president's actions will ensure that our immigration enforcement efforts are used to secure the border, prevent threats to national security, and protect public safety. these should be our top priorities and i support those efforts, but if members of the house take issue with them they should draft and adopt immigration reform just as the senate did on a bipartisan basis 18 months ago. our path forward is simple. pass a clean funding bill. if my colleagues want to fix our broken immigration system, then let's take up a bill but let's not use this critical funding bill to play partisan politics. the dedicated men and women of the department of homeland security deserve better. the american people deserve better. let's put aside politics and let's pass a clean homeland

security funding bill. mr. president, i yield the floor and i suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

quorum call: