Floor Colloquy: Urging support for manufacturing innovation hubs with Senator King

Madam President, I come to the floor again today to talk about good jobs and how we can work together in responsible and bipartisan way to create the kind of high-quality, lasting middle-class jobs that all of us hear from our home states they want us to work together to produce, for America today and America tomorrow.

As someone who worked for eight years for a manufacturing company in the private sector before going into public service, I can tell you we can win in manufacturing. We can learn from our competitors. We can strengthen our workforce. We can strengthen our access to foreign markets. We can strengthen our access to credit. All of these we can do, and we can compete and win in advanced manufacturing in the United States. 

One of the things about my own experience in the private sector that has really stayed with me is that more of our manufacturing employment was in Germany than in any other single country and that often seems unlikely, given that Germany actually has higher labor costs, labor protections, environmental protections, and in many ways higher costs of doing business than almost any other advanced country. 

So how is it possible that they are so successful? In fact, more than twice the percentage of their GDP is in manufacturing than is the case in the United States. Why would we fight for manufacturing jobs? Why would we fight to emulate Germany’s example?  

Because manufacturing jobs are great jobs. As you know, as our colleague from Maine knows well, manufacturing jobs are high-skill, high-wage, high-benefit, and have a high positive impact on their surrounding community. But they also need something. They need ongoing R&D. They need cutting edge research. They need continuous improvement and innovation in order to remain at the cutting edge of productivity.

So what we’re going to talk about here on the floor today is a bill that learns from the lessons of our most successful European competitor, Germany, where they have more than 60 manufacturing hubs located all over Germany. And these manufacturing hubs are places where universities doing cutting-edge technical research, companies beginning to deploy these new technologies in manufacturing, and the workforce that needs to acquire the skills to be successful in these new areas of manufacturing all work in coordination. That’s something that we can, by working in a bipartisan way here in this Senate, advance and advance rapidly here in the United States. 

So we’re going to talk together today, the Senator from Maine and I, about a bill, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act, which has 14 cosponsors, an indication of its broad base of bipartisan support. It has long been led by Senators Brown of Ohio and Blunt of Missouri, a bipartisan team, and they’ve added to that great initial leadership team, Senator Stabenow, Senator Levin, Senator Reed, Senator Schumer, all Democrats, and Senator Graham, Senator Kirk, Senator Collins, Senator Wicker, Senator Boozman, all Republicans, and most recently our wonderful colleague, Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent.

This is a bill that’s been endorsed by folks ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the US Conference of Mayors to the United Auto Workers, and many many more organizations at the national and local level. An indicator of just how diverse its support is from across the country across many different sectors.  

This is bill that I have reason to hope can, not just get a lot of endorsements from the private sector, not just a lot of endorsements from cosponsors here in the Senate, but can actually move through regular order to be taken up and considered by the committee of jurisdiction to be then taken up and considered here on the floor and actually signed into law by the President of the United States. I am hopeful that that could happen – partly because this is good policy. There are already a number of hubs that have been established by federal agencies spending money that’s already been authorized and appropriated for specific research areas where the Department of Energy and Department of Defense need do work to develop cutting-edge manufacturing capacity in the United States. 

But I think if this law gets taken up on a bipartisan basis – improved, refined, debated in committee and here on the floor, we actually have a shot at a process that will be wide open, that will allow elements of the federal government in partnership with the private sector to leverage cutting-edge research to deploy whole new technologies across this country. 

I am excited by it and I know my colleague is as well.

Let me briefly introduce why Senator King is a great colleague to join all of us who have served as sponsors on this bill. He’s previously worked in the private sector on clean energy; he’s previously served as the Governor of the State of Maine, and has worked closely with the University of Maine and so has a sense of how publicly funded research at a cutting-edge university, investment in workforce skills, and the deployment of new and innovative technologies and clean energy can work together to grow manufacturing, to grow job opportunities and to grow an economy.

So I’d like to invite my colleague now if he would, to address his experience in Maine and why he’s joined this broad group of cosponsors on this promising, bipartisan manufacturing bill.

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I’d like to thank my colleague from Maine for sharing his personal experience both as Governor and his work in partnership with the University of Maine and their composite center and his understanding of the importance of a modern skilled work force in order to take advantage of the work we’re hoping to catalyze through this bill. 

If I were to just summarize across three large areas, this bill if enacted would take advantage of linkages, leverage, and labor in a way that would grow lasting middle-class jobs. 

All of us here want to work together to find a way to give American workers and families a fair shot, to give them a fair shot at the kind of middle-class quality of life that dominated over the last 50 years. And as my colleague said, it was because of the G.I. Bill and its investment in education; it was because of innovation and competitiveness; it was because of a skilled work force, that we were really able to dominate the world in manufacturing for much of the last 50 years and the last century.

If we are to seize this moment and regain our global leadership not just in the productivity of our manufacturing but also in the base, in the employment of our manufacturing, we have to do the sorts of things that this bill imagines. We have research being done in national labs, in federally funded national labs, fundamental research that’s wonderful. We’ve got applied research on things like composites being done at the University of Delaware and the University of Maine and every other state university that does higher research. And we’ve got manufacturers trying to take advantage of new technologies and new opportunities. 

The main thing this bill would do is to link them all together. To create regional hubs that allow the researchers, the private sector, and the new employees to all come together. It also, as my colleague mentioned, leverages private-sector funds. Every one of the four hubs announced to date is a more than one-to-one match, two- or four-, or in one case, of eight-to-one match of private sector dollars to public sector dollars. And last, it invests heavily in training and in skills and in making sure the workforce is ready as these new technologies get out there.

I’d like to describe the reach of some of these linkages and partnerships for a moment.

Let me just take a second and take a walking tour if I could of the four hubs that have been finalized so far. For example, the one in Youngstown, Ohio, which deals with 3D manufacturing. This is a relatively new, cutting-edge technology that radically alters the scale of early stage manufacturing, what is possible in terms of prototyping, and then I think fairly soon what is possible in terms of customized unit-by-unit manufacturing. It has enormous promise. 

But if we’re going to stay competitive globally in manufacturing, when there is something new invented in the United States we have to make sure it’s made in the United States. And so this is the sort of hub that makes that possible.

There are four hubs, and I’ll mention them briefly: one in Ohio, one in Raleigh, North Carolina, one in Detroit, one in Chicago. But they don’t just engage the universities and the work force and the companies right in that immediate community. They benefit from national networks. So, for example, General Dynamics and Honeywell are two of the very large national footprint firms partnering with the Youngstown hub.

Universities from Arizona State to Florida State are collaborating in the wide band gap semiconductor work in Raleigh, North Carolina. Researchers from the University of Kentucky, University of Tennessee, Notre Dame, and Ohio State are partners with the hub that’s in Detroit. And there are researchers from Boulder, Indiana, Notre Dame, Louisville, Iowa, Nebraska, U.T.-Austin, and Wisconsin who are partnering with the hub in Chicago. 

So what are these hubs? Are they just some diffuse academic team that shares names and a little bit of data with each other? No, if there were, for example, to be a hub in Maine on composites you’d find researchers at the University of Delaware who have done great work on composites and companies doing work in composites partnering with the fundamental research being done, let’s say hypothetically at the University of Maine, and learning about how to deploy that new technology in ways that would benefit the local workforce and local manufacturers. That’s why there’s so much leverage coming out of these linkages.

That’s why the hubs have been so generative, so powerful in Germany’s experience. It is a way to harness our federal investment in research by the national labs and by state universities with the energy of the private sector and the capacity of our manufacturers to relentlessly innovate. We have a very broad menu of bipartisan manufacturing bills that have been taken up and discussed in this chamber. This one, this manufacturing hubs bill, has some of the broadest support and I think some of the best reasons for it to be considered in committee and taken up on this floor later this spring, and it is my real hope that our colleagues will join us in doing so. Let me yield back to my colleague from Maine.

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I’d like to thank my colleague for joining me in this colloquy on manufacturing more broadly and more specifically on this bill.

I’m grateful for the leadership that Senator Stabenow and Senator Graham, as the co-chairs of the Senate Manufacturing Caucus, have shown, and on this particular bill the passion and the perseverance that Senators Brown and Blunt have shown in bringing this great idea into legislative form and in advancing it.

There are so many other bills that we can and should take up that will bring strength and vitality to the American manufacturing sector, but it is my real hope that S. 1468, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act will be the next in a series of important bipartisan manufacturing bills that we will take up to make sure that we’re doing our job to help grow high-quality American jobs.

Floor Speech: Senator Coons stays #Up4Climate to urge action on climate change

Mr. President, I’d like to thank my colleague from Oregon, Senator Merkley, who’s done a tremendous job laying out both the scientific case, and the compelling economic case, the cultural case, the global case for why we here in the senate need to wake up, need to listen to the indisputable evidence of what climate change is doing in our home states, to our country, and around the world.

Mr. President, even now as we speak here in this chamber, my own three children – Maggie, Michael and Jack – are asleep at home. And as I reflected on this past summer I was struck by something, an experience that we had that was a simple and telling reminder of the steady changes wrought by climate change in our nation. Last summer we took a family vacation, a trip to glacier national park. For those of you who have had the opportunity to hike in this majestic national park in Montana, it’s the site of many striking and beautiful scenes.

But there was one hike we took in particular that stayed with me. It was a hike to historic Grinnell Glacier, a glacier that’s by many photographs, over decades, documented in its steady receding. In fact, since 1966 it’s lost nearly half its total acreage. And we took a long and winding hike up the trail that takes you to Grinnell glacier. You can’t quite see until you come up over the last rise that most of what is left of Grinnell Glacier in the summer today is a chilly pool of water.

For my daughter Maggie and for my sons Mike and Jack, as I look ahead to the long-term future, I think we all have to ask ourselves a question about how many more changes we’re willing to accept being wrought on creation, on this nation, and on the world by the steady advance of climate change?  

Now I know we can’t simply take the examples of things like Grinnell Glacier or what to me seemed a striking change in the cap of Mount Kilimanjaro. I first climbed it in 1984 and I visited it again last year, and it’s a striking change, a visually powerful change. These aren’t scientific. There are lots of other arguments perhaps as to why these two particular glaciers have retreated. But I still remember hearing a presentation at the University of Delaware by Dr. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, a glaciologist who presented a very broad and, I thought, very compelling case based on ice cores for the actual advance of climate change over many decades.

In fact, I see that my colleague from Rhode Island has a photographic history of Grinnell Glacier in Montana’s Glacier National Park, so the point I was just making in passing, he’s able to illustrate here. That is as of ten years ago, the glacier has retreated somewhat even further than that. But this striking glacier in 1940 is now almost completely gone in just one generation.

This and so many other glaciers that were monuments in our national parks are today receded or altogether gone. I think we have to ask ourselves fundamentally, what’s our path afford?

We’ve heard from other senators. Tim Kaine spoke about the importance of innovation. Angus King – the Senator from Virginia and the Senator from Maine – spoke about the importance of markets and of making sure that our inventions and innovations in trying to solve these problems are also shared internationally. I think these are great and important insights.

One of the things I wanted to bring to the floor today first was insights from my own home state of Delaware where our Governor Jack Markell, has impaneled a sea level rise advisory committee starting in 2010 that looked hard at how climate change might affect my home state. 

At just 60 feet, Delaware has the lowest mean elevation of any state in the country, and already makes it more susceptible to sea level rise than almost any state in the country.

In my state of Delaware we have and will continue to see the impact of climate change on our businesses, our communities, and our local environment. And as the sea level rises, we’re seeing the effects more and more.

Sea level rises essentially for two reasons.

First, as the planet’s ice sheets melt, the much larger sheets than Grinnell Glacier, they add to the amount of water in the ocean. But second, salt water actually expands as it warms as well. So as the planet’s average temperature has steadily risen, so, too, has the level of its salt water seas. The fact that the earth’s oceans are rising each year isn’t new information. It has been rising as long as we have been keeping track.

But what’s really jarring is that that rate of rise is increasing, and increasing significantly. When the data was tracked from 1870 to 1930, sea level was rising at a rate of four inches per 100 years. Over the next 60 years, it rose at a rate of eight inches per hundred years, it more than doubled. And then in just the last 20 years sea level has been rising at a strikingly more rapid rate of 12.5 inches per 100 years.

The water is rising, Mr. President. And in Delaware, it’s rising fast.

The land itself in my state is actually also sinking. There is an actually documented vertical movement of earth’s crust underneath Mid-Atlantic Coast, it’s called subsidence, it’s been happening in Delaware slowly but gradually since the ice age at a pace of just two millimeters of elevation every year. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot but it adds up to another four inches over the century. So you’ve got water rising and the land sinking making climate change and sea level rising specifically for my home state, a very real issue.

A wide array of scientists have studied this and its impact on Delaware and they’ve developed three models for future scenarios. In the conservative model, by the year 2100, sea level in Delaware will have risen about a foot and a half. In another model, the water off Delaware rises a full meter. And in another and the most disconcerting model, one and a half meters or about five feet.

And unfortunately at present this broad group of scientists inside and outside of government are estimating that that is the most likely scenario.

Let’s make this real. Here is a projection of these three different scenarios in one area in Delaware, Bower’s Beach. And this shows how now this is a well-established beach community and in the most conservative, we’ve still got something of land and in the middle it’s completely cut off here from the mainland and then in the most likely, sadly, given most current evidence, there’s literally nothing left except a little sand bar out by itself in the Delaware bay.

That gives you one example of why the difference between these three scenarios matters so much. And unfortunately, there is no scenario in which Bower’s Beach is still a viable beachfront community by the end of this century. This beach community of Bower’s Beach is very close to Dover Air Force Base and ends up under water. 

Now let’s look at South Wilmington. The city in which I live is Wilmington, Delaware, and South Wilmington is a neighborhood in the largest city in our state. And as the water rises in the Atlantic Ocean it also rises up the Delaware Bay and the Delaware River and the Christina River, which runs right through most of my home county, New Castle County, and rises in the Peterson Wildlife Refuge, too.

The impacts here are potentially devastating. We’re talking about water a foot and a half higher than what Delaware experienced during super storm sandy but not for a brief storm surge… each and every day.

Again, if you take a look at today, the conservative, the middle, and the most likely, most aggressive scenario in which virtually all of south Wilmington is under water by the end of this century. The calculation of whether we’re hit half a meter or a full meter or a meter and half of sea rise comes down the rate of acceleration of climate change globally.

And it leaves for us a central and so far unanswered question, whether we try to slow the rate at which climate change is affecting our planet and maybe, somehow, turn the tide.

This is the part of climate change policy called mitigation.

Priority one in this strategy is cutting the emissions we’re pumping into our atmosphere. And to do it, we can and must diversify our energy sources and reduce our dependence on polluting fossil fuels. Clean energy technology, energy efficiency programs, public transportation and more will help cut down on these emissions but it will require a global effort in order to avoid or minimize local impacts.

The second part of climate change policy is adaptation.

It is based on an acceptance of the reality that our climate is changing and will have real effects on our planet and all of our communities. The truth is that even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today, if we shut down power plants, stopped driving cars stopped using gas-powered farm equipment and trains and ships, all the rest, the amount of greenhouse gases, of CO2 and others already in the atmosphere would still take many, many years to dissipate.

Changes in the world’s climate are at this point inevitable. It’s already happening and affecting communities and we can expect these impacts to intensify as the rate of climate change continues to accelerate. We can modify our behavior to prevent those effects from being catastrophic. We can and should make better choices now to prevent disaster later.

In Delaware, for example, we’ve had two laws on the books for now 40 years that have helped us adapt.

First was championed by Republican Governor Russ Peterson, a hero of mine, of our governors and others. It is called the Coastal Zone Act and passing it cost him his career in politics. It prohibited future industrial development on a long strip of coastal land allowing the state and federal government to preserve it and reduce the impacts of flooding and coastal erosion, ultimately in the long run, Governor Peterson has been proven a visionary in preserving this vital barrier all along Delaware’s coast.

The second law empowered the State to protect and replenish the state’s beaches, including the beaches on Delaware Bay often overlooked. This has allowed our state to build a berm and dune system that protects infrastructure and protects property from being washed away.

More importantly than these significant landmark laws of 40 years ago, today instead of running away from the science, Delaware’s leaders have embraced it.

The state agency that manages environmental issues for Delaware is known as DNREC, and ably led by Secretary Colin O’Mara, it’s taken the lead on a government wide project to assess the state’s vulnerability to sea level rise and as I’ve mentioned recommend options for adaptation.

Delaware’s sea level rise committee spent 18 months looking at 79 different state-wide resources, roads and bridges, schools, fire stations, railroads, wetlands,  people and their homes and businesses and layered all of this onto maps to show how far the water would reach at different models for sea level rise.

If sea level does get to a meter and a half, we’ll lose more than 10 percent of our state. The water claims 20,000 residential properties, significant percentages of wetlands, farms, highways, industrial sites, we would lose 21 miles of our northeast corridor rail lines to flooding, shutting down the vital northeast corridor that transports so many millions every year. The Port of Wilmington would be rendered useless. Nearly all the state’s protected wetlands inundated. Three-quarters of our dams, dikes, and levees flooded out.

In short, this scenario, for our lowest lying state, would be devastating. As Secretary O’Mara said in this report – and I quote – “We’re looking at big risks for human health and safety. It’s not just the Delaware Bay beaches. We also have concerns about communities from New Castle and Wilmington to Delaware City. It’s much more complex than just a few inches of water rising on our beaches.”

He’s right. So, Mr. President, once again, remember, we have two basic approaches to climate change policy: adaptation and mitigation.

And once Delaware compiled its 200-page assessment on sea-level rise, the committee got to work on an adaptation strategy to protect our state. We came up with a slate of more than 60 options and hosted a whole series of public meetings and town halls to discuss them. We’re now working on a broader vulnerability assessment to examine the full range of impacts from climate change beyond sea level rise – changing temperatures, extreme weather, changes in precipitation, impacts that will affect us and all our neighbors. Climate change as all of my colleagues have said earlier this evening, will affect the distribution, abundance and behavior of wildlife, as well as the diversity, structure and function of our ecosystems.

We’re already seeing changes in natural patterns. As Senator Markey of Massachusetts commented earlier this evening, many commercial and recreational fish stocks along our East Coast have moved northwards by 20 to 200 miles over the past 40 years as ocean temperatures have increased. Scientists expect migratory species to be strongly affected by climate change. Since animal migration is closely connected to climate, species use habitats and resources during their migrations, these changes are impacting our own multibillion-dollar – both bird watching and water-fowl hunting industries, an important economic driver for us and critical parts of our heritage.

According to the draft National Climate Assessment released in 2013, our farmers are expected initially to adapt relatively well to the changing climate over the next 25 years. But later, as temperature increases and precipitation extremes get more intense, crop yields and production of poultry and livestock are expected to decline. More extreme weather events, droughts, heavy downpours will further reduce yields, damage soil, stress irrigation water supplies, and increase production costs.

All in all, this is a fairly grim long-term outlook in the absence of decisive action.

Mr. President, I’m proud of my state. Delaware was the first state to thoroughly assess the vulnerability of specific resources in as comprehensive a way as they have. And we are determined to confront these changes to our planet head-on and to protect our communities and the way of life that we have built.

Let me, if I could, briefly review that there are so many things we can and should do here in congress in a bipartisan way to lay the groundwork for the actions we have to take. We can improve our energy efficiency. We could take up and pass the bipartisan bill recently reintroduced by Senators Shaheen and Portman to increase the use of energy efficient technologies across all sectors in our society. This new version of the bill has 12 sponsors, six Democrats and six Republicans, and it includes 10 commonsense amendments that would save consumers electricity and money. A small but meaningful start on a journey towards changing our direction on climate change.

Or we could level the playing field and help new clean energy technologies get off the ground by giving them the same tax advantages currently utilized by fossil fuel projects. The bipartisan Master Limited Partnership Parity act, which I’m proud to cosponsor with my colleagues, Senators Moran and Stabenow, Murkowski, Landrieu and Collins, democrats and republicans working together, would level the playing field for renewables and give them and other new technologies a fighting chance in our energy market.

There are so many other steps we could do in combination if we would but get past this endless, pointless debate that has long been resolved in the halls of science and move forward in a way that better serves our country and our world.

The bottom line is that our climate is changing. We know that. With this knowledge comes the responsibility to reduce our emissions, to mitigate the impacts, and prepare for and take action to deal with the coming changes.

Mr. President, as I reflect on our own responsibilities as senators, I am in part moved to respond to the challenge of climate change not just because it is an environmental issue or an economic issue or a regional issue or a global issue, but it is also for me and for many others a faith issue.

It is a question of how we carry out our responsibility to be good stewards of God’s creation, to be those senators we are called to be, each from our own traditions, who stand up and do what is right, not just for the short term, not just for the concerns of the day but for the long term. 

And I want to, as I move towards my close, just share with a few of those in the chamber and watching that one of the things that’s been most encouraging to me as I’ve reflected on the change in the climate change movement over recent years, that it has begun to draw support from all across the theological spectrum. 

There was just last year, July of 2013, a letter sent to Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Reid and all members of the congress by 200 self-identified Christian Evangelical scientists from both religious and secular universities all across the United States. A powerful and incisive letter that says – and I quote –”As Evangelical scientists and academics, we understand climate change is real and action urgently needed. All of God’s creation is groaning under the weight of our uncontrolled use of fossil fuels, bringing on a warming planet, melting ice, and rising seas.”

It goes on, and I urge any watching to consider reading it. It’s posted online. It goes on and quotes Christian scripture at length in making the case that we have an obligation if we are concerned about our neighbors and about the least of these in this world to take on the challenge of making sure that we are good stewards. 

Those of the Roman Catholic faith may be inspired by Pope Francis who has taken the name of the Patron Saint of animals and the environment, and recently issued a call for all people to be protectors of creation. 

Last I might read from a letter that was issued by the President of the National Association of Evangelicals, a group that is not commonly known for their close alignment with my Party, Leith Anderson wrote in a letter in 2011 – quote – “While others debate the science and politics of climate change, my thoughts go to the poor, who are neither scientists nor politicians. They will never study carbon dioxide in the air or acidification of the oceans but they will suffer, from dry wells in the Sahel of Africa and floods along the coasts of Bangladesh. Their crops will fail while our supermarkets remain full. They will suffer while we study and debate.” 

This couldn’t be more true.

And, Mr. President, I urge all of us in this chamber to reflect on whatever tradition sustains us and brings us here, that we have an obligation to those who sleep soundly in our homes now, to those from our home states around the country to stand up and take action, to look clearly at the challenge that lies in front of us and to act in the best traditions.

Floor Speech: Creating a national network for manufacturing innovation

   Madam President, I come to the floor once again to talk about good jobs–about manufacturing jobs–and about what we can do together in this Chamber to strengthen the vital manufacturing sector of the American economy. 

   Last year, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Republican Senator Roy Blunt came together in a bipartisan effort to cosponsor an important bill, S. 1468, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act of 2013–an effort to build a national network for manufacturing and innovation, also known as manufacturing innovation hubs.

   This bill, if enacted, would allow us to build institutes across our country dedicated to discovering the next breakthroughs in technology and translating them into the next breakthroughs in manufacturing. I have been proud to support and fight for this bill, and now, because of my colleagues’ leadership and determination, we are close to getting a vote.

   We have heard about the importance of these innovation hubs for manufacturing before. Last year two hubs opened–one in Youngstown, OH, and another in Raleigh, NC. Just last week I was thrilled to hear about two more opening–one in Detroit and another in Chicago.

   These hubs are good first steps, but they are being done by the executive branch, without express and explicit authorization for a whole and broader program through this bill, which would extend this national network, would make its life longer and greater, and give more specific details to the process by which they would be authorized going forward.

   It is my hope, having already seen several demonstrations on a more modest scale, this Congress will come together in a bipartisan way and enact this legislation to put a framework in place for the long term.

   These hubs, as I said, are good first steps, but we in Congress can and should do more. In my home State of Delaware we are blessed to have some remarkable institutions of higher learning: Delaware State University, led by the great President Dr. Harry Williams; the University of Delaware–both research institutions which benefit from federally funded research and both of which do work in energy and engineering, relevant to manufacturing. We also have Del Tech–Delaware Technical & Community College–which does great workforce training and partners with manufacturers. We also have a whole series of manufacturers, large and small; some iconic companies such as DuPont, some unknown outside my State that employ dozens or hundreds.

   What a manufacturing hub would do is bring together a university that is doing cutting-edge research in a new field with companies looking to start manufacturing using that technology, with those community colleges and others who would train the new workforce, creating a network that would do the innovative work in an iterative way that would accelerate new manufacturing opportunities.

   The reason this bill has such a diverse set of bipartisan backers–from Democrats such as Sherrod Brown, Debbie Stabenow, and myself, to Republicans such as Roy Blunt, Lindsey Graham, and Mark Kirk–is because these hubs represent a great example of how the Federal Government can help foster partnerships between businesses, universities, and communities in a hands-off way.

   As to these first four hubs I mentioned, in these instances, the Federal Government is also getting terrific leverage. There is a more than 1-to-1 match from private, State, and local partnerships in these existing hubs–partnerships, I might add, that have national reach, giving the hubs the potential to benefit not just their immediate regions or their immediate communities but the whole country.

   General Dynamics and Honeywell, for example, are two of the partner companies in the Youngstown, OH, lab. They have footprints all across our country. At the hub in Raleigh, NC, researchers from other universities–such as Arizona State and Florida State–are collaborators as well, contributing their knowledge to the great work of these hubs and then also bringing back to their labs and their communities what is being learned through this common collaborative work.

   So the Youngstown and Raleigh hubs–now well established–are about more than just those two cities, and the hubs in Detroit and Chicago will be about more than just Michigan and Illinois, and the hubs we would create, we would authorize, through this bill would be about more than just the cities or States in which they are based.

   By bringing together such a wide-ranging and diverse set of partners, hubs allow many different stakeholders to pool their resources, minimizing the risks of investing in the early stage research that is critical to innovation but not feasible for one company alone to invest in.

   It is about the private sector coming together with the university and public sectors to solve tough problems without just one firm bearing all the risk or the burden. R&D–research and development–as we know, is critical to our economic future. These hubs offer an innovative model for increasing our national capacity for invention.

    The Federal Government acts as a convener for private firms, nonprofits, universities, and researchers, creating an environment where they can all do what they do best and share it. This idea transcends ideology or party. That is why I think Members of both parties should feel comfortable getting behind this bill. It has been endorsed by folks ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to Del Bio, which represents the bio and pharmaceutical community, and folks in the private sector and public sector in my own State and in States across the country.

   Manufacturing is at the heart of what can and should make this country competitive and prosperous in this century. At the end of the day, this is about creating good jobs. Manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs. It has a significant secondary benefit in the community as well as having higher wages and benefits than jobs in any other sector.

   If we are looking for the key to a dynamic innovation economy, we need to look no further than manufacturers. They invest more in R&D than any other private sector within the country.

   When we think of manufacturing and innovation today, we often picture researchers in the United States inventing things and manufacturing factories overseas. But that is not how sophisticated, advanced manufacturing innovation works anymore. The reality is that innovation is just not linear. R&D and manufacturing need to be closer together. It does not just start in the lab and then get sent to a factory and then to a store and your home. More often R&D results in innovations that improve the products already in our home, that improve the manufacturing process to discover better ways to make things faster, more safely, more efficiently, and that innovative cycle can speed up the more closely connected and articulated it is.

   By creating these manufacturing innovation hubs, all of which focus on a specific sector or industry, we can help fuel the discoveries that will make manufacturing a critical part of our long-term economic future, while ensuring that the discoveries that change our world are made here in America and the products that come out of them are manufactured here in America.

   These hubs focus on emerging areas where there is enormous potential. For example, the hub in Youngstown, OH, is focused on 3D printing, which already has the potential to transform how manufacturing, large-scale and small-scale, is done not just in the United States but around the world. We believe–I certainly believe we should continue to be at the cutting edge of developing and deploying what 3D printing has to offer.

   The one in Raleigh, NC, is about wide bandgap semiconductors or energy-efficient electronics and will likely dominate much of the next generation of electronics. Again, why would we not want to be on the ground for not just the inventing of new technologies but demonstrating how to manufacture them?

   In Detroit, researchers and businesses and universities and other stakeholders in this newest hub will work together on advanced lightweight materials, on remarkable metals that are stronger, more durable, more ductile, and more lightweight than other existing materials, with applications, of course, in automobiles but across a very wide range of products and platforms.

   Lastly, in Chicago, small businesses, universities, and larger companies are working together on some remarkable advances that speed up the whole manufacturing process so new ideas can go from the lab to your home faster than ever before.

   Hubs such as these are central to our competitiveness because it is not just about the work happening at the lab or the institute itself; it is about how they then attract companies with a national reach to an area that is capable of building sustainable and dynamic local economies. It is about bringing researchers and manufacturers together to spur innovation, commercialize R&D, and create good jobs that do not go somewhere else. It is about the larger impact for our communities and our country, as innovation breeds new supply chains and new businesses locally and across our country. 

   Today’s global economy is more competitive than it has ever been. We are competing not just with developing countries that have lower labor and environmental standards or lower wages but also with developed nations that are trying to out-educate, out-research, and out-innovate us. Germany, for example, has a well-developed, well-established, well-deployed network of more than 60 manufacturing innovation hubs exactly like the ones I have just described. It also has fairly high labor and environmental standards but is the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe. It has nearly double the percentage of its GDP in manufacturing as the United States.

   How are they able to do this? How can they sustain these high levels of manufacturing? It is in no small part because of the manufacturing innovation hubs they have developed and deployed.

   So let’s get this done. There is absolutely no reason that the season of governing and of legislating here in Washington needs to be over, especially when there is so much important work to do–work that I know we can and should get done on a bipartisan basis. Senators Brown and Blunt have done great work and shown strong leadership in developing this bill, refining this bill, and getting it to this point.

   Let’s show that we can come together in areas where we do agree and put campaigns and politics aside for now and put American jobs and American innovation first. 

Floor Speech: Urging Congress to support revival of American manufacturing, rebuild middle class

I come to the floor once again to talk about manufacturing jobs and their importance for rebuilding the American middle class, their importance for our economy, and their importance for our future.

Last week President Obama delivered his State of the Union Address before a joint session of this Congress, and he talked about what we can and should do together to invest in America’s workers, to spur job creation, and to expand economic opportunity. He said:

What I believe unites the people of this nation, is the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all–the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can and should get ahead. Opportunity is who we are. And the defining project of our generation is to restore that trust.

I couldn’t agree more. At a basic level, one thing we need to do is to put up a floor under the struggling workers in America who are continuing to seek work and to come together to extend emergency unemployment insurance for these long-term job seekers.

While jobs remain, sadly, more scarce than they should be in our economy and as we continue in recovery, we can’t let Americans fall through the cracks as they continue to seek work.

But since the extended unemployment insurance benefits expired last December, 1.7 million Americans, including more than 4,000 Delawareans, have lost the unemployment insurance that is critical to their families, to keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Emergency unemployment insurance, which this body once again today failed to extend, is a critical lifeline to Americans out of work through no fault of their own and who are doing everything they can to get back to work. While they are searching for jobs, we should make sure they can put food on their tables and keep their families sound.

One Delawarean I have heard from who relies on this lifeline is Raymond from Newark. Raymond was laid off last April from his job at the EVRAZ steel mill in Claymont. He is not sitting at home based on these unemployment benefits. He is not showing dependency, as some have suggested here. He has averaged more than 30 job applications each and every week. He has four children depending on him–one in college with tuition payments.

He wrote to me saying: “My job search is more than finding a job; it is searching to make an honest living.”

Raymond, to you, and to the more than the 1 million Americans who rely on decent work to give meaning to their lives, to give support to their families, and to give purpose and opportunity to their children and their future, we can and should do more–not only by extending the unemployment insurance, not only by increasing the minimum wage, but by building the middle class of this country to work together.

Folks such as Raymond have worked hard and paid their taxes. They have earned the opportunity, when they really need it, to get unemployment insurance. That is why they paid into it for so many years. But we need to do more beyond just extending unemployment insurance.

We need to invest in Raymond’s future. We need to invest in the skills that will help Americans like him transition from his job in a steel mill to a plant that is open and has a job that needs to be filled.

Throughout our history broad-based job growth and job creation have ensured economic opportunity that was there for millions of millions of Americans across several generations. Anyone who was able and willing to work in this country for a long time was able to find a decent job and a ladder into the middle class. By investing in our nation’s workforce, our people, through public education, through the GI bill, and through access to higher education, we have been a country where anyone who was willing to work could make it if they combined their work ethic and talents with the skills they needed.

During World War II, in the postwar boom, manufacturing was an economic backbone. Our country was the pathway to the middle class that made all of this possible. 

American manufacturing was the sturdy manifestation of that central American idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can provide for your family today so your children can get access to higher education, a brighter future, and you can have a secure retirement tomorrow. That is the essence of the American middle class.

The basic opportunity that manufacturing provided–those strong and stable rungs by which Americans could pull themselves up the ladder of opportunity–was the heart of America’s economic engine, it was the glue that held communities together, but over the past few decades it has changed dramatically. As the world has changed, as billions of competitors have entered global markets, from China to India to Russia, so has the nature of manufacturing , as technology has advanced and the playing field on which we compete globally has changed fundamentally. The critical impact of low wages abroad and of trade deals that were not effectively enforced has been well documented. But too often people draw the wrong conclusion about the future of manufacturing based on its recent past. I have heard many arguing that manufacturing is no longer an industry, a sector where America can compete because this global playing field is tilted and there will always be workers in some country who will work for less, and so we are relegated to inevitably lose what is left of our manufacturing in a race to the bottom. The suggestion has been made in some sectors that we should thrive with service and high-skilled research and development and financial services but not manufacturing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In my view, only if we continue to be a country where we invent things, grow things, and make things will we continue to be a leading economy where there is real opportunity for all Americans. Why? Because manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs both for those who work in them, who get higher wages and higher benefits, but also for the local economy, where manufacturing jobs provide more of a compounding benefit than any other sector.

Some suggest we just can’t compete because our labor standards, our environmental protections, and our wages are too high. But look to Germany and Europe, and you can see this isn’t true. They have higher labor standards and higher environmental protections than we do, and yet more than double the percentage of their economy, the percentage of their GDP is manufacturing because their government, their education sector, and their private sector work in close harmony to do what we need to do.

Since manufacturers invest the most in private sector R&D, where there is manufacturing, there is also a wealth of high-skilled research work. That is one of the other benefits of manufacturing. Tech development works the best when research centers are close to where products are made. Over the long term it is hard to have one without the other. So as our manufacturing base has moved offshore, we have been at risk of losing our research base. But just in the last few years there has been a dynamic that is encouraging of jobs coming back to this country. As our productivity continues to grow, as our energy costs go down, and as that wage gap closes, we have actually been regaining ground in manufacturing.

I am convinced that if we want to rebuild an economy that is dynamic and that grows, one that provides opportunities to the middle class, manufacturing must be at the center–in fact, must be the foundation.

What is true is that because the global economy has shifted so dramatically, we need to shift our strategy and our approach. The manufacturing that America excels at today is more advanced and requires higher skilled workers than ever before. Rather than repeating the same tasks over and over, workers today in manufacturing have to be able to carry out complex and varying tasks; to be able to see what is not going right and fix it as a collaborative team; to understand the manufacturing process and to innovate continuously. They have to have critical thinking and problem-solving skills. The sorts of things workers weren’t expected to do 30 years ago are a minimum requirement today. They need to understand manufacturing, and they need to be able to program and to improve the caliber and productivity of the machines that do most of the repetitive simple labor of manufacturing today. 

We can train Americans for these jobs , but our schools and our institutions of higher learning, our community colleges and universities have to be tightly integrated into a skill-training system that is demand-driven rather than giving people training and praying that somehow they will find their way to an appropriate employer.

That is why I was so encouraged when President Obama placed such an emphasis on workplace skills training and manufacturing in his State of the Union speech. By modernizing our education system and building real and enduring partnerships between schools and businesses, we can ensure our workers have the skills that employers actually need today and tomorrow; so when a guy like Raymond from a steel mill in Claymont is laid off, he can have the opportunity to improve his skills, to retool his abilities, and to move right into an open and available manufacturing job. A recent study showed there were more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs –high-skilled, high-wage, high-benefit jobs –in America today unfilled because of this skills gap.

While I understand and even appreciate President Obama’s commitment to making some progress in the coming year through Executive orders, he should not give up on working with Congress. It is just February. It is too early in this year for us to give up on the possibility of passing bipartisan legislation together.

I think more than ever, because of the message it sends domestically and internationally, we have to find a way to work together to make progress on the critical issue of manufacturing skills and to do what we can together to grow our economy and rebuild our middle class. That is why I have been working so hard with my colleagues on the Manufacturing Jobs for America campaign here in the Senate. Manufacturing Jobs for America is a campaign to build support for good manufacturing legislation on which Democrats and Republicans can agree. So far we have had 26 Democratic Senators introduce 32 bills. Almost half of them have Republican cosponsors already, and we are seeking more each and every week.

Our bills focus on four areas that, if we were to enact them, could have a real and substantial impact on manufacturing and opportunity in our country: strengthening America’s modern workforce skills, as I have spoken to; fighting for a more level global playing field and opening export markets to America’s manufacturers of all sizes. Medium and small businesses have been growing their exports, but we could grow so much more, and that would sustain the growth in manufacturing; third, making it easier for manufacturers to access capital and invest in the R&D I spoke to a moment ago; and fourth, ensuring a coordinated government-wide effort in support of a national manufacturing strategy. All of our competitors have them. We alone don’t, and we need a national manufacturing strategy to make sure that skills, access to exports, and access to capital all happen.

Madam President, adapting our economy to the realities of a new era is a challenge we have struggled with for more than a generation. Yet figuring out how to realize an economy where growth is both strong and more equitable–one that is dynamic and creative and globally competitive and also has a broad middle class, provides security for working families, and leaves no one behind; an economy that invests in the dreams and aspirations of our children–building that economy is the central challenge we face. Manufacturing can and should be the foundation of that economy.

If we want America to be as strong in the 21st century as it was in the 20th, we need American manufacturing. Let’s work together and get this done.

I thank my colleagues from both sides of the aisle for their partnership, their interest, and their work. I so much look forward to working together in the weeks ahead to prove to the American people that we can make bipartisan progress on manufacturing.

Floor Speech: Unveiling bill to modernize national labs and spur innovation

Mr. President, I rise today to speak about a bill introduced today, a bipartisan bill, a bill that will strengthen America’s innovation economy.

Over the last 60 years, our national laboratories have served as leading centers of research and discovery in America.

Today, in fact, we have 17 DOE labs charged with three broad research missions – science, energy, and national security. And although they’ve grown and changed since their founding to encompass much broader ranges of work and are successful in carrying out their primary missions, the labs are not fully optimized to take part in today’s innovation culture.

That’s a problem; because in this century of rapid change America’s best competitive advantage remains our capacity to innovate.

So over the coming months I’ll be talking about a few things that Congress can do in a bipartisan way to streamline and jump-start our nation’s hubs of discovery so that we can thrive as a 21st Century innovation economy.

At the top level, it will mean working together to reauthorize the America COMPETES Act, which would reaffirm our commitment to the robust national strategy for science and technology programs that will continue to be a critical underpinning of America’s prosperity. 

One part of how that can be achieved is how our national labs operate, and a bill that will make our national labs operate more effectively has been introduced today by Senator Rubio of Florida and myself, and it’s the America INNOVATES Act. 

Already, our labs have incubated many groundbreaking innovations over their long and storied history. Their research has led to breakthroughs from, for example in the health care field, new Melanoma and HIV/AIDS treatments, to in the national security field, special I.E.D. detonators that have saved the lives of our troops in combat.

That research is critical because although the private sector will continue to be a key source of investment and innovation, the federal government has and will continue to play a central role in advancing basic science, research, and innovation as well.

Why is that? Private markets historically speaking tend to underinvest in R&D relative to the potential benefits to society, and this is especially true where basic science is most relevant and it’s particularly true in the energy sector.

But if there’s a problem I’ve heard about since coming to Congress, in this field, it’s that too often the great work of scientists at our national laboratories just doesn’t get translated to the marketplace – that we as a nation, as a people don’t benefit from the remarkable discoveries and inventions being made in our 17 national labs.

Right now too much groundbreaking science and too many innovative ideas never leave the walls of our national labs, squandering enormous potential for our people, our country, and the commercial marketplace.

So in this bill today, introduced with Senator Rubio of Florida, we continue to support our labs’ core missions. We’re not proposing anything drastic. What we are doing instead is modernizing the labs for the 21st Century, so that ideas developed in the lab can most effectively become innovations in the marketplace.

Fortunately, we need only look to the labs themselves for inspiration on how to do this.

So we make two broad proposals.

First, we’re integrating the management of the Department of Energy’s science and energy programs to improve linkages between basic and applied science. This will allow the early stages of research and development to be translated more efficiently and it’s something that Department of Energy Secretary Moniz has signaled he supports and is going to move forward with.

Second, we’re giving the national labs more power to work with the private sector, to ensure that more scientific discoveries turn into commercial breakthroughs.

Together these two steps would allow us to streamline the labs’ work so it can more quickly and effectively translate into the transformative innovations that can create jobs and grow our economy.

Now to explain what our proposals actually might achieve, let me walk through what is broadly known as the innovation pipeline, which shows how basic science research ultimately becomes a deployed world-changing innovation.

First I’ll use the example of the great work scientists at the National Renewable Energy Lab, or NREL, in Golden, Colorado, are doing to advance cellulosic ethanol technologies.

One of our country’s big challenges today is reducing our dependence on foreign oil, and to do that we need new fuel options that we can create or grow here in America. Cellulosic ethanol is an advanced biofuel with a great deal of promise because it’s produced from abundant and renewable materials like grasses and wood chips, other types of biomass and waste. And because these materials are abundant, cellulosic ethanol has the potential to replace a significant portion of our nation’s petroleum consumption.

The challenge comes, however, because unlike corn, these cellulosic materials are made of much more complex starches that are much harder to break down into ethanol. To make the promise of cellulosic ethanol a reality, we need to develop the enzymes and the micro-organisms that could break them down and ferment these more complex starches, and that’s where this innovation pipeline comes in.

At the NREL in Colorado, scientists started at this most basic science step here.

Basic science is very fundamental. It’s the study of the elementary principles of the universe, really discovery level science.

So, for example, in this application, enzymes are large biological molecules, they are nature’s catalysts. They accelerate the metabolic processes that sustain life. And to develop new customized enzymes and micro-organisms capable of converting starchy biomass into cellulosic ethanol, you have to start at the very fundamentals of biochemistry and of biology. This includes studying intricate details of the relevant processes, the biochemical processes, as well as probing the proteins and amino acids that form the building blocks of these enzymes down to the sub-molecular level.

At this point, scientists, having made a series of discoveries, can then move to the applied science stage.

Applied science concerns translating these fundamental discoveries into an application. In this example, scientists apply the insights gained from fundamental basic science research to develop new enzymes with desired performance traits such as high selectivity, specificity, and stability to enable effective and efficient conversion of these complex starches into ethanol.

Applied research can also involve controlled lab-scale demonstrations to test and to demonstrate how effectively these newly developed enzymes and micro-organisms can turn wood chips into ethanol.

Still in the lab and very far from commercial scale, the kinds of small discoveries that happen at the applied science level act as an early demonstration that something new, the application of a new discovery, can possibly move further down this pipeline.

At the applied research stage, we are still far away from creating something ready for the market, but between these two stages our scientists have gone from the basic science of how an idea might work to actually demonstrating it could work in practice.

At this point now, the private sector is much more likely to see the potential value of this discovery. Scientists have shown it’s possible and next we move to the commercialization and then the scaling and deployment phases, where private investors and private companies take the technology of our national lab scientists and make it into a product that can succeed in the market.

During the applied research stage at NREL, scientists were hard at work showing they really could produce cellulosic ethanol efficiently and cheaply, eventually meeting their goal to make it price competitive with conventional fuels in the commercial marketplace.

That’s where we are right now with cellulosic ethanol. Companies across the country, such as DuPont from my own home state of Delaware, Poet from other places in the country, and many others are currently actually building plants, they are doing the scaling and deployment, they’re building plants to produce cellulosic ethanol at commercial scale and competitive prices.

So this example is just one model of public-private partnership for innovation and how it works all along this innovation pipeline, where the basic and applied science research begin in a national lab and then are transferred either by the licensing or sale of intellectual property to private-sector companies who then do the very hard work of commercialization and scaling before ultimate delivery to the marketplace, where it can be bought and consumed by Americans and others around the world.

I had the opportunity last year to witness another model of public-private partnership for innovation at a different national lab, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which is home to a unique national asset, the Advanced Light Source, or ALS.

The ALS is a very complex, very expensive piece of machinery that serves thousands of researchers – from private sector scientists to university researchers – who use the light sources such as ultraviolet rays, soft x-rays, and infrared light that all come off of the ALS to conduct a wide range of scientific experiments.

Experiments at the ALS are performed at nearly 40 different beam lines that come off the Synchotron and can operate simultaneously around-the-clock and year-round. This facility’s remarkable resources would be far too expensive for any one company or university to invest in alone, but by building a national level publicly-owned facility, it’s then possible for it to function and to be partly sustained by fees and targeted infrastructure investments by users. And as a result, the ALS has become a place where many different partners from around our country and the world test new ideas and new approaches.

In terms of this innovation pipeline, what the Berkeley Lab and ALS do is allow a very wide range of researchers to engage in different stages of research under one roof. The unique capabilities offered by the ALS attract many industry partners and encourages productive public-private collaboration.

A good example of how this is actually applied into the marketplace is in the semiconductor industry. Semiconductor technology is one of the most transformative scientific breakthroughs of the last century. Semiconductors are at the heart of what makes a modern computer work. Their constant advancement is what allows us to today hold the computing power of last generation’s supercomputer in iPhones in our pockets.

However, the manufacturing techniques previously used to produce new, smaller, more powerful semiconductor products just aren’t adequate to build the next generation of nano-electronic devices. So what’s happened is a consortium of companies – Intel, IBM, HP, Dow – formed a consortium called SEMATECH to leverage the unique capabilities of the ALS at the Berkeley Lab to advance semiconductor manufacturing for next-generation electronics.

As the lab reports, “By tapping into the center’s long-term expertise in short wavelength optics and the unique properties of the ALS Synchotron facility, SEMATECH funded the development of the world’s highest resolution projection lithography tool and highest performance extreme-ultraviolet microscope” – developments only possible because of the facilities and the expertise at this unique national lab.

Having then developed these new tools capable of manufacturing the next generation of semiconductor devices, a company like Intel can take that new technology and scale it up at their own plants.

Of course, there are many different variations like these two I’ve suggested of public-private partnerships that our labs can and have utilized to take ideas from basic science all the way out to the marketplace. These two examples – cellulosic ethanol and semiconductor manufacturing – show us what’s really possible when the private sector is able to work in full partnership with our national labs. 

In the bill we’ve introduced here today, Senator Rubio and I are trying to expand the flexibility and freedom of all our national labs to innovate and to build productive partnerships so that every research project has the potential and opportunity to travel this entire pipeline and be deployed to the world markets.

As we see here on the innovation pipeline, the payoff for all this work doesn’t come until the very end, so one of the best things we can do together is to focus our policies to make the movement of ideas through this – from the national labs to private-sector partners to the marketplace – as efficient and predictable as possible.

Mr. President, while there are many ideas, many areas, many political subjects on which Senator Rubio and I disagree, I’m pleased that we’ve been able to work hard and to come together on the America INNOVATES Act today. Because we both agree that government has a role to play investing in fundamental scientific research that can lead to innovations that change our world.

In this bill we’re not talking about expanding government or calling for any new spending or new regulation. We’re talking about the early science work that only government can fund because there isn’t a clear payoff for the private sector, and figuring out how to connect the national labs and the private sector along this innovation pipeline in a better and stronger way to deliver more products to the American marketplace and the world markets.

Once again, I want to thank my Republican colleague, Senator Marco Rubio, and I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join us in supporting this bipartisan innovation jobs bill. Thank you.

Floor Speech: A funding bill that invests in America’s future

Madam President, today, this week, we’ve come together to consider an omnibus appropriations bill. That’s a big mouthful, an omnibus appropriations bill, but I hope to lay out in plain language for our folks back at home and for those in this chamber why that matters, why I’m excited about it and why I support it.

This is the first time since I joined this body three years ago that we have considered one, and it’s a real step forward. The agreement we came to on the budget and the agreement I hope we will pass on this appropriations bill means no more shutdowns, no more crises, no more autopilot, at least not for this fiscal year.

This bill helps us return to regular order, to the proposition that once election day is over, it’s our job as the representatives the people elected to come together, find common ground, solve bigger problems together and move the nation forward.

Now, this appropriations bill is the result of a lot of hard work by members and staff, and I must begin first and foremost by thanking the Senate Appropriations Committee chair, Senator Mikulski and vice-chair Senator Shelby, as well as the House chair, Congressman Rogers and ranking member, Congresswoman Lowey, who showed great leadership, working together on a very tight deadline to craft such a vast and comprehensive bill.

Their work follows the leadership of the chair, Senator Murray, and the leader of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Ryan, after they came together to pave the way for the Appropriations Committee to reach this deal this week. I applaud their leadership and thank them for the example they have set.

As a member of both the Budget and Appropriations committees, it’s been a privilege to work with them to craft these bills and ensure we meet our nation’s needs. The bill before us is, of course, a compromise. And it is the essence of a compromise that it’s not perfect by any means, that there are many who can find fault within it or disappointments aplenty amongst the choices made.

It doesn’t include, for example, just to pick one thing of great importance to my state, it doesn’t include enough funding to make real headway on Amtrak’s critical infrastructure improvements that I think are essential just to deal with the $6 billion backlog of investments needed in aging tunnels and bridges and tracks.

So while this bill does provide adequate funding for Amtrak today, which I’m very glad about, it puts off those critically needed investments in repairing these essential elements of its infrastructure, which we will inevitably need to make.

That’s just one example. And in a bill this big, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of the tough tradeoffs that had to be made between House and Senate, between the appropriators of the majority and the minority. But as we consider our vote on this bill and how it does or doesn’t meet our own priorities, our state’s priorities, we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

We need to remember that at least in this case, the alternative to this bill isn’t our own individual or perfect vision of government – whatever view we might hold – the alternative is crisis after crisis, government that doesn’t move forward with the country, but treads water as the world passes us by in an increasingly competitive global environment. 

What this bill does in a very real way is bring back some stability for our government and our economy and allow us to make important investments in our country’s growth.

For instance, it takes a number of valuable steps for my home state of Delaware. It funds meat and poultry inspectors critical to Delaware’s chicken industry and its 13,000 jobs. It funds the next stage of an Army Corps of Engineers project to deepen the Delaware river from 40 to 45 feet, so that we’re ready and can be competitive when the expansion of the Panama Canal nears completion.

It dedicates funding through the Victims of Child Abuse Act, and I am an original cosponsor of a bill reauthorizing the Victims of Child Abuse Act. For the three Children’s Advocacy Centers throughout my state, these centers are critical to delivering justice for the victims of child abuse without harming their healing process.

And the bill maintains funding for a Bulletproof Vest Partnership, an initiative that has supplied Delaware police officers with over a thousand bulletproof vests in the past two years. Two of those vests, I should add, saved the lives of two officers during a shooting at the New Castle Courthouse just last spring.

These are just a few of the things for which I am grateful in this broad omnibus bill. Nationally, it also allows us to meet our key priorities of training our work force for this century, making our communities safer, and building a circle of protection around the most vulnerable in our society – so in combination, making us safer, stronger and more just.

The investments it makes in America’s workforce by funding education programs can last a lifetime. Head Start helps kids ensure they don’t fall behind before they have had a chance. This bill increases that funding by a billion dollars to serve 90,000 more kids this year. There is a competitive grant program to help states and communities find innovative ways to provide high-quality preschool options for low and middle-income families that I’m particularly excited about. In Delaware, we saw the power of this program and we competed for and won federal funding on a competitive basis for high-quality early education just last year. The Department of Education’s First in the World initiative will help colleges to measure, and thus improve, outcomes and bring down costs for students and families.

And this bill increases our investment in job training programs like Job Corps and the Veterans Employment and Training Service which helps everyone from low-income Americans who have failed to get on their feet in the job market to veterans who stood up for us around the world and have earned our support upon their return. 

Next, this bill includes crucial funding that makes our communities safer. We’re upping our investment in the COPS program first championed on this floor by my predecessor, Senator Joe Biden. It will put 1,500 more officers on our streets and in our neighborhoods, keeping us safe. The Violence Against Women Act, which we came together in a bipartisan way to pass last year, is fully funded, and we’re taking important steps to stop the scourge of gun violence that affects each and every community with a new comprehensive school safety program, which I’m excited about; new investments to improve background checks; and new training to help local law enforcement react and protect the public from active shooters.

Of course the second part of making our community safer is ensuring that justice is delivered in our courts when crime does happen. Unfortunately, the sequester’s cuts to our federal courts cut the judiciary to the bone, imposing furloughs, hurting our nation’s justice system by leading to layoffs of hundreds of experienced, seasoned senior court staff. Thankfully, the bill before us reverses these and many other cuts and minimizes the delays of justice that are unacceptable to our nation.

Finally, this bill allows us to sustain what I like to call a “circle of protection” around the most vulnerable in our society that reflects our shared commitment to each other, our most basic values. Investments in the WIC program for women, infants and children will make sure 87,000 children have food they need at a vital stage of development.

LIHEAP ensures that low-income families don’t freeze during the coldest months of the year and this bill’s funding increase will ensure 400,000 more households have this critical assistance. Last, when we passed this bill when which I pray we will by week’s end, we’ll reverse the sequester’s devastating cuts to housing programs and as a result prevent more than 100,000 American families from becoming homeless.

Madam President, each of these investments in our workforce, in our public safety, in protection for our most vulnerable, together they make up the foundation of a safer, more just, more inclusive society. But when we also combine it with investments in research and innovation and infrastructure, we lay the groundwork for growth and shared prosperity today and tomorrow.

After the last three years, which in my experience have been mostly defined by partisan gridlock, stopgap budgets, and crisis governance, this bipartisan appropriations bill allows us to create some stability for our nation and our economy. And I think it reminds us that we are a nation that is at our best when we are determined to be open to each other’s ideas, to hear each other’s concerns and criticisms, and find ways to work together.

Although there are plenty of areas where I disagree with my Republican colleagues, as I’ve gotten to know them over the past three years we have found many more areas of common good and common work. So let me briefly mention a few of them as I celebrate what I think is the most important aspect of this big bill, which is that it’s truly bipartisan.

Senator Marco Rubio and I were both elected in 2010 and came to this chamber roughly the same time and we found ways to work together to invest in STEM education and to open pathways to college for young Americans.

Senator Hatch and I wrote a bill together called I-Squared – and we’re joined by Senator Klobuchar and Senator Rubio – and this bill brings high-skilled workers to our shores and invests in STEM education for American citizens.

Senator Kirk and I have worked together to create a national manufacturing strategy that focuses resources on creating manufacturing jobs in America. And just this Monday, Senator Roberts of Kansas and I announced our partnership on a new bill to make the research and development tax credit and it’s funding available to startups and to young, innovative companies.

There are so many issues where we can work together to invest in our workforce, to protect the public, to sustain this storied circle of protection around the most vulnerable, to invest in long-term economic growth, and to lift up every community and every American. 

I am incredibly thankful for the leadership of Senators Mikulski and Shelby and the way that they displayed that leadership through action, through this process by putting aside their differences and finding common ground. I’d like to also close with a note of personal thanks to the countless committee staff on both sides who worked tirelessly throughout the holidays to make this bill a reality.

With this omnibus appropriations bill, it is my sincere hope that we’re putting an end to a cycle of manufactured crises and sending to the American people and to our communities the message that we can and will work together to confront the many challenges that remain here and in the future. 

Floor Speech: Congress must renew support for jobseekers

Madam President, fifty years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson challenged a joint session of Congress and the American people to begin a war on poverty.

“Unfortunately,” President Johnson said, “many Americans today live on the outskirts of hope.” “Our task,” he said, “is to help replace their despair with opportunity.”

Since President Johnson first issued that call, Congress and our nation have taken important steps to build and sustain a circle of protection around the most vulnerable in our society.

That protection isn’t as complete or strong as it can and should be – but through programs like unemployment insurance, which we are considering this week in this Congress, we are more able to catch our neighbors when they fall and support them as they work to get back on their feet.

Earlier this week the Senate began debate on whether to extend emergency unemployment insurance for the 3,600 Delawareans and more than a million job-seekers across the country whose benefits just expired. 

It is absolutely critical that we approve this extension. During this fragile economic recovery, unemployment insurance has been a critical lifeline – one that has prevented millions of unemployed Americans from slipping further and falling into poverty.

In 2012, unemployment insurance kept 2.5 million Americans — including 600,000 children — out of poverty. That means that without federal action to extend unemployment insurance, the nation’s poverty rate would have been double what it was. And these numbers are for 2012 – they were even higher at the height of the recession.

So let’s be clear about what we’re debating when we discuss an unemployment insurance extension. These are long-term benefits for jobless Americans who’ve been out of work through no fault of their own for over 26 weeks.

When I say through no fault of their own, I mean you can’t get benefits if you’re fired for cause. And if you receive benefits, you must diligently search for another job. When we talk about the millions of long-term unemployed Americans, we’re talking about folks who were laid off because of the recession, are fighting to get back on their feet, and rely on these benefits to keep their families afloat, to keep a roof over their head, food on the table, their families together, and sustain them as they continue looking for work.

Yet two weeks ago, funding for long-term emergency benefits ran out. That meant $300 less in weekly income for the average jobseeker and that meant $400 million left our economy in just the first week.

In Delaware, it pulled $800,000 from our local economy. That’s money that otherwise would be spent in local grocery stores and our markets.

Now, one of the most vexing things I’ve heard in the debate over whether to continue these benefits is that they somehow incentivize people to not bother looking for jobs – that they instead lull able-bodied Americans into lives of dependency and despondency.

Madam President, given the people I hear from, the people I meet with, the people I know in Delaware, that’s not just absurd, it’s, forgive me, offensive. And, as President Obama said yesterday, it sells the American people short. I’ve heard from and spoken with Delawareans up and down my state who are relying on unemployment benefits that they paid into when employed and every one of them would trade a job for relying on unemployment insurance in a heartbeat. Let me share with you a few stories of Delawareans who have contacted me and who have shared just how hard this has been for them.

Debbie from Middletown, Delaware wrote that while she’s been receiving unemployment benefits, she’s applied to 156 jobs. She had been interviewed three times. She is 56. She has worked diligently since she was a teenager. She’s worked hard, paid her taxes, she’s paid into this system for practically her whole life and yet now when she needs it most, we failed to continue to provide this lifeline of support.

Linda from Newark wrote to me that on just $258 per week, her family has barely been able to stay afloat. They’re doing everything they can to keep up on their bills, to stay current, but even with unemployment insurance they’ve had to sell some of their family’s treasured possessions and goods. She wrote to me, “This is no way for anyone to live. It’s disheartening and difficult to stay motivated. And frankly,” she said, “I’m thoroughly fed up with being categorized as someone who lives off the government by collecting unemployment benefits.” I agree with her because, frankly, Linda, you paid into these benefits for years. This is what it’s there for.

John from Frederica told me he was laid off from Dover Air Force Base in part because of the sequester, and now depends on unemployment benefits while he looks for another job. This man who is a Navy veteran and was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for our country and yet right now because of the partisan gridlock in this Congress, we’re not there for him and his family.

Madam President, the millions of Americans like Debbie, Linda, and John in Delaware face a really tough job market. Nationally, for every available job, there are three jobseekers. And the longer someone remains unemployed, the harder it becomes for them to find work. The more their skills are out of date, the more difficult the search becomes, and the more they need our support to sustain that job search.

I’ve seen these effects up close and personally in Delaware. In my three years as a senator I’ve hosted 16 different job fairs to connect Delawareans looking for work with employers looking to hire. I’ve been honored to partner with Senator Carper and Congressman Carney in hosting these job fairs. In fact we’re hosting another one in our state capital, Dover, in just a few weeks.

When you speak with these folks about their struggle — about how hard it is to make ends meet and to keep searching for a job — you get a sense of how important these benefits are for their survival, for their families. And you get a sense of how much more we can and should be doing to tackle and deal with long-term unemployment in America.

As poverty of opportunity and hope afflicts too many of our communities and darkens the lives of too many of our neighbors, let us not suffer, in this chamber, from a poverty of imagination, determination, and ambition.

On this issue – which is so fundamental to who we are as a nation and to our service in this body – we cannot give in to complacency and apathy. 

Fighting poverty is hard. And adapting our economy to the realities of a new era is a challenge we’ve struggled with for more than a generation. Yet figuring out how to realize an economy whose growth is strong and equitable… one that is dynamic and creative and competitive and also has a broad middle class, provides security for working families, and leaves no one behind… an economy that invests in the dreams and aspirations of every child – building that economy is surely one of the most urgent and difficult challenges we face.

And doing so requires that we put aside our personal politics and come together in these areas where, until recently, there has been broad and bipartisan consensus.

I now hear many of my Republican colleagues talk on this floor about the War on Poverty 50 years later as having been an abject failure. They make sweeping indictments on government action, putting small government ideology ahead of the shared national goal of fighting poverty.

But this perspective misses the point. The original War on Poverty was made up of a lot of programs that worked at every level of government – some that failed and others that, through steady and determined bipartisan work and steady improvement and refinement over the years, have become critical and widely accepted strands that hold together our social safety net.

Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, unemployment insurance – all of these programs are valued and hold American families together and sustain American jobseekers. Bipartisan leaders across the decades have reaffirmed the importance and value of these programs time and time again.

And these programs, let’s remember, are about so much more than lifting people out of poverty – they’re also about keeping people out of poverty in the first place. We need them to build and strengthen the middle class, which is one of the greatest legacies of this nation.

So as we search for ways to adapt our fight to new times and new challenges, we must remember that there is no one way to win the war President Johnson first declared 50 years ago. It’s not a question of big or small government – of federal or local action.

As President Johnson himself said, “This will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice…”

“Poverty,” he said, “is a national problem. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the state and the local level… For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.”

This wasn’t an ideological argument for big centralized government. It was an all-hands-on-deck call, a moral call, for a nation to meet a national challenge. And although we’ve made progress since he addressed this Congress in 1964, his call to combat poverty remains just as important today, even as our challenges have evolved.

We’ve come a long way since the depths of the Great Recession just a few years ago. More than 8 million private-sector jobs have been created. There’s been a more than three-point drop in the national unemployment rate. We have resurgent energy, housing and manufacturing sectors.

Although a few years have passed since our economy sunk to its lowest lows, this crisis remains for those Americans and their families who are still struggling to find a job and keep a roof over their heads. Though this week we’re debating extension of emergency unemployment insurance, we should note this is not only an obvious and necessary thing to do, it is the beginning of our real work of sustaining the war on poverty. I’m proud to be engaged in broad bipartisan efforts to strengthen the middle class, to focus on jobs and skills and manufacturing.

We have to find bipartisan solutions that engage the private and the public sectors, federal and local governments, in putting people back to work.

And while we do that, we cannot forget to continue to insist on a circle of protection around the most vulnerable in our society, rather than allowing that valued circle to crumble.

We have to remember that we are all in this together. That, “there but for the grace of God go I.” As we see those in our community, in our families who are struggling in this recovery, we know that although today it may be our neighbors, tomorrow it may be us.

President Johnson called on us to focus on the best of America – the spirit that we hold each other up, the spirit that builds community through mutual sacrifice.

As we begin our work in this new year to jump-start our economy and spread hope and opportunity, we must never forget that basic spirit which President Johnson called for and which has kept this country moving forward from generation to generation. 

Floor Speech: New reasons to invest in manufacturing jobs

Mr. President, I come to the floor once again to talk about manufacturing jobs. This week, under Senator Amy Klobuchar’s leadership, the Joint Economic Committee released a report that thoroughly and thoughtfully lays out why manufacturing jobs have such promise and how Congress can act to help spur manufacturing job creation now and into the future.

The report shows that today manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs, that they pay better than jobs in any other sector in wages and benefits, and that they help create more local service sector jobs, that they contribute more to the local economy, and that manufacturers invest the most in private sector R&D of any sector in our country. 

Manufacturing, as the Presiding Officer well knows, has long played an important role in our Nation’s economy, has served as our economic backbone, and has built the American middle class. But over the past 60 years, manufacturing in our country has changed, gradually and then dramatically. As our economy and the world have changed, so has the nature of manufacturing and the playing field on which we can and must compete.

Due to global competition and the worst recession since the Great Depression, we lost 6 million manufacturing jobs in the United States in the first decade of this century. We are now on our way back, but we are well short of where we were in 2000. We have gained 550,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 3 years, and that gives me real hope. In just the last 6 months, we have seen new signals that our manufacturing sector continues to be on the rebound. 

A new report from the Institute for Supply Management shows the U.S. manufacturing sector grew last month at its fastest pace in 2 1/2 years, and hiring has reached an 18-month high. The value of our manufacturing exports has grown 38 percent in the last 4 years, and those exports now account for nearly 3 million jobs on American shores.

But, as the Presiding Officer and I well know and as many of our colleagues know, we need to invest more in that success and in that growth, in the private sector and in the public sector.

Overall, this is great news, about the slow, but real, steady recovery of our manufacturing sector. The reason we are coming back is the United States is actually poised to compete in advanced manufacturing, in the manufacturing economy of this century. In the 21st century, manufacturing is fundamentally different than it was in our past. Rather than repeating the same simple tasks over and over, workers must now carry out far more complex and varying tasks. They need to be critical thinkers and problem solvers. They have to do math and communicate with each other in writing and as a team and work in ways simply not expected 20 or 30 years ago. Crucially, they need to understand the entire manufacturing process in a way that wasn’t necessary before. Yes, there are machines doing a lot of work, but we need workers who can oversee them and understand them to keep our steady, growing benefits to increase productivity.

Manufacturers can’t rely on someone from outside our country to fix a problem every time there is one. Today they rely on their workers to troubleshoot on the fly. Our workers need to continue to be some of the most productive in the world and, to do that, they need to be more skilled than ever, particularly because they are overseeing highly complex operations.

The manufacturing floor today, as this report reminds us, is no longer the dirty, dingy, dangerous manufacturing workplace of 150 years ago. Today it is clean, high tech, highly productive, and it needs a highly skilled workforce. We can win by training our workers for these jobs.

While some nations engage in a race to the bottom on environmental labor and wage standards, this isn’t the playing field we can or should try to win. Fortunately, we already have the tools to lead the way in manufacturing, in an innovation-centered economy.

This Joint Economic Committee report outlines how low-energy costs, due to greatly expanded natural gas supplies, a highly skilled workforce relative to much of the rest of the world, and having still the world’s best universities, all in combination give us a real fighting chance. American manufacturing, I am convinced, is poised for a takeoff.

Now we have this report from the Joint Economic Committee which shows us just that. It shows why we should remain optimistic about American manufacturing, if we can simply in this body harness the will to act. This report frankly lays out a lot of why we have created Manufacturing Jobs for America. 

Manufacturing Jobs for America is a campaign. It is a campaign to build support for good manufacturing legislation that Democrats and Republicans can agree on. So far, 26 Democratic Senators have come together to contribute 44 bills to a conversation; 31 of those bills have already been introduced in this body, and almost half of them have bipartisan cosponsors. We are actively seeking Republican cosponsors on the rest. 

Our goal overall is to generate more and work more closely with Republicans to build consensus for bills that can pass the Senate, pass the House, and go to the White House to become law. We want to see manufacturing bills that can really help put Americans back to work. 

I am grateful for the leadership of Senator Debbie Stabenow who, along with her cochair, Senator Lindsey Graham, led the bipartisan manufacturing caucus that is helping take great ideas and bills generated through this initiative and turn them into solid, bipartisan bills.

This Joint Economic Committee report emphasizes that there are four key areas where we have to focus to create manufacturing jobs now and in the future and they are exactly the areas that the Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative centers on as well. 

First, we have to strengthen America’s workforce. Second, we have to fight for a more level global playing field so we can open markets abroad and compete successfully. Third, we need to make it easier for manufacturers–especially new and small businesses — to access capital, to invest in research and development as well as new equipment and products. Fourth, we can and should do more to ensure a coordinated, all-of-government effort in supporting manufacturing by insisting on a stronger, clearer national manufacturing strategy. Together, across these four areas, the bills in Manufacturing Jobs for America can have a real and substantial impact if they become law.

I believe in the power of this initiative because I have seen the potential of manufacturing up close. In my time in the private sector, I developed a fierce belief in how we can and must act here in Washington to support and spur American private sector manufacturing. Before I came here, much of my work in the private sector was at a manufacturing company, a materials-based science company that makes hundreds of products. At one point I was part of a site location team that had to decide where to locate a new state-of-the-art semiconductor chip packaging manufacturing plant.

What made the difference? In the ultimate decision it was first and foremost we needed a skilled and reliable workforce. Second, we wanted the State, county, and city governments to be responsive and have made investments in infrastructure. While we also of course considered tax credits and training grants, the first two really were the main factors–the skills and capabilities of the workforce at all levels and the responsiveness of the local government, the State government, and the Federal Government in investing in infrastructure.

This experience taught me two things: that the advanced manufacturing sector can thrive in the United States–that facility was located in America, not overseas; and there is a critical role for government to play. So if this Congress makes a concerted, across-the-board push to help create manufacturing jobs in America, I am convinced we can lay a strong foundation for growth today and tomorrow. The opportunity is there, just in front of us. We just need to stop the endless partisan struggles that have dominated this Congress in the last few years and seize the very real, very positive opportunity in front of us–to lay out a bipartisan path forward to strengthen the manufacturing sector in our country.

Together, we can keep our factories humming and lead the way in new industries in the future. We just need the political will to try. That is what this effort, Manufacturing Jobs for America, is all about. 

I am so grateful to Senator Klobuchar and the Joint Economic Committee for the Manufacturing Jobs for The Future report and for the vision it lays out, and I appreciate the effort of all of my colleagues who contributed great and strong and clear ideas to this Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative.

Floor Speech: Calling for an end to partisan obstruction of nominees

I came to speak to a bipartisan bill, which I hope to take a few minutes to talk about, but first I wish to comment on what is happening or not happening on the floor and the comments of the majority leader.

I have been a Senator for only three years, as the Presiding Officer well knows. We were sworn in as a group of those elected to the class of 2010. I just came from an inspiring event where the Vice President, who previously held this seat on behalf of Delaware, gave an award to the former majority leader, a real patriot, a veteran, former Senator Bob Dole. They talked about how compromise, principled compromise, made it possible for Senator McGovern and Senator Dole, folks from opposite ends of the political spectrum, to work together in the interests of hungry children in the United States.

Frankly, what I have seen in the three years that I have been in the Senate, the three years that we have served together on the Judiciary Committee, has been a slow walk.

There are minority rights in this body, but there are also minority responsibilities. There are majority rights but also majority responsibilities.

I wish to add to the comments of the majority leader that the nominees to serve on the DC Circuit, the nominees to many district court seats, whose confirmations I have either presided over or attended, were not objected to on substantive grounds. I have trouble with the idea that the three empty seats on the DC Circuit do not need to be filled. 

I have listened at great length to the arguments about caseload and about workload. As the chair of the courts subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, I presided over the presentation of the Judicial Conference’s report on where we need additional judgeships and where we don’t.

I will note briefly and in passing that Judge Tymkovich, who presented this report, did not suggest there was some need to reduce the DC Circuit by eliminating these currently vacant spots. 

We could go through this chapter and verse. This has been debated to death on this floor. In my view, we have three excellent, qualified candidates. I regret that we have spent so much time burning the clock and that we have had to make changes that ultimately will make it possible for qualified nominees to be confirmed. 

It is, to me, a subject of some deep concern that we cannot work better together, Republicans and Democrats, to move work forward.

If I might, I would like to move for a moment to an example of exactly the sort of bipartisan bill that we should be able to move to here, that if there weren’t this endless obstruction, if we weren’t running out the clock on nothing, we might be able to get done together. This is an example of the sort of reaching across the aisle that used to dominate this body when giants such as Dole and McGovern served here but is no longer the case. They are no longer the daily diet of this body. We are no longer reaching across the aisle and finding ways to make our country more competitive, create more manufacturing jobs in partnership with the private sector, and responsibly reduce our deficit.

I was encouraged as a member of the budget conference committee that we seemed to be moving toward enacting a significant–small in scale but significant in its precedence–deal for the Budget Committee that could allow us to go back to regular order for appropriations. But here, as we waste hour after hour running out the clock to confirm nominees, I wonder. I wonder whether we are going to be able to take up, consider, and pass substantive legislation.

Floor Speech: Introducing bipartisan bill to save advocacy centers for victims of child abuse

If I might, I would like to take a few minutes to talk about why I initially came to the floor today; that is, to talk about the power of children’s advocacy centers. Children’s advocacy centers exist across the country today in large part because this Congress, on a bipartisan basis, passed back in 1990 the Victims of Child Abuse Act–a bill that for the first time authorized funding for an important nationwide network of what are called children’s advocacy centers. These centers help deliver justice, they help heal victims of violence and abuse, and we must act to continue empowering their service to our nation.

Today is a time when we could work together to reauthorize that initial landmark bill from 1990 and rededicate ourselves on a bipartisan basis to something that is one of our most sacred obligations: protecting our children, protecting the victims of child abuse and delivering justice for them. That is what this bipartisan bill does that was introduced earlier today along with my colleagues, Senators Blunt and Sessions and Hirono–a great example of being able to work together across the aisle. 

As parents, as neighbors, as leaders of our nation, we have no more sacred obligation than protecting our children. In most of our cases, we dedicate everything we have as parents to ensuring our children’s safety, to providing for their future, and that is what this bill is all about–that responsibility.

Tragically, too often, despite our best efforts, too many of our children fall victim to abuse. We cannot guarantee their safety, but what we can do is ensure that when children in this country are harmed, we can deliver justice without further harming them. Thankfully, children’s advocacy centers, for which this bill reauthorizes funding, are critical and effective resources in our communities that help us perform this awesome and terrible responsibility. Through this bill, we can continue to prevent future tragedies and deliver justice in ways that are effective and less costly than communities can deliver alone.

This bill helps prevent child abuse proactively. Just last year its programs trained more than 500,000 Americans, mostly in school settings, in how to spot and prevent child sexual abuse.

Secondly, and in my view most importantly, this bill delivers justice. Children’s advocacy centers increase prosecution of the monsters who perpetrate child abuse. One study showed a 94-percent conviction rate for center cases that carried forward to trial.

Third, and in many ways equally as important, this bill helps to heal. Child victims of abuse who receive services at a child advocacy center are four times more likely to receive the medical exams and mental health treatment they desperately need compared to children who are served by non-center supported communities. No parent ever wants to go to one of these places or have to bring their child to one of these places, but those parents who have under these tragic circumstances, nearly 100 percent of them say they would recommend seeking this help to other parents.

How do these advocacy centers achieve all these different results of prevention, of justice, and of healing? Well, they are unique because they bring together under one roof everybody who needs to be present to help deal with the tragedy of child abuse: law enforcement, prosecutors, mental health and child service professionals–all focused on what is in the best interest of the child.

Through a trained forensic interviewer, they interview the child to find out exactly what happened. They ask difficult, detailed questions, and they structure the conversation in a trained and non-leading way so the testimony can be used later in court, preventing what otherwise is re-traumatization, making it possible for child victims to testify in a way that will lead to justice but without forcing those children to take the stand and to repeat over and over what they testified to once at a center.

Prosecutors take the information obtained in the interview all the way through the court system, while doctors and other child service professionals ensure the child is getting the help he or she badly needs to begin the process of healing.

One place, one interview, with all the resources a victim would need to move forward to secure justice and to heal. 

In my home State of Delaware, we have three children’s advocacy centers, one in each of our counties. In the last year, I visited the centers in Wilmington and in Dover and saw firsthand the extraordinary work the professionals there do. These are places haunted by the tragedies that are described and recorded there, but the staff are welcoming, nurturing professionals, and the law enforcement and mental health and child service professionals who are there are deeply dedicated to making sure that they achieve justice and that they promote healing.

It was striking on my tours, my visits, to see how strategically and thoughtfully each of these centers has been put together, how they have worked through every possible detail to enable obtaining the testimony needed to secure justice while enabling healing of child victims. This is critical in order to avoid re-traumatization–a threat that is real for victims and for their long-term healing process. The centers in Wilmington and Dover and Georgetown in my home State show over and over how these centers create the sort of nurturing but effective space to ensure that we both meet the needs of victims and secure justice.

As I am sure the Chair knows, in my home State of Delaware just a few years ago we saw exactly the kind of evil we most dread in this world when a pediatrician, a man named Earl Bradley whom many Delawareans trusted with their children’s health and safety, was found to have sexually assaulted more than 100 of our children. Delaware is a State of neighbors, and his horrific crimes against our children, our families, and our communities affected all of us. Attorney general Beau Biden and his team effectively led the investigation and prosecution of this monster. Thankfully, children’s advocacy centers were able to play a key role in ensuring that the interviews and the assistance provided to the victims and their families were effective and that ultimately justice was rendered.

Randy Williams, the executive director of Delaware’s Children’s Advocacy Center in Dover, wrote to me: “Our multidisciplinary team worked tirelessly and seamlessly in providing forensic interviews, assessments, medical evaluations and mental health services for every child referred to our centers.”

Randy went on to say: “I feel confident that our team’s outstanding collaborative response was a direct result of the financial and technical assistance and training resources made possible over many years through the Federal Victims of Child Abuse Act.”

In the end, Dr. Bradley was convicted on multiple counts. Over 100 victims were involved. He is now serving 14 life sentences plus 164 years in prison.

As a nation, we have no greater responsibility than to keep our children safe. As a father, there is nothing that keeps me up at night more than concerns about the safety and security and health of my own children. We must do everything we can to prevent sexual abuse of those most vulnerable and those most precious members of our society–our children. When that tragedy strikes, we need to be prepared with the best services we have to foster healing and deliver justice.

This specific bill is about upholding our responsibility to our children, to our families, and to this nation’s future. It is at the very core of why we serve and of what we believe. I am grateful that this is a bipartisan bill, that this is a bill which can demonstrate the best of what this Senate, this Congress, and this country is capable of. It represents the best of our Federal commitment to targeted, effective, and essential assistance to State and local law enforcement, to our communities, and to our children.

I urge my colleagues to join with us because in the end, no child should fall prey to physical or sexual abuse. No mother or father should have a haunting experience of finding that an adult they trusted took advantage of that trust and horribly hurt their child. No country should tolerate these crimes when there are things we can do now, today, on a bipartisan basis, to protect and to heal our children and to ensure that justice is secured.