mr. merkley: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from oregon. mr. merkley: i would love for us to have a full ordinary process here on the floor and to have all of us on both sides of the aisle support that process. i come to the floor to ask for this unanimous consent because that process has been frustrated and we now have been without a leader for this entire administration. my colleague made a point about afghanistan. and he said we need to know how many americans are in afghanistan. if you want better action on the issue of americans as refugees abroad or stranded abroad, then you want to have a responsible leader, an accountable leader heading up the bureau of population migration and refugees. so let's do our job here in this chamber because when we fail to enable such a critical organization responsible for billions of dollars around the world being provided to millions of people, responsible for these -- for the vetting of people coming into our country, when we fail to do our job to put somebody in charge, we are only wounding ourselves. th

mr. merkley. >> mr. sanders. >> aye. >> ms. stabenow. >> aye. >> mr. whitehouse. >> yes. >> mr. chairman. >> aye. >> mr. chairman, yeas are 12, nays are 8. >> next, jennifer sass of maryland to be a member of the chemical safety and hazard investigation board. i move to approve. report the nomination to the senate. is there a second? >> second. >> moves and seconded. clerk will call the roll. >> mr. bowman? >> no. >> ms. caputo? >> no. >> mr. kramer? >> no by proxy. >> ms. duckworth? >> aye. >> mr. graham? >> no by proxy. >> mr. inhofe. >> no. >> mr. kelly. >> aye. >> ms. lummis. >> no. >> mr. markey. >> aye. >> mr. padilla. >> aye. >> mr. sanders. >> aye. >> ms. stabenow. >> aye. >> mr. whitehouse. >> aye. >> mr. wicker? >> no, by proxy. >> mr. chairman. >> aye. >> yeas are 10, nays are 10. >> to expedite this meeting, we have agrees to consider remaining matters before the committee by voice vote. i would like to call up two presidential nominations. first i want to call up presidential nomination number 539, steven owens of arizona, to be a member of the chemical safety and h

mr. merkley: thank you.i'm on the floor today to talk about the nomination of ambassador julieta valls noyes to serve as assistant secretary of state for the bureau of population refugees and migration. originally nominated last july, ambassador noyes' nomination was reported favorably out of the foreign relations committee in october. since then she has waited in limbo for all of us to act. ambassador noyes has a distinguished 35-year career with the state department, serving in important and challenging roles. many of those roles tied directly to the work she would be doing at the bureau of population refugees and migration, often referred to as p.r.m. as ambassador to croatia, she presided over the final stages of a refugees resettlement program after the balkan wars while hosting regional conferences and trainings for prosecutors, police and judges on this refugee-related issues. as deputy assistant secretary in the bureau of european and eurasian affairs, ambassador noyes oversaw relations with 11 weste

mr. sanders: thank you, senator merkley. senator romney. >> ms. young, as you probably know i was one of those who was part of a bipartisan negotiating team that put together the infrastructure built. our largest single investment was in highways. you can imagine our surprise when we see the department of transportation indicating that the highway money cannot be used for increasing the capacity of highways. this direction flies in the face of our intent and our needs. i recognized, some states are not growing and may not need additional capacity, delaware, new york, rhode island and so forth. but other states are growing fast, south carolina, florida, my state of utah is the fastest-growing state in the nation in the last decade. we need to increase capacity on highways or we will not see the economic growth that we projected as being a part of this bill. current -- could you get back to our members of a bipartisan group on our progress on this front? ms. young: the ranking member brought this to my attention today. i will look into this and than

graciously agreed to yield to others here, and i think senator merkley is next, followed by senator -- jeff, thank you. >> thank you very much mr. chairman. and i was just looking at at a chart put together to compare all 50 states and their recycling rates and particularly looking at the plastic bottle challenge and there are four states, five actually, that have hit over 50%. maine at 78%, oregon at 69%, vermont 51%, california new york at 57%. and then the vast bulk of the states are under 20%. ms. biser, i was wondering about north carolina, because of the important work you're doing in many sectors, but in this category of plastic bottles, 8% on north carolina. it's pretty far down there. has north carolina considered how to really focus on this problem of plastic bottles? there's the expression that was in the testimony of reduce, reuse, recycle, but with plastic bottles, the truth is it's burned, buried or borne out to sea, all three of which create significant environmental challenges. as we wrestle with this state by state, oregon was the first one to have a bottle bill. i'm disappointed to see that maine has a higher