Senator Coons delivers keynote remarks at the Secular Coalition’s Secular Summit

More than anything I wanted to just start by thanking you for inviting me, for what you do, and for what you’re in the midst of doing, for the Model Policy Guide that you put out, for taking time to go and to advocate, to go and sit down, to go and be a presence, to go be in front of – from Ted Cruz to Sheldon Whitehouse – the whole range of folks who serve, right from Tammy Baldwin to Joni Ernst, we’ve got a remarkable array of backgrounds and values in the United States Senate. And they need to be, we need to be reminded, that we represent a very broad range of views, of beliefs, of backgrounds and attitudes in this country. I take seriously the idea that I need to represent all of Delaware. I take seriously that even folks who do not share any of my worldviews, several of whom I spoke to this afternoon, deserve effective and engaged representation. At the end of the day I think that is one of my core commitments as a senator; a commitment to secular government. So thank you for taking the time to make sure that our elected representatives understand the whole range of who they represent.

Some may think that I am an unlikely person to be addressing you this evening. As you heard, as United States Senator, I am dedicated to the separation of church and state, and to the equal protection under the Constitution, which I swore to uphold whether you are religious or secular. But as a citizen, I am a practicing Christian and a devout Presbyterian and a recent speaker at the Senate prayer breakfast.

So, I think it’s interesting that we have a chance to visit together. If you actually look at what I dedicate my time, and my heart, and my energy to, I doubt that my values or the things that I fight for in Congress differ very much from the ideals that you hold or the issues on which you spent time lobbying just this week in Congress. And so, I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about that. How it is that someone of my values, whose path runs unmistakably through my own religious faith journey, ends up in a place where I think we are natural allies in advocacy around things of lasting difference. And forgive me for the self-indulgence, but I’d like to take a few minutes, and just hopefully this is helpful, to walk you through how I came to be who I am and what I try to fight for in the Congress and how I came to be here.

I am of course aware that for many the Bible, which I consider scripture, has been used as a document, as a foundation to justify discrimination, has been the basis of intolerance based on outdated teachings and moral codes and has been a source of pain and distance and discomfort for many. It is quite a different source for me. And so, forgive me, I’m going to quote my favorite passage of scripture, something I suspect is not often done at Secular Coalition.

It is Mathew chapter 25; my hunch is that it may be either vaguely familiar to you or actually familiar to you. It is the passage in which Jesus is teaching about what really matters. In summary, He says, for I was hungry, you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

The person who was making an inquiry as sort of what does this matter says when did that ever happen that, I didn’t do it for you. The answer is truly whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters you did for Me.

Now that has spoken to me, has helped drive my actions and my engagement, my commitment in no small part because my own parents lived that, made that real in my life. And that has shaped a lot of who I am.

I was active in my church as a volunteer as a kid; my parents were instrumental in showing me those principles in action. My dad taught sunday school and after one particularly powerful sermon that sighted this passage, raised his hand to his own surprise as a suburban Republican businessman just trying to raise three boys and volunteered to start going to our state prison, and visiting with prisoners, and building a relationship that ultimately led to a deep relationship with a man who was a convicted murderer; that ultimately led him to risk having that murderer come home and spend furlough weekends with us, with his young children in this safe suburban neighborhood. In a way that I don’t think he thought was a big deal at the time. But now that I have teenage children and I have a home that I try to keep safe, I recognize was radical. Was an opening of our own family space to someone who was considered by society at the very edge of who was acceptable and who was welcome.

My mother, we were just talking about this the other day, helped welcome a refugee family from South Vietnam and helped change their lives and transform them from penniless with nothing but the clothes on their backs to folks who had a real remarkable opportunity and over the decades we were involved with them as a family, we got to see them transform into engaged and settled Americans.

So, in small ways and in big ways, I was raised by parents who took these words to heart and did things with them.

I spent time myself in South Africa working for Desmond Tutu, going across the country working with the homeless and homeless shelters, and volunteering with kids in inner city schools, and then when it came time to do some graduate study I went to, yes, that institution in New Haven. And while working in a homeless shelter in New Haven, a friend who had a pony tail down to here and was doing criminal justice work said to me, “There’s this crazy lesbian lefty nun you’ve gotta come listen to.” I said, “Sounds good to me.” I audited one class at the Divinity School and thought she was amazing, and took a second class, and a third class, and a fourth class, and ultimately one sunday the Dean of Admissions said to me, you know we do let law school students into the Divinity School. And so in what was for me a surprising step, I chose to enroll in the Divinity School.

Now, I was very active in the progressive community in my law school, and most of my friends were politically active progressives. But I was unprepared for their response. When word started filtering out that I had enrolled in divinity school, some of them literally disowned me. My own roommates moved out. Several folks literally stopped speaking to me, and acted as if I had lost my mind. Either made offensive jokes that kinda not funny or cut me out of their social circle. In ways that were unexpected to me and personally hurtful. And it took me quite a while to get through all of this. Some of them, sort of up here just dismissed divinity as a serious field of study and said, you know, “Chris, you are a scientist, you are a chemist, you trained as a chemist as an undergraduate how could you possibly believe in this insane stuff.” And others had a far more edgy and political response. And as I tried to heal and to reconnect with those relationships, with folks who had meant a great deal to me, who I had worked with hard in the homelessness clinic or in taking classes with, I came to learn that many of them had personal experiences of deep pain, and of alienation, of abuse literally or figuratively in their own childhood or their own communities that had driven a big wedge between them and religion. And that helped me understand what was, what I saw, real bigotry. Frankly we were a group of progressives who were really proud of how welcoming and open we were and virtually any possible lifestyle or worldview or attitude was something we would embrace right up until the moment when I said I believed in God and was unwelcomed.

I wrestled with that for quite a while.

Eventually I came to understand that for many of my colleagues in the progressive political journey, accepting someone of expressed faith was one of the hardest moments of tolerance and inclusion for them. So I have been passionate about trying to help bridge this difference for a while. Because frankly, in the political coalition that works for progressive values, there are truly progressive Christians and Jews, and there are truly progressive nonbelievers or secularists who have found common cause, and getting past some of our misunderstandings of each other, which often means getting passed some of our childhood experiences or youthful experiences that can be very painful and very personal, is absolutely essential to building the bridges to a sustained coalition of action.

I also suspect that one of the main reasons my choice was so difficult for so many of my progressive friends to understand was because religion had come to be so closely associated with right wing politics rather than dedication to any progressive values. One’s grounding in faith had become more associated with dogma, with arrogance, with a certain rigid certainty than with my own experience, which was an association with questioning, with tolerance, with inclusion, and with doubt.

One thing that divinity school actually drove home for me was the centrality of doubt to faith – that faith without doubt isn’t faith it’s extremism.

After all, when you spend hour upon hour studying scholarly interpretations of ancient and opaque texts it is hard to be overcome by anything other than humility in the face of what is a largely unsolved and unsolvable mystery. And in my particular church, I’m Presbyterian, the tradition of our church is one that gives each individual relatively wide latitude to understand what is the intersection between the eternal, or the religious, and the secular, or the daily. In my own church upbringing, the idea of one person having a monopoly on truth would be considered not prophetic but fanaticism.

So when I think about this country’s founding and the central tenet of secular governance, I also think about the importance of doubt and of humility.

As a person of faith, I think it is foundational to our country that if we allow people to choose their path of faith they must of course be also free, welcomed, celebrated to choose not to have faith in a supreme being, but instead to be optimistic about the possibilities for ethical living and good citizenship rooted in first principles, rooted in however you derive your principles for living. And although I started by perhaps puckishly quoting from the book of Matthew, there is, I’m aware, nothing uniquely Christian about those values. It’s just as easy to get there through faith as it is through other experiences that help us just discern how to treat each other respectively and kindly.

And if that’s true, then surely it is those universal values of equality and of justice and of inclusion that transcend one’s faith orientation or secular orientation that should be our guiding light as policymakers.

Religious freedom must also be freedom to not have our values or practices forced into the public square. I’ll remind you, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Adams, “Say nothing of my religion, it is known to God and myself alone.”

If we take seriously the value of one’s individual freedom to choose faith then we must also take seriously the right of our neighbors not to be oppressed by discrimination even it is informed by one’s deeply held religious tradition. And it is exactly that intersection that is once again at the front of the news, that is once again at the center of the national debate.

One other quote from a founder, George Washington wrote beautifully about this idea in a letter to the Newport Rhode Island Congregation. Although it could have been addressed to any group of believers or nonbelievers alike, it was to one of the oldest synagogues in America, he wrote, “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that tolerance is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoy the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” And he closed, “While everyone shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Today, the dominant voices of faith self-identify or self-professed faith in our national politics unfortunately still remain most associated with dogmatism, with a certain rigid hubris and certainty that says I have the answer, and the rest of you, be damned. I recognize that if doubt and humility are central to my faith experience, than that leaves open the distinct possibility that others are right and I am wrong, and I think starting from that point is the beginning of the bridge building which I hope we will continue.

The certainty that has become associated with religion in the far right in politics is a genuine problem, I think, for our bridge building, because it makes it seem as if religious values can only manifest themselves in conservative diatribes about homosexuality or abortion. In the association of religion, or Christianity, with Republican Party politics, I think there has subsequently been a real backlash against religion or expressions of faith especially amongst progressives.

As a progressive person of faith, this has been profoundly harmful and not just with my roommates and my social circle. But more broadly, in terms of where we can go, together.

It has caused discrimination and bigotry that is counter to our values as our country. That is true whether we are debating the rights of committed gay couples to enjoy the blessings of marriage or to be served at whichever business they choose or whether the church’s teachings should have an impact on public policies regarding reproductive health. Equality and freedom from discrimination are fundamental to who we are as a country. They are the birthright of every American and no matter what your upbringing teaches, that must be for us non-negotiable.

Second, the association of religion with certainty and conservatism has served to diminish the power of progressive voices of faith. It has made it seem as if the more religious one is the more conservative one must be. Yet here I am, a devout, believing Presbyterian, and I am proud that my church ordains both gay and lesbian clergy, and blesses marriages of opposite sex and same-sex couples alike.

A year ago January, I had the distinct honor of preaching at the wedding of a close couple who I dearly love who were the first to wed under Delaware’s new marriage equality statue. And I think as small acts of engagement, of positivity like that, that cross the bridge between the progressive and the faithful happen across our country, there will I hope be somewhat of a diminishing of what has so long been the distance between those of progressive political values and those of progressive faith.

Lastly, and I think this is a point we miss far too much, the destructive influence of religion in conservative politics has served to drive a wedge between religious and secular Americans who should be working together. I know I have made that point more than once. I share your profound belief in secular governance, yet I am also mindful and informed by the fact that in my view every major social movement in American history had its central animation, in part, in houses of worship. Whether the labor movement, the American Revolution, abolition of slavery, the social gospel, the civil rights movement, it was the combination of folks from the African-American church to Catholic parishes to synagogues to Protestant congregations all over the country that were central drivers of social change.

Building and sustaining an alliance between those social change movements outside and inside houses of faith, is the only way we can be successful in the long term in continuing to transform this to a country where all backgrounds are respected and included.

Faith doesn’t manifest itself uniformly and progressives of faith need to be able to speak openly about their values, not to evangelize but to allow these alliances to be formed and to be built sturdier.

From the purpose of coalition building, whatever the cause may be, we have to recognize we need as many allies as possible. I’m not going to guess how your visit to Senator Cruz’s office went today, but my hunch is as you look at today’s Congress you recognize that we need each other more than we ever have before.

Though we have come a long way, too many LGBTQ Americans are still treated as second-class citizens by their government, state or federal, because of who they are and who they love.

Though we’ve made a long journey in the 5o years since Selma, too many African-American men today are put behind bars with their futures extinguished because of draconian drug laws.

While we’ve created more wealth than any nation on Earth, too many of our children go to bed hungry and too many of their futures are diminished simply because of their zip code.

I have huge confidence in our country’s ability to continue perfecting our union. And a big reason why is because the values that bind us together transcend whatever your childhood experiences were, whatever your religious affiliations or secular views may be, because they are greater than any of those. So whether you pray five times a day, or once a day, or never, I am equally hopeful that we can transcend those differences and be woven together by our advocacy for a more just and equal society.

So thank you. Thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you for coming to Washington. We have a lot of work to do, together.

Speech to United Theological Seminary’s Progressive Faith Members Orientation

Thank you, and thank you to everybody who’s gathered today for a conversation about the intersection between faith and politics and to reflect on how our faith traditions and our values and our public service intersect or should intersect.

You asked me to talk about something that would surprise you—I’ve been reflecting on something a lot recently. You know this has been a really hard year for criminal justice in our country, and for a sense that our justice system is a just system. And whether it’s in Ferguson or in Staten Island or in my hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, or places elsewhere in the country, there is a real sense of disconnect and a renewed focus on how mass incarceration is impacting communities and how our criminal justice system has some profound failings.

When I was a young man—and I mean, in middle school—my father, my parents were sort of dutiful suburban Republican Presbyterians. Everything was done decently and in order, no worship exceeded an hour. Fellowship hour was fellowship hour. Enthusiasms were for the Baptists.

So looking back on it, it is stunning to me that my father, a small businessman and Republican with no particular engagement in or history of civic activism, decided one Sunday because there was a guest preacher who was citing Matthew 25 and said really very pointedly “’When have you, to the least of these, clothed the naked, fed the hungry, visited those in prison?’ And if we’re not doing this then why are we here? We oughtta be at the country club. The food’s better and the music’s better.”

And a group of volunteers decided to begin going to our state prison and visiting with prisoners. And my father found it compelling, and developed a real relationship with a man who was a convicted murderer. What I find striking looking back on it, I was eleven at the time, this man had killed his own father.

His father was a violent, abusive alcoholic. Paul had killed him when he was 17 and had spent 18 years in prison. His family wanted nothing to do with him. And he was eligible for parole. And we started having him come spend weekends with us visiting.

Now, as a father myself of teenagers—teenage boys and a teenage daughter—when my own kids have seen homeless folks on the street in our town and said, “Dad, we have an extra bedroom, why can’t she come live with us?” My wife and I do this sort of safe, “Oh, well, you know, we support the Friendship house, and we volunteer there, and there’s other people who do that sort of thing, honey.”

My father and my mother took what was the radical step of welcoming into our home, weekend after weekend, year after year, someone who they did not see as a convict but who they saw as a neighbor and a fellow Christian. When my father later in life, asked me how I became a Democrat (I’m the first Democrat in the known history of my family) I cited to him that simple powerful radical witness of taking seriously Matthew 25. I hope at some point to earn His respect by doing some small thing in this Congress to make some real difference in criminal justice reform.

In my own life I spent time living in homeless shelters and visiting with the homeless and working with the homeless, trying to honor that tradition—trying to make some difference, and to understand what the housing needs in our country are. But to me today, criminal justice strikes me as a pressing and basic human rights need, justice need, and where the voice of the progressive faith community is badly needed, important, and vital.

Thank you.

Floor Speech: Employment Non-Discrimination Act is long overdue

Mr. President, every so often in between the crises, in between the rancor and the partisan fighting, we get an opportunity to make some real progress here in the Senate. This week we’re considering the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill to put in place basic workplace protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

It’s been a big year for equality nationally and in my home state of Delaware. The Delaware General Assembly legalized same-sex marriage earlier this year in May, giving every Delawarean access to the full rights and responsibilities of marriage no matter their orientation. 

A month later, Delaware’s General Assembly built on its three year-old law protecting LGBT people from workplace discrimination, adding protections for transgender Delawareans as well. These two laws were about dignity, respect, and basic fairness for our neighbors. Of course, a month later, the United States Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, giving all married couples across our country access to the federal benefits they’re due. This has truly been an historic year for civil rights and for our country. But for all our progress, much remains to be done.

In 29 states, it is still legal to fire someone just because they’re gay, just because they’re lesbian, or just because they’re bisexual. That means more than four million Americans across those states go to work day in and day out having no protection from being fired summarily because of how they live. And for five million, it’s legal to be fired because of their gender identity. I want to thank my colleague from Oregon for his hard work in leading this fight on the floor and for the senator from Iowa for his long advocacy for this bill that should have passed years and years ago.

More than 40 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans and almost 80 percent of transgender Americans say they’ve been mistreated in the workplace because of who they are – because of who they love. Clearly there is still work for us to do.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act would provide basic protections against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s a bill that’s built on our nation’s historic civil rights laws, including the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

This is about basic fairness. The overwhelming majority of Americans, in fact, more than 80 percent, think that it is already against the law to fire someone just because they’re gay. Most Fortune 500 companies already have policies prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in place. Some of Delaware’s biggest employers and companies – DuPont, DOW, Bank of America, T.D. Bank, Christiana Care, and the University of Delaware – have led the way with their own policies to protect the rights of LGBT Delawareans and their employees. There is real momentum behind these protections and it is time for Congress to pass this law.

Protecting Americans from discrimination is part of America’s shared values and it needs to be part of our laws as well. No one here thinks it’s okay to fire someone simply because they’re African American or because they’re a woman or because they’re an older American. It’s not okay to fire someone because they are gay or transgender either. Equality is a fundamental part of our shared American values – to do unto others, to treat people with the respect and dignity with which you want them to treat you. 

And majorities in every state support putting these protections in place. Majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents support putting these protections in place. Majorities in every Christian denomination support putting these protections in place and the majority of small business owners surveyed support putting these protections in place. Freedom from discrimination is a fundamental American value that we don’t just share, we cherish. Why not put these protections in place now, today, to ensure that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans will be able to go to work, to earn a living, to provide for themselves and their families without the fear of being fired just because of who they are? 

Mr. President, the opportunity that’s in front of every one of us is an important one. Leadership on civil rights in this chamber has traditionally been bipartisan, and this period of partisanship on civil rights is only fairly recent and need not be permanent. In fact, this bill is cosponsored by two of our Republican colleagues: Senator Collins of Maine and Senator Kirk of Illinois. When he came to the floor to speak on ENDA earlier this week, Senator Kirk noted the importance of a senator from his home state of Illinois, being in a position of leadership on this civil rights issue. This really is an historic opportunity, and when the Senate votes on final passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act tomorrow, I hope we all will take advantage of this historic opportunity.

Floor Speech: Expanding access to capital for manufacturers

Mr. President, I come to the floor once again today to talk about jobs, about manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs, as we all know, are high quality jobs.

Manufacturing jobs come with higher pay and higher benefits. Manufacturing jobs help create other local service sector jobs and manufacturing jobs contribute more to the local economy than jobs in any other sector. And beyond that, Mr. President, manufacturers invest the most of any industry sector in research and development, something critical to America’s continued growth and our security as a leading innovation economy.

So last week, 21 Senate colleagues and I joined in a new initiative, the Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative, to help create good manufacturing jobs here at home today and tomorrow. It’s grown now to 25 senators who’ve all contributed different policy ideas. This isn’t one big mega-bill with dozens of sponsors, but just one bill. Instead, it’s a constellation of 40 different proposals. Some of them have already been introduced as bills and half of those that have been introduced are bipartisan.

These bills represent some of our best ideas about how we can work together across the aisle to provide badly needed support for our growing manufacturing sector here in the United States.

There are four different areas that these 40 different proposals fall into and I wanted to talk about one of them today. The first three are: how do we open markets abroad, how do we strengthen America’s 21st century manufacturing workforce, and how do we create a long-term environment for growth through manufacturing strategies? But the fourth is how do we ensure access to capital? So of the four, today I wanted to speak to access to capital.

As any business owner knows, you can’t ensure the long-term growth and vitality of your business unless you have capital to invest – whether in research and development, new workers, new products, or new equipment to expand into new markets. So access to capital is absolutely essential to manufacturing jobs for America. The three bills I’m going to talk about today – which are part of this constellation of 40 different proposals – each would expand access to capital for manufactures in different ways.

Let me start with the Start-up Innovation Credit Act. This is an existing bipartisan bill that I’ve introduced along with Senators Enzi, Rubio, Blunt, and Moran, who are all Republicans, and Senators Schumer, Stabenow and Kaine, all, like me, Democrats.

Although we represent different parties, come from different parts of the country, and have different backgrounds, we’ve all come together to strengthen our economy and, in particular, to support innovation and entrepreneurship. One way we do that now is to support private-sector innovation in manufacturing through the research and development tax credit. The R&D tax credit generates new products and industries, benefiting other sectors. But there’s a critical gap in the existing, in the long-standing R&D tax credit. It isn’t available to start-ups because they’re not yet profitable. This is a tax credit that you can only take if you have a tax liability and are profitable.

So we worked together, Senator Enzi and I and the other cosponsors, to fix this hole with a relatively simple tweak. That’s what the Start-up Innovation Credit Act does. It allows companies to claim the R&D tax credit against their employment tax liability rather than their corporate income tax liability. Supporting small, innovative companies in their critical early stages of research and development could unleash further innovations and unleash greater growth that would spur good job creation for Americans for the long run.

Between 1980-2005, all net new jobs created in the US were created by firms five years old or less. In total, that was about 40 million jobs over those 25 years. This credit is specifically designed with those new, young firms in mind, those early stage firms that are the font of the greatest source of creativity and of jobs. It’s limited to those companies that are five years old or less and it’s limited to being an offset against their W-2 liability so we can provide some access for early stage start-ups to this R&D credit that encourages them to hire more folks and to grow more quickly. Just a part of Manufacturing Jobs for America.

The second bill I’d like to talk about today is the Master Limited Partnerships Parity Act. That’s a mouthful, Mr. President, but it also levels the playing field in access to credit. Instead of giving smaller early stage start-up companies the same access to capital that larger, more mature firms have, this bill levels the playing field in the energy sector and it levels the playing field in particular for clean energy firms.

This is a bipartisan bill as well. I introduced it with Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow as my lead cosponsor and Republican Senators Jerry Moran and Lisa Murkowski. And I am grateful for their persistent and engaged leadership on this bill. I’m thrilled in the last couple of days that Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu and Republican Senator Susan Collins have signed on as cosponsors as well. The MLP Parity Act allows us to really have an all-of-the-above energy strategy.

As I’ve heard as I presided in my first two years, as I served on the Energy Committee, there are many senators here, Republican and Democrat, who think we shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in technology and we should be promoting an all-of-the-above energy strategy, and this bill makes that possible in clean energy financing and in preserving a widely used tool for existing traditional energy financing. Oil and gas will play a significant role in our nation’s energy picture for the foreseeable future, but right now we don’t have a level playing field between renewables and between oil and gas and pipelines.

For nearly 30 years, traditional nonrenewable sources of energy have had access to master limited partnerships. MLP’s give natural gas, oil and coal companies access to private capital at a lower cost. That’s something that capital-intensive projects, like pipelines, badly need. But alternative energy projects, I would argue, now need that as well and, in fact, in some ways more than ever.

I spoke just last night to a group of board members at the National Academies of Science. And what we spoke about was how much technology has developed, has sped up in the clean energy space, but how financial innovation hasn’t kept pace. This has held back renewable energy and investments in energy efficiency, even as technology has made energy production and distribution and energy efficiency cheaper to achieve.

Expanding access through this broad bipartisan bill to low-cost, long-term capital would be an important step to letting new energy sources take off and letting them compete on a level playing field with all sources of energy. That’s exactly what the MLP Parity Act intends to do. 

Last but not least, I was proud to be able to join a number of other senators in cosponsoring the Small Brew Act. Senators Cardin and Begich, Senators Collins and Murkowski, Democrats and Republicans, have worked together to give small brewers a leg up by lowering the excise tax that they face on the beer they produce.

Small brewers, such as Dogfish Head in my home state of Delaware, are big job creators in communities across this country. As Senator Ben Cardin said on the floor earlier this year, while some people may think this is a bill about beer, it is really about jobs. And, I would say, jobs in manufacturing.

Small and independent brewers today employ more than 100,000 Americans and pay more than $3 billion in wages and benefits. Sam Calagione, the owner of Dogfish Head brewery in my home state of Delaware, now employs 180 workers at his facility in Milton. Of course, what they’re manufacturing is not a new or innovative or recently invented product. People have been brewing beer for thousands of years. But Sam’s done a remarkable job of coming up with a very broad range of different brews and, in fact, of bringing back brews that are centuries or millennia old by recovering ancient recipes for fantastic and tasty beers.

What I’m focusing on today though is about the expansion. This particular company has invested $50 million in a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. And when I recently visited, I was struck at how different it was from the beer bottling plants of the past, from what some may have seen on “Laverne and Shirley,” or what they might have imagined a traditional manufacturing plant to look like. Those folks who work on the bottling line, on the manufacturing line at this particular facility have to be able to use programmable logic controls; they have to be able to do quality control and math and to communicate as a team, and to communicate in a way that puts them at the cutting edge of advanced manufacturing.

This highlights some of the biggest challenges in manufacturing. It takes a lot of money to invest in a plant and machinery to make it capable of competing as a modern-day plant. It takes access to capital. But we also need to change the public’s perception of what manufacturing is. It is a very different place to work, a manufacturing line, than it was 20 or 50 years ago. They’re safe, they’re clean, they’re well-lit. These are decent, high-paying jobs. And if we’re going to win in the global competition for manufacturing, we need to strengthen the skills and the perceptions of manufacturing across our country.

Well, Mr. President, each of the three bills I’ve spoken about today will help create good manufacturing jobs here in America and I believe are ready for consideration on a bipartisan basis by this chamber. We need to take action together on a bipartisan basis to get our economy going again.

And I’ll remind you, manufacturing jobs are not just decent jobs, not just good jobs, they’re great jobs. They’re the jobs of today and tomorrow. They’re the jobs that sustain and build the backbone of the American middle class. We already have all the tools in this country to ensure its growth, but if we work together and put in place stronger and better federal policies in partnership with the private sector, we can put jets on our manufacturing sector and it can take off and grow again.

Floor Speech: Senator Coons urges confirmation of Patricia Millett for D.C. Circuit Court

Mr. President, I rise today to speak in favor of Ms. Patricia Millett’s nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have had the opportunity to closely examine each of the judicial candidates nominated by our president. I did so with Ms. Millett by attending her nomination hearing and speaking to a wide range of the practitioners and colleagues who have direct knowledge of her professionalism and experience. Without exception, at every stage of her career and with every personal and professional colleague with whom she’s had work experience, Patty Millett has distinguished herself as a person of integrity, intelligence and dedication.

She is a person whose capability and devotion to her family is an inspiration to those around her. She is unanimously recommended by former living Solicitors General and received the A.B.A.’s highest rating. Some of my colleagues here have argued that President Obama is trying to, “pack the court” by nominating Ms. Millett and two other nominees to fill three current vacancies on the D.C. Circuit Court. These charges of court packing strike me, frankly, as without foundation.

Court packing is an historical term used to describe when politicians try to change the size of a court or expand a court in order to control its expected outcomes. That was the cause of the objection to President Roosevelt’s plan to add up to six justices to the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1937. This is, in fact, the opposite. In fact, a current legislative proposal to strip the President’s ability to fill three vacant seats on the D.C. Circuit could be better called court stripping.

In this particular case, making nominations to vacant judicial positions is not court packing, it is a president doing his job, and confirming highly qualified nominees to serve on this circuit in this vacancy would be this body doing its job. Charges of court packing are absurd on their face. They’re even more absurd when put in context. Ms. Millett has been put in the ninth seat of the eleven seats authorized on this court.

I held a hearing earlier this year on judicial staffing levels in my role as the chair of the Subcommittee on Bankruptcy in the Courts of the Judiciary Committee. I invited the chair of the Committee on Judicial Resources, Judge Tymkovich, to come and testify. He was nominated by George W. Bush to serve on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Tymkovich testified rather convincingly that the federal judiciary needs more judges, not fewer. Every other year, the judicial conference submits to Congress a report on recommendations on judgeships. That report did not conclude that any judgeship should be removed or remain unfilled on the D.C. circuit. Judge Tymkovich  also explained why the caseload statistics used by some of our colleagues to argue that the D.C. Circuit has a low caseload and, thus, need not have its vacancies filled, are in fact unconvincing.

The D.C. Circuit, in fact, hears a unique case load with four times the number of complex administrative appeals than other circuit courts around the country. The D.C. Circuit is the circuit from which all the federal agencies’ actions are repealed. Its caseload is made up of very complex, very difficult cases with far-reaching consequences, and that requires a great deal of time. So simply looking at the raw number of cases filed, opened, and closed is not an accurate predictor of whether or not a vacant seat on the D.C. Circuit should, in fact, be filled. 

The D.C. Circuit’s caseload has, in fact, remained steady over the past ten years so the Judicial Conference has seen no reason to recommend any alteration in its staffing levels. The court packing argument made by some is also at odds with history, especially when you consider that caseloads lower than they are now on the D.C. Circuit were sufficient when all Republicans then in office voted to confirm then-judge Roberts to the Ninth Circuit, Janice Rogers Brown to the 10th seat, Thomas Griffith to the 11th seat, and Brett Kavanaugh to the 10th seat when it became vacant.

When Ms. Millett is confirmed, the D.C. Circuit will still have more pending appeals per active judge than after the confirmations of any of those four earlier Bush nominees. The caseload on the D.C. Circuit would also remain above that of the current Tenth and Sixth Circuit to which the Senate has confirmed Republican-supported judicial nominees this year.

A filibuster of Ms. Millett on caseload grounds would bring the Senate to an unprecedented and regrettable place. It would destroy comity and trust at a time when our nation needs it most, when we need to demonstrate to the people of the United States that this Congress can function and that this Senate can fulfill its constitutional role.

It would not just facilitate the administration of justice by our courts, but also allow us to tackle other issues if we could move past endless and needless filibusters on issues like this. It would allow us to move forward to the broader issues of the day, tackling long-term debt and deficit challenges, fighting global terrorism, reinvesting in our future, and working together to grow our economy, and there are so many other issues that call for the time of this body.

With that, Mr. President, I want to urge my colleagues to look at Ms. Millett’s nomination on its merits and not be distracted by what I think are groundless arguments that this is an instance of so-called court packing by this President. This President is doing his job. He is nominating supremely qualified candidates to serve in the highest courts of this land and this body should do its job and confirm those qualified nominees. Thank you.

Floor Speech: Senator Coons urges Congress to refocus on jobs

Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I rise today to talk about something that we don’t hear enough about on the Senate floor these days: jobs. During the 2012 election, the monthly jobs numbers were even more closely watched and analyzed than the daily polls, but ever since, it’s as if Congress has forgotten that there are still 12 million Americans looking for work, and from my home state of Delaware alone, 32,000 Delawareans out of a job.

Sure, we’re eager to hear if the unemployment numbers are nudged up or down a tenth of a percent, but maybe Washington is all too willing to put the unemployed on the back burner. We’re adding nearly 200,000 jobs a month now, according to the most recent jobs report, and that’s certainly progress, but one of the things I found most chilling was analysis that said that at this pace it will be 2017 before our nation gets close to full employment again. Is that acceptable to you? That’s certainly not acceptable to me. When is Washington — when is Congress — going to get back to working on behalf of those still looking for work?

The jobs numbers that are typically reported mask an even deeper, more concerning structural problem in our economy as well. Almost 40 percent of those currently unemployed, about 4.3 million Americans, are described as the long-term unemployed. These are folks who have been out of work six months or more. Short-term unemployment has dropped, but long-term unemployment remains persistently high and troubling. The longer a worker is unemployed, the more difficult it becomes to find a job, whether it’s because there is a stigma attached to being unemployed or because their skills need to be updated or because we need something to help lift their spirits and make them successful in job interviews.

Across all these different reasons, in my view, we need stronger, more engaged, more agile interventions by the federal government, by state and local governments, in our economy and in support for those seeking work to help them find employment. I think we need to act swiftly on measures to improve skills training, job placement, and collaboration with state and local labor agencies. The fact is, the longer we wait to deal with long-term employment, the tougher it will be to help these folks get back to work. Yet, many of us here in Congress apparently can’t or won’t focus on unemployment, long-term or short term, much less on other measures to stimulate our economy. Is it any wonder the American people think Congress isn’t even trying anymore?

Here in the Senate, we know that while deeply challenged by filibusters and ideological fights and caucus politics, we are still managing to get big things done. It would be an overstatement to say we’re making it all work, that it’s easy, but thanks to a contingent of Republicans and Democrats here who are working in good faith together, we have been able to make some meaningful bipartisan progress. The Senate passed a bipartisan farm bill that would have taken steps to modernize our nation’s agriculture system, would support 16 million jobs, and actually reduce the deficit by $24 billion. What a remarkable trifecta of accomplishments, supporting one of the world’s most cutting-edge agricultural economies, supporting significant employment and job creation, and significantly cutting our deficit. What’s not to love, Madam President, in that farm bill? Well, the House drafted a farm bill that eliminates our hard-fought bipartisan compromises and has effectively doomed the bill.

Similarly, the Senate here passed a bipartisan Water Resources Development Act to modernize America’s water infrastructure all over the country, including flood protection, water supply, and shipping channels. It got 83 votes here out of 100 in the Senate. It’s being slow-walked in the House over ideological objections about how to structure the bill.

After a historic committee markup, after the Congressional Budget Office said it would reduce the deficit by $150 billion in the first decade and $700 billion in the second, this Senate passed an overwhelmingly bipartisan immigration reform bill – I think one of the biggest accomplishments of this Congress. This Senate passed an overwhelmingly bipartisan immigration reform bill only for it to languish stubbornly in the partisan Hunger Games that is today’s House of Representatives. The headline in politico from today reads, “Immigration reform heads for slow death.”

Americans are frustrated with this, Madam President, and so am I. The House of Representatives has sadly become wholly dysfunctional, paralyzed by partisan civil war over the fundamental question of whether government should be an instrument of good in people’s lives. That’s the key here. Sadly, the fighting within the Republican Party is dividing that caucus internally. On the one hand, you have genuinely principled Republican lawmakers who believe in this legislative process, who are committed to working collaboratively on the challenges our nation faces. These folks have worked with me and others and cosponsored many bills that I have introduced and others have introduced to try to make a difference here. On the other hand, you’ve got an anti-government, frankly anti-Obama faction that took over the House in 2010. Their numbers are small, but their voices are loud, and it is, I think, their core belief that Congress and the federal government cannot and should not legislate – that government has no meaningful or constructive role to play in our society. I worry that that belief informs their tactics of stall and delay, investigate and repeal.

The Huffington Post reported this week that this Congress, in particular this House, has had only 15 bills signed into law so far. Fifteen. You have to go back a long time to find a Congress that has passed fewer pieces of legislation between House and Senate than this one, the 113th Congress. Democrats and many Republican lawmakers look at this as an embarrassment, at a time of enormous challenges overseas and at home, for us to take so few actions together. But the Tea Party and some conservative ideologues look at it as an accomplishment, those who say that any compromise is a four-letter word, especially if the alternative is broad or progressive legislation. 

So what we have is a fight between folks who would, for example, trim the scope and funding for the federal Department of Education and folks who fundamentally think there shouldn’t be a Department of Education. That’s a fight in which I think the American people don’t win. An opposition party is a great thing, a necessary thing for our democracy, but this opposition party within the opposition party is crippling this Senate, this House, this Congress. By my count, it’s been 90 weeks since a Republican filibuster blocked a jobs bill that was designed to keep teachers, police officers, and first responders on the job. It’s been 87 weeks since a filibuster blocked a bill to put Americans to work through investments in infrastructure and 51 weeks since a Republican filibuster blocked a bill to give tax breaks to companies that bring jobs home and end a tax deduction for companies that move jobs overseas. And frankly, just 42 weeks ago, a Republican filibuster in this chamber blocked a bill to help 20,000 veterans find new jobs. 

In the other chamber, it’s no better. The House of Representatives has now voted 37 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The New York Times did the math. The House has spent 15% of its time voting to repeal so-called Obamacare. In May, the Congressional Budget Office, which is the arbiter of what is or isn’t necessary, the scorekeeper, actually said the House has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act so many times, it will no longer issue new scores as the House attempts over and over again to achieve what seems to be its most basic purpose, to repeal. That’s how much time and energy this House has wasted on this particular project that could be better invested, finding ways to implement this bill more responsibly.

How much time do we waste here in this chamber, Madam President, just running out the clock, waiting for 30 hours for cloture to ripen because we can’t get simple agreements to move forward? I know this isn’t what our side or our leadership wants. I suspect it’s not what most senators of either party want, and it is certainly not what our constituents want. What should be taking days is taking weeks. What should take weeks is taking months or even years. In my view, Madam President, we’re not here to run out the clock. We’re here to make a difference, or at least that’s why our constituents sent us here.

Ideological obstruction has rendered this Washington, this Congress so ineffective, so inert, that when it comes to helping people get back to work in Delaware, my colleagues, Senator Carper and Congressman Carney, and I have taken an unusual action for members of Congress. We have started hosting job fairs. We have used the power of the office to convene when we can’t use the power of the office to legislate. We have had actually 13 job fairs up and down our state in all three of our counties in Delaware and watched as hundreds of folks have come and have had the opportunity to apply for and pursue new employment. Congress, in my view, should be taking a clue from that effort. We should recommit ourselves to helping our innovative small businesses grow, to helping open new markets for American goods, to helping Americans find good jobs, and to supporting those who haven’t been quite so lucky yet.

I think, Madam President, we need an agenda, an agenda that focuses on five areas, where investment now will lead to new jobs, not just for today or tomorrow but long into the future. First should be education. We have to do more, as I said before, to help the long-term unemployed get professional skills to thrive in this job market, and we have to do more to prepare young people for the challenges of the modern economy. I have a bill, the American Dream Accounts Act, cosponsored by Senator Rubio and others, that would help get our at-risk kids through school and into college.

We should also support innovative cutting edge research, and I’ve got a bill that would make the R&D tax credit permanent and open it up to startups. It’s called the Startup Innovation Credit Act, which has been cosponsored by a wide range of senators – Enzi and Rubio, Blunt and Moran, Stabenow, Kaine, and Schumer – a truly bipartisan bill. And I’m proud to be working with Senator Alexander of Tennessee on hopefully strengthening and reauthorizing the America Competes Act.

A third area we should be focusing on is tied to this. We have to do more to harness the resurgence of American manufacturing. There are a dozen smart bills, many with bipartisan support, that have been introduced, taken up, and passed here in the Senate that are currently languishing in the House. We should work to make a difference for America’s manufacturers.

Fourth, we have to grow our economy by growing our markets, our opportunities around the world. As the chair of the African Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I’ve worked across the aisle with Senators Durbin and Boozman to introduce a bill to triple exports to Africa over ten years. 

Fifth and last, an area I thought all of us would be able to come together on is investing in infrastructure. The BUILD Act, introduced in the last Congress, which I hope we will move to here, would create a national infrastructure financing vehicle—an infrastructure bank to help bring private funds into vital infrastructure projects. It’s had bipartisan support in the past from the Chamber of Commerce to the AFL-CIO. And it is my hope that we can take it up and use it as a vehicle to help the 12 million people who are looking for work find the jobs they need.

Madam President, I have a simple question today. When is Washington, when is Congress going to get back to work on behalf of those still looking for jobs? How much longer will we wait, how much more clock will we run out, how much more time will we waste? It’s my prayer that this chamber, this country finds a way to work together to get over this partisanship that has paralyzed our political process. In close, I just want to say a word of thanks to colleagues I’ve seen who have come and joined me in the chamber, Senator McCain and Senator Flake of Arizona. They are exemplars of the folks who have worked across the aisle to find solutions to some of the big problems facing us. They worked tirelessly with Democratic colleagues to put together the architecture of the bipartisan immigration bill that was just passed through this chamber in recent weeks. It is my hope that others in the other chamber will see that spirit and take up this opportunity to take up and pass legislation to put America on a track towards growth. There are 12 million reasons for us to do that, 12 million Americans looking for help getting back to work. Thank you and, Madam President, with that, I yield the floor.

Floor Speech: Senator Coons calls on Republicans to stop prolonging the sequester by blocking budget negotiations

Madam President, I rise today to speak about our current impasse over the progress of the federal budget. I have been a senator for just a little over two years. I have presided over this chamber a great deal, as have you. And I have listened to dozens of speeches from colleagues, in particular Republican colleagues, upset that this chamber, that the Budget Committee on which I serve, had not passed a budget in several years.

But this year, we passed a budget. Finally. We went through the long and grinding process known here in Washington as “vote-a-rama,” where we considered, debated, and disposed of 101 amendments, over hours and hours and hours of deliberation and debate and voting on this floor and we passed a budget.

It’s been 46 days since the Senate passed our budget, but we still need to reconcile it with the House of Representatives’ budget for it to become a forceful resolution — a budget resolution — that drives the decisions of the Congress. It is important that we do that because it has been 66 days since the sequester kicked in. “Sequester,” I know, is Washington speak, but all of us as senators are hearing from our home states the very real, very human impact of these across-the-board spending cuts that have begun to really bite.

Whether it’s potential furloughs of men and women who serve at Dover Air Force Base, whether it’s tens of thousands of children being kicked out of Head Start programs, whether it’s thousands of women not getting the breast cancer screenings they need or hundreds of thousands of children not getting the vaccines they’re supposed to get, the impacts of the sequester are becoming stronger and broader and more negative all across our country.

And the sequester exists because of a lack of political will to come together, to resolve a fundamentally different vision between the Senate and the House enacted in our respective budgets. This sequester exists because we haven’t come together, across the House and the Senate, in a way that for 200 years and more this Congress has done when we pass a bill and when the House passes a bill, it’s supposed to go to conference for reconciliation, resolution and ultimately passage.

Here’s our chance. Why would Republicans actively keep us from going to conference to finalize a budget, especially after years of coming to this floor and giving speeches, declaiming over and over how terrible it was that we would not pass a budget in the Senate?

Americans — Delawareans — are tired of this dysfunction. In my view, today, Republicans are manufacturing a crisis by preventing the Senate and House from coming together to reconcile our budgets in conference. As I said, Madam President, I’m a member of the Budget Committee, and I can say with some detailed knowledge, as can you, there are real differences between the budget adopted here in the Senate and that adopted in the House.

I believe the Democratic budget promotes growth and the Republican budget focuses on cuts. I believe ours prioritizes the middle class, whereas the other prioritizes more tax cuts for the wealthiest. Ours prioritizes balance. The other? Politics. I think our budget puts us on the path towards job creation while the other takes a path to austerity.

But we will never reconcile these two budgets, achieve a shared path forward and set aside this terrible sequester if we don’t go to conference. Reconciling these two budgets are the definition of what I’ve heard member after member come to the floor and call for, what we here in the Senate call “regular order” — the process set out by the founders of this nation and to which we should return.

These political games, in my view, are destroying this institution. I think it is no wonder that the opinion of the average American all across this country of this institution simply sinks lower and lower. The only thing standing in the way of our progress on this budget, at this point, is repeated Republican objections. It is my hope they will step aside and allow us to walk the corridor to the House, get to the conference table and resolve our budget differences.

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Floor Speech: Senator Coons reintroduces bill to help at-risk kids access college

Madam President, as the son and grandson of classroom teachers; as a father myself; as someone for whom education played a central role in my life; as a passionate believer in the power of education to change others’ lives, I rise today to talk about a bill that is one of the most important to me that I have moved as a senator.

The fact is if we look at the American national condition: lack of access to higher education, lack of an opportunity for a quality education is one of the greatest problems we face. Inequality in having some real hope, some real promise of a shot at college defines and distinguishes the drivers of social inequality in America in ways it has not in decades. If we want to ensure going forward that American workers can compete in the global economy; if we want to ensure a country that is capable of living up to our promise of liberty and justice for all; if we want to deal with one of the biggest civil rights issues, I think, in our country; then we have to ensure every child has an equal chance for high-quality education regardless of the ZIP code they are born into.

Madam President, long before I was elected to public office, I spent years working with an education-center nonprofit called the “I Have A Dream” Foundation. In my role there, I visited schools all over the United States. More often than not, schools in very tough communities and neighborhoods, schools that were in public housing developments or that were in some of the most forlorn and troubled neighborhoods in all of America.

Something that struck me over and over again when I would go into an elementary school and talk to a group of young kids and say: What do you dream of? What do you hope to be when you grow up? They would raise their hands, and none of them said, “I dream of being in a gang;” “I dream of being in jail;” “I dream of being a drug dealer;” “I dream of dying before 20.” They would say: “I dream of being a senator” or “a lawyer” or “owning my own business” or “being a star in the NBA;” of “being a success.” The dreams you hear from kids in elementary schools are the same regardless of the community you are in in America. Yet the outcomes are so desperately different.

What I saw in the nearly 20 years I was active with the “I Have A Dream” Foundation was that the young people who came from a community, family, or school where there was little or no experience or expectation of a college education, there are powerful, persistent, and negative message at a very early age that college is not for them. They are told indirectly that it is not affordable, it is not accessible, it is not part of the plan for their future. Those messages have a cumulative and powerful and consequential impact.

Very few of the 50 “Dreamers” from the east side of Wilmington that my family and I worked very closely with had any expectation of a college education. In 1988, when our chapter of the “I Have A Dream” program promised them the opportunity for a higher education through a scholarship, you could see the change. First, in their teachers and their parents, then in their mentors and their classmates, and ultimately in them — in their hopes, in their expectations.

The most powerful thing the “I Have A Dream” program did in our chapter, and in dozens of chapters around the country, was to hold up a mirror to young people of their future that was a brighter and more promising future than they had ever dreamed of on their own. Then, to challenge them to walk through that open door and to make college not just a distant dream, not something they heard of or watched on TV, but something that became a part of their lived life, and to change their outcomes.

That experience has inspired the bill I introduced in the last Congress, and I am most personally connected to in this Congress.

Last year I found a Republican partner who shares my passion for expanding access to college and for making it more affordable. That partner is Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Some folks have noticed that here in the Senate we don’t always get along and we don’t always agree and sometimes partisanship divides us. I have been very, very pleased to have this strong and able partner in moving forward a bipartisan bill, which we named the American Dream Accounts Act: a bill that bridges the opportunity gap by connecting students, teachers, parents, and mentors to create a new generation of higher education achievers.

Too many American kids today are cut off from the enormous potential of a higher education. The numbers are grim. If you come from a low-income family, the chance you’d complete a college degree by the time that person turns 25 is about 1 in 10 at best.

These days, in order to have the prospect of employment and opportunity of accumulating wealth, and providing an education and security for our family and kids, a college education is essential. We in the federal government spend billions of dollars on making higher education affordable through Pell grants, yet do almost nothing to make it clear to children at the earliest age that this funding will be available to them.

In my home state of Delaware, our Governor Jack Markell and our first lady Carla Markell have done a wonderful job of incorporating the power of this insight, this lesson of ensuring there is a state-funded scholarship and network of engaged mentors and real reform in our public schools. We don’t tell kids — even in our state — in elementary school of the possibilities that lie ahead of them in a way that changes their expectations.

That is what this bill will hopefully do. It encourages partnerships between schools and colleges, nonprofits and businesses. It allows them to develop individualized student accounts, like a Facebook account married to a college savings account; individual accounts that are secure, Web-based, personal, and portable; accounts that contain information about each student’s academic preparedness and financial literacy. Something that combines a portfolio of their entire education experience with the very real savings for the future of higher education we want to pull them toward from their earliest years.

Instead of forcing motivated parents or concerned teachers or interested mentors or empowered students — instead of forcing all of these folks to track down these different resources separately, this legislation — this idea — would connect them across existing silos and across existing education programs at the state and federal level.

So tomorrow, Senator Rubio and I will reintroduce this legislation as the bipartisan American Dream Accounts Act of 2013. We are working hard to earn the support of our colleagues here in the Senate and in the House, and I will keep at this for as long as it takes.

The American Dream Accounts Act addresses the longstanding challenges and barriers to college access: connectivity, financial resources, early intervention, and portability. Let me briefly speak to each of those.

First, connectivity. The journey from elementary school, to high school, to higher education is a long one, and for a student to be successful it takes lots of engaged and attentive adults — motivated parents, concerned teachers, supportive family. So many students in our schools all over this country disengage or drop out along the way because they are not connected, they are not supported by those concerned and engaged adults. The American Dream Accounts Act takes advantage of modern technology to create Facebook-inspired individualized accounts — an opportunity to deliver personalized hubs of information that would connect these kids and sustain and support them throughout the entire journey of education by continuing to remind them of the promise of higher education and its affordability.

Second, these Dream Accounts would connect kids with college savings opportunities. Studies show that students who know there is a dedicated college savings account in their name are seven times more likely to go to college than peers without one. Think about that for a moment. States such as Delaware and our nation invest billions of dollars in programs to make higher education affordable. Yet so few of the kids I have worked with all over this country in the “I Have a Dream” program have any idea. They have never heard of Senator Pell. They don’t know Pell Grants exist. They don’t live in states that have the HOPE scholars, the ASPIRE scholars, or the Dream scholarships that a number of states have, and they don’t know they will be there for them when they are of age to go to college. Why don’t we tell them early? Why don’t we change their expectations? That is one of the things this program would do. And it is not a new idea; it is a demonstrated one that we know works.

The third piece of this American Dream Accounts Act is early intervention. As I said, states and federal programs that provide billions in support to make college affordable don’t connect with kids early enough. By letting them know early, we can change their ultimate orientation and outcomes.

The last important piece is portability. One of the things I saw in my own experience with my Dreamers — the students in the “I Have A Dream” program that I helped to run in Delaware — was just how often they moved. Children growing up in poverty — in families facing unexpected challenges — relocate over and over and bounce from school to school, district to district, often facing overstretched teachers with full classrooms who, when they move midyear into a new school, don’t get any background information or insight on the student who has moved into their classroom. So instead of being welcomed and engaged in a positive way, sometimes they feel and are disconnected and develop into discipline problems or students who are difficult to teach. The mobility that comes with poverty sometimes also leads to disconnection from education.

This robust, online, secure, individualized account would empower teachers to connect with parents, to connect with mentors, and to know the entire education history of the student newly before them. So no matter what disruptions or challenges a student might face as they travel through the long journey of education, their own individual American Dream Account — their own portfolio of their dreams and their activities and their progress — would be there with them.

Our nation’s long-term economic competitiveness requires a highly trained and highly educated workforce, and our nation’s commitment to a democracy and to a country of equal opportunity demands that we do everything we can to make real the hope of higher education for kids no matter the ZIP code into which they are born, no matter their background. While we spend billions on making higher education affordable, we aren’t delivering it effectively enough to change that future. What I saw in my years with the “I Have A Dream” program was bright faces, raised arms, hope, and opportunity that sadly was not realized as often as it could be. This program — this connectivity — this new type of account is a way to make real on that promise.

We can meet this challenge by connecting students with a broad array of higher education options, informing them about them early, whether it is vocational school or job training, community college or four-year universities. Not everyone is made for a four-year higher education degree. This would connect kids with all the different opportunities for skill training and higher education that are out there. It also would support students as they identify the type of education best for them, the career they most want, and give them the tools to get there.

As I visit schools across my own state of Delaware, one thing is clear: All of these different resources currently exist in different ways and at different stages of education, but they are not connected in a way that weaves together students, parents, mentors, and the resources of our highly motivated, highly engaged state.

So this vision — one that has stayed with me from my time at “I Have A Dream” to my service here as a senator — is that when we ask a roomful of elementary school kids in the future, “What do you dream of? What is your hope?” when their hands shoot up in the air and they list all of the different dreams they have, regardless of background or income or community, we can make that possible. We can make our investments real, and we can make the dream of equal opportunity a reality.

This year, with the support of lots of groups, including the Corporation for Enterprise Development, a wonderful group called Opportunity Nation, the First Focus Campaign for Children, we are hopeful that bipartisan support for this American Dream Accounts idea will simply continue to grow. Let’s work together to empower students and parents of all backgrounds to achieve their dreams from the earliest age.

Thank you. Madam President, I yield the floor.

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Floor Colloquy: Senator Coons talks about the importance of the Master Limited Partnerships Parity Act

Madam President, Senator Murkowski of Alaska is a strong leader on energy issues, and I am proud to work with her on the Energy and National Resources Committee. It is fitting that we are here despite representing different States from different regions of the country to talk about an issue we believe can bring us together.

Republicans and Democrats alike can agree that when it comes to American energy, we need a comprehensive, all-of-the-above strategy, and that is the only way we are going to succeed in securing homegrown and affordable sources of energy for the next generation.

In my view, oil and gas are not going away anytime soon. If renewable sources of energy are going to grow and become central players in the American energy marketplace, we have to make sure they are operating on a level playing field. Right now the playing field is anything but equal.

For nearly 30 years, traditional sources of energy have had access to a very beneficial tax structure called Master Limited Partnerships. This is a financing arrangement that taxes projects like a partnership, a pass through, but trades their interests like a corporate stock. This prevents double taxation and leaves more cash available for distribution back to investors.

This allows limited partners and general partners to come together and invest capital in a Master Limited Partnership and form an operating company. For the last 30 years, that has been used in natural gas, oil, and coal mining, predominately in pipelines but also in fossil fuels.

Not surprisingly, this structure means MLPs have had access to private capital at a lower cost, and that is something capital-intensive projects, such as oil pipelines, badly need. Frankly, it is something alternative energy projects in the United States need more than ever.

Let’s work together and level this playing field. Let’s remove the restriction that allows only traditional energy projects, such as, oil, gas, coal, and pipelines, to form MLPs. It is literally in the original statute that only nonrenewable forms of energy are eligible. In my view, we should open it up to include clean and renewable energy and then let the free market take it from there.

So this week, Senator Murkowski and I joined Republicans and Democrats from the House and the Senate to introduce the Master Limited Partnerships Parity Act of 2013–a bill that will do just that. We are grateful for the support of Senators Jerry Moran of Kansas and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, as well as Congressman Ted Poe of Texas, Mike Thompson of California, Peter Welch of Vermont, and Chris Gibson of New York, who are original cosponsors.

Our bill does not change these benefits for traditional energy sources at all. It doesn’t touch existing MLPs and their well-established benefits for coal and oil and natural gas; it just allows renewable energy projects to compete fairly by also accessing this tax advantage capital formation field. It gives an equal chance for success for projects using energy from wind and the Sun, the heat of the Earth, and biomass; breakthrough technologies to consumers with affordable homegrown energy for generations to come.

This bill is this year a new and improved version of the Master Limited Partnership Parity Act from last year. We introduced a version last year that earned strong support from Republicans and Democrats, as well as outside experts and the business community. This year we are expanding the scope of the bill to also include additional energy projects that qualify as MLPs: waste heat to power, carbon capture and storage, biochemicals, and energy efficiency in buildings. We wanted to include a broader array of clean energy resources because that is how we can get the best competition and deliver the most affordable and efficient energy to consumers from Delaware to Alaska and across our whole country.

MLPs are complicated financial structures, but our bill is very simple. It is just a few pages long. It makes one simple tweak to the Tax Code to bring these renewable energy and clean energy projects into the existing structures of MLPs. It is the embodiment of what I have heard from many colleagues in the last 3 years, that we should not be picking winners and losers in energy technology, and we should have an “all of the above” strategy.

This change, in my view, will bring a significant new wave of private capital off the sidelines and into the renewable energy marketplace. It allows the private sector to look at clean energy in a whole new way. Today, master limited partnerships have reached a market capitalization of close to $450 billion with about 80 percent of it devoted to traditional energy projects–oil and gas–and the majority of that to pipelines. Access to this kind of scale of private capital could drive the investment that is essential to creating new jobs in a fast growing new field.

It would also, in my view, bring some fairness, some modernization to this well-established section of our Tax Code. As the Presiding Officer knows, our Tax Code hasn’t been broadly modernized in decades. In the mid-1980s, Congress enacted provisions to establish MLPs for oil and gas, timber and coal, and midstream energy industries. This tax benefit hasn’t been significantly changed, expanded, or modernized in nearly 30 years.

Just to be clear, we are not talking about taking away any of these benefits for any existing beneficiary industry, just updating them to recognize the modern market reality of new energy technologies and to reflect the changing investment opportunities in the emerging markets of renewable energy. In fact, one of the lead cosponsors of this legislation in the House, Congressman Ted Poe–Judge Poe–a Texas Republican, said at a recent press event we did that over the course of his career, he has represented as many oil refineries as any other Member of Congress. Yet he sees this as an efficient and effective opportunity to expand from its traditional use of pipelines of oil and gas to the broader energy marketplace of the United States, and he is confident expanding this structure to include clean sources of energy would create jobs.

I wish to ask the Senator from Alaska, Ms. Murkowski, if she has seen the same thing in Alaska. Does the Senator from Alaska see this as an opportunity that will help us grow an “all of the above” energy strategy for the United States?

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Madam President, I thank the Senator from Alaska. I am grateful for her joining me as an original cosponsor and for her being a strong and engaged advocate for this approach at the conference in New York and in conversations with colleagues and in the image she has laid out. She has been a real champion for a commonsense, “all of the above” visionary path forward that will move us on the committee and in the Congress.

As the ranking member of Energy and Natural Resources, the support of the Senator from Alaska is central and significant. I am also glad the chairman is working with me. Senator Wyden, in a recent public setting, referred to this as “exactly the right approach.” I believe, as does the Senator from

Alaska, the bill will unleash private capital; that it will help create jobs, modernize our Tax Code, and make it more fair; and I think that is why it has earned support from Republicans and Democrats in the House and in the Senate, but also at some senior levels in the administration.

Former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said the MLP Parity Act would make “a world of difference and have a profound effect on private capital and investment.” Our, hopefully, incoming Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz, also pointed toward the MLPs as a great opportunity to increase clean energy financing and put it on a level platform.

This legislation has earned backing from business leaders, from investors, from outside experts, from academics. Two experts in energy finance, Felix Mormann and Dan Reicher, from Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, shared their thoughts in an editorial in the New York Times.

They wrote:

If renewable energy is going to become fully competitive and a significant source of energy in the United States, then further technological innovation must be accompanied by financial innovation so that clean energy sources gain access to the same low-cost capital that traditional energy sources like coal and oil and gas enjoy.

Our financial innovation has to keep up with our energy innovation. It is just that simple. That is why more than 250 companies and organizations have recently signed a letter supporting our Master Limited Partnerships Parity Act. They range from Fortune 500 NRG to the American Wind Energy Association, the Solar Energy Industries Association, the American Council on Renewable Energy, and many more.

Just one more quote, if I might. David Crane, who is the CEO of NRG Energy, said:

The MLP Parity Act is a phenomenal idea. It’s a fairly arcane part of the tax law, but it’s worked well and has been extremely beneficial to private investment in the oil and gas space. The fact that it doesn’t currently apply to renewables is just a silly inequity in our current law.

Well, one of the things the folks we work for expect us to do is to find ways to move forward together, to find ways to nail down and address inequities in the law, and this is one we can fix with a simple, straightforward bill.

I am so grateful for the cosponsorship of the Senator from Alaska and her leadership, and I agree with her that we are seeing growing momentum behind this free market approach. Does the Senator from Alaska wish to add anything else as we advocate for this bill?

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 I thank Senator Murkowski.

If we are going to lead on energy or in anything, we have to listen to each other and we have to work together. I have been so grateful for the way Senator Murkowski and Senator Wyden have worked closely together and moved the Energy and Natural Resources Committee forward.

As the Senator referenced, we had a great hearing earlier this week on the Shaheen-Portman bill–the energy efficiency bill on which Senator Shaheen of New Hampshire has worked so well with Senator Portman of Ohio–and also some bipartisan bills on hydropower.

It is my real hope that this strong bipartisan bill–opening up master limited partnerships to energy efficiency, to hydropower, and to a dozen other clean and renewable sources of energy–this sort of simple, straightforward, commonsense, bipartisan bill that creates opportunity, will allow the private sector to then marry up with the innovations of researchers and help with the deployment of new energy sources.

At the end of the day, we in Congress–the Federal Government–have to set a realistic policy pathway forward to sustain innovations in the energy market and then let the financial markets work to their fullest potential. The Master Limited Partnerships Parity Act moves us closer to that goal and that day.

I thank Senator Murkowski for her leadership and for being here with me today, and I thank Senator Moran and Senator Stabenow, our original Senate cosponsors, and our House counterparts. By leveling the playing field for fair competition, this market-driven solution can provide vital support to the kind of comprehensive, “all of the above” energy strategy we all need to power our country for generations to come.

Floor Speech: Senator Coons joins Senator Durbin in reintroducing bill to create jobs in U.S. by expanding trade with Africa

Madam President, I rise today to thank Senator Durbin of Illinois for his leadership on these vital issues.

You just heard in the comments he has made the reach and scope of his vision. I am just so impressed with the breadth and depth of his engagement. First, on behalf of American workers, because he recognizes so clearly that 95% of the world’s consumers live outside our country and we have to have a coordinated, capable, competent export strategy in order to continue to access the most promising, most rapidly growing markets in Africa.

The 54 countries of the continent of Africa provide enormous opportunity as their growing middle class, increasing access to their human and mineral and natural resources create opportunities for us to grow jobs here in the United States. Nearly 10 million good jobs today are supported in the United States by exports to the rest of the world. As Senator Durbin has wisely seen and pointed out, our competitors are beating us in the race to access these great opportunities.

The Chinese, the Brazilians, the Russians, the Indians. In every country on the continent, they are present, they are investing, and they are growing. Senator Durbin rightly recognized that China has eclipsed the United States as the leading trade partner for Africa, and there are real consequences for Africans and for African countries. Sadly often Chinese investments bring with them Chinese contractors, workers and a different approach to values, priorities in terms of development, a lack of focus on transparency, on human rights, on the environment, and as he detailed in his comments today, the consequences can even be so far-reaching as conservation and the impact on wildlife and the ultimate consequences of supporting the worst actors on the continent, folks such as Joseph Kony.

But let me turn, if I might, briefly to the bill which I am proud to cosponsor with him today, which focuses on trying to ensure that the more than 10 U.S. government agencies responsible for export promotion have a coordinated strategy. One of the principal points of his bill, which I am proud to cosponsor, challenges the Executive branch to sustain and increase our investment in the Foreign Commercial Service, to sustain an increase our resources through things like OPIC and EX-IM and asks the Executive branch to create a coordinator to ensure that all of this is done responsibly and in a cost-effective way.

Other things that I mentioned in the trade report, which Senator Durbin was kind enough to quote and to reference, are that in the United States, we have an enormous African diaspora community, which can be strategically vital as American businesses seek to access these growing opportunities across the continent of Africa.

We also look to bolster support for agencies that finance U.S. commercial engagement overseas.  Our competitors, in particular the Chinese, have a very different approach to finance exports and the United States needs to better coordinate and better align to act as one nation.

The goal that set in this legislation is a 200% increase is an ambitious goal, a 200% increase in U.S. exports to Africa in the next ten years. But if we were to accomplish this goal in a cost-effective way through more responsibly coordinating the investments we’re already making in these federal agencies that can better coordinate U.S. private-sector efforts, think of how many jobs we might create, think of how many countries we might connect better to the United States, think of how many towns and workplaces across this country would benefit.

Senator Durbin, I just want to thank you today for your leadership, for the clarity of your vision, for the breadth of your engagement and for the investment of time. Someone in his position has so many other issues which he could be investing his time on, but over his entire service here in Senate of the United States, he’s been passionate about clean water for the continent of Africa and passionate about high-quality jobs for the workers of the United States. In this bill he finds a way to make good on both of those passions, improving the lives of Africans across a growing continent and improving the lives of workers across our nation. Thank you, sir, for your leadership and I am proud to join you today in cosponsoring this reintroduced bipartisan, soon-to-be bicameral, commonsense bill.  Let’s hope that all of our colleagues take it up and pass it in this Congress.

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