Nomination of Katherine Archuleta to be Director of the Office of Personnel Managment

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

THE FARM BILL

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, this afternoon the 2013 farm bill conference committee will finally convene for the first time, bringing us one step closer to finishing the farm bill. I know the Presiding Officer, being from Wisconsin, understands how important this is to our country's future, and certainly the farmers, businesses, and families in Minnesota understand how important this bill is. We have waited a long time to go to this conference committee. The Senate has passed two farm bills now that continue the strong policies of the last farm bill but in fact reduce the debt by $24 billion over the farm bill that is currently in place. I am part of the group that negotiated the details of the bill to help finish the process which started over 2 years ago.

Before I go on about the details of the Senate bill, I thank Chairman Stabenow for her incredible leadership and perseverance in getting us to this point that has been so long awaited. Under Chairman Stabenow's leadership, the Senate Agriculture Committee put together a farm bill that strengthens the safety net for our Nation's farmers and ranchers, reforms and streamlines our agriculture, conservation, and nutrition programs while still keeping them strong, and, as I mentioned, reduces $24 billion from the Nation's debt.

Throughout the process we faced unprecedented challenges and delay. We had the lack of a dance partner over in the House, but then of course we had the traditional issues--regional disputes about how certain crops and commodities should be handled, a few partisan issues here and there, but somehow we were able to come together to the point where the Senate bill was supported by 68 Senators, including 18 Republicans. I believe this is a testament to the open process we had, the endless amendments we voted on on the floor, as well as the strong committee that was brought together to work on this bill.

No matter where I go in my State--and I am sure the Presiding Officer has seen this in Wisconsin--I am always reminded of the critical role agriculture plays in our economy. Minnesota is No. 1 in turkeys--something we think of a lot as we head into the Thanksgiving season. We are No. 1 in sweet corn, green peas, and oats, and No. 2 in hogs. I don't think people would think about that with our State, but we have surpassed some other States. But we are No. 2 in hogs and spring wheat, and No. 3 in soybeans, and No. 4 in corn.

But we don't just grow the crops and raise the livestock. We are also home to a number of major agricultural companies which have kept our economy strong, and is one of the reasons our unemployment rate is down to 5.1 percent in Minnesota. These companies include Hormel, Cargill, General Mills, coops such as CHS, and Land o' Lakes. That is why one of the first things I did when I came to the Senate was ask to be on the Agriculture Committee. I am honored to serve on this conference committee and to team up with my friend and House colleague, Representative Collin Peterson, who will be leading the Democratic side in the House, as well as Congressman Tim Wells who represents the southern part of our State.

The expiration of the current farm bill on September 30 is hurting our agricultural economy and is creating a huge amount of uncertainty for our farmers and for our consumers. Last week I visited with Minnesotans from across the State who want Congress to pass a farm bill. I was in Kiester, MN, where I got to ride in a combine and see the good work of our farmers as they harvested the corn. I have to say that sitting in the combine after the 3 weeks of the shutdown was actually quite rewarding, as I saw firsthand you could actually get results very quickly in a combine, which I hope will happen in Congress as we move ahead.

From farmers in Redwood County to the Red River Valley to volunteers at a food bank in Minneapolis, where we also had a joint event with hunger groups, conservation groups, including Pheasants Forever, which is based in Minnesota, and the Farm Bureau and the Farmers Union, we all came together to say we had to get this done.

I journeyed up to the Moorhead area and joined Senator Hoeven in Fargo. We like to call it Moorhead-Fargo in Minnesota instead of Fargo-Moorhead--two towns divided by a river but joined by many common interests. We met there with farmers about the importance of sugar beets and about the importance of a strong farm bill for that region of the country.

Through my week I quickly heard--as I am sure the Presiding Officer did in Wisconsin--that the people of this country are sick and tired of gridlock politics, they are sick and tired of people standing in opposite corners of the boxing ring and throwing punches. They are sick and tired of the red-light, green-light game that has been played with policy. It is time to come together and get this done.

I am convinced if there is any silver lining or hope that came out of the chaos of last month, it is that the American people saw firsthand why we need change and why we need to work together. That is why in fact Senator Hoeven and I came together across the river, to make a very strong statement that we thought we had to get this bill done.

As a member of the conference committee, I know that if we don't pass a new farm bill, farmers will not be able to sign up for crop insurance, something that is so central to this new bill and is part of the $24 billion in debt reduction. They won't be able to sign up for a conservation program at a time when we need more conservation, when we see a decline in our pheasant population, where we have seen the signs that we need to have strong conservation programs. We would also see a skyrocketing of dairy prices as we would be going back to the farm bill that was passed in 1949. As I like to say at home, we don't want to party like it is 1949, and we certainly don't want to farm like it is 1949.

The failure to come together and resolve the differences between the two bills now would likely result in either 1949 prices or some kind of extension. And guess what. Ask the farmers and ranchers about that in South Dakota who just saw a decimation of their cattle because of the sudden cold weather and blizzard they experienced in South Dakota. This current bill that is in place does nothing to provide a safety net for them that used to be in place but isn't in place because of the fact we haven't passed a permanent farm bill.

It does nothing, if we simply extended it, about energy programs or about changes we need to see in the milk program or about reforms or the streamlining of our conservation programs. We simply cannot afford to do that again.

Finally, it does nothing to reduce the debt if we simply extend the current program.

Farmers and ranchers do not want another extension like the one we saw last year that left out the programs I just mentioned, the livestock disaster program, any significant deficit reduction. I believe the Senate bill lays a strong foundation for a conference agreement that can be supported on a bipartisan basis and signed into law by the President. To put it more directly, over the weekend I got a call from Greg Schwarz, who works with the Minnesota corn growers. He was hard at work, bringing in the harvest. He actually was calling me while driving his combine. His words offer some perspective, as they were passed on to me, about where we have been and where we need to go. He said:

We have been working on this farm bill for over 2 years now, and we just want to get it done. Farmers are working around the clock on this year's harvest, and if you don't hear from us, it is not because we don't care, it's because we have work to do.

Greg is right. Members of the farm bill conference committee have work to do as well. I believe that Washington should strive to be more like the farmers and ranchers that we represent who work and hope they get the job done. They can't leave a bunch of corn or soybeans in the field just because they get sick of it or they don't like their neighbor. They have to finish the job. If it starts getting cold or if it is raining, they have to bring that harvest in before there is a blizzard. That is what they do, and that is what we need to do. We have a time deadline here, an important reason we need to get moving on this bill.

I would like to highlight some areas of the Senate bill that I believe need to be preserved as part of the final agreement as near as possible to the way they are right now. I recognize there will be some compromise, but I think whatever compromise needs to be worked out should be closer to the bipartisan Senate bill that, as we know, had the support of 18 Senate Republicans, including Senators in my part of the country such as Senator Grassley and Senator Hoeven.

I know that important differences need to be worked out, especially in the areas of nutrition. I think we can do that. But, again, given what we are seeing in terms of the cuts over on the House side, we have to get them much closer to where we are in the Senate bill, which is something that will keep a safety net not just for our farmers, not just for our conservation and our pheasants and our wildlife, but also for the people of this country.

I believe the people who grow our food deserve to know that their livelihoods cannot be swept away in the blink of an eye, either by market failures or by natural disasters. That is why in the Senate farm bill the foundation of the safety net is a strengthened crop insurance program. We made the program work better for underserved commodities and specialty crops.

In recognition of the importance of crop insurance, we extended conservation compliance rules to this program to ensure that all producers benefiting from this safety net play by the same set of rules and keep our water clean and soil productive for future generations.

This agreement has the support of agriculture, environmental wildlife leaders, including the National Farmers Union and the National Corn Growers Association, as well as the Environmental Defense Fund and Ducks Unlimited. That is quite a crew.

In our charge to do more with fewer resources, the Senate bill pulls back on crop insurance subsidies for the wealthiest farmers, while ensuring that everyone can still participate in the program, keeping the risk pool strong. We also eliminated direct payments and further focused commodity title programs on our family farmers by strengthening payment limits on rules that ensure that farmers and not urban millionaires are eligible for farm payments.

We continued the successful sugar program, funded the livestock disaster programs, which I mentioned earlier, and put in place a new safety net for dairy producers to address the wild volatility in that market. No one knows that better than those in the State of Wisconsin, the home of a lot of cheese, the home of a lot of cows and a lot of dairy.

We streamlined conservation programs from 23 to 13. Specifically, I worked with Collin Peterson to ensure that local communities such as those in the Red River Valley have tools they need to address conservation challenges like flooding. The bill funds energy title programs to extend homegrown renewable energy production.

When you look at our reduction in dependence on foreign oil, from 60 to 40 percent in just the last few years--yes, you look at the increased domestic drilling and natural gas; yes, you look at the facts that we finally increased gas mileage standards that made a big difference in this country, but you also look at biofuels which are now 10 percent of our Nation's fuel supply.

These bills ensure that we are working to support our farmers and workers in the Midwest and not the oil cartels in the Middle East. That is why I strongly support mandatory funding for the energy titles to help provide incentives for homegrown energy production from the next generation of biofuels to blender pumps. This is a vital industry in States such as mine, supporting thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in economic growth. I appreciate the support of my colleague Senator Franken for this important industry. As many of us understand, we want an ``all of the above'' energy approach that includes oil, includes natural gas, but also includes biofuels.

The Senate bill ensures that our energy innovators have the certainty and stability they need to develop the next generation of American energy.

The Senate bill also includes a number of initiatives for beginning farmers and ranchers, including two of my provisions. The first provision I produced with Senator Baucus, which would reduce crop insurance costs for beginning farmers by 10 percent. The second provision that I have introduced with Senators JOHANNS, BAUCUS, and HOEVEN would allow beginning producers to use conservation reserve program acres for grazing without a penalty. I believe that both of these provisions will go a long way in building the next generation of farmers who will grow our food supply. Both of these provisions should be included in the final bill.

I believe that if we want to recruit a new generation of farmers and ranchers we must take further action to improve the quality of life in our small towns and our rural areas. That is why I worked with Senators HOEVEN and HEITKAMP, and I led the amendment to provide additional resources for critical priorities in the farm bill, including research--something the Presiding Officer knows something about from the University of Wisconsin--as well as rural development, conservation, and energy.

Our provision funds the new nonprofit foundation, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, to leverage private funding with a Federal match to support agricultural research. It provides additional funds to address the $3.2 billion backlog of water and wastewater projects in rural America. You literally cannot go to a region of any State in rural America without hearing about this backlog of rural wastewater and water projects. This amendment that we passed helps with that.

It also increases funding for a regional approach to conservation to address a variety of challenges, including the flooding that we saw in the Red River Valley. The provision also added an additional $100 million to the energy title to help farmers, ranchers, and rural businesses produce homegrown energy. I was pleased to get the strong support of our committee for that amendment, and I am pleased it is included in the final Senate bill.

In the Senate we also preserve the essential nutrition programs that millions of families and children rely on every day. In recent years, programs such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, became especially important as hard-working families and seniors were suddenly cashed-strapped but still in need of groceries. One of my predecessors--in fact I have his desk--Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, was an early champion of the food stamp program now known as SNAP. As one of the founders--Humphrey was one of the founders of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota--he understood the importance of a stable government policy for both agricultural producers as well as families struggling to put food on the table.

That is why we have always seen this combination of these programs. It makes sense--food comes from farms. Food is a safety net for the people of this country, as are the farm provisions, which are actually a minority of the provisions in this bill. The farm provisions provide a safety net for those who provide food. What we have done with this bill, of course, is reduce some costs and made it more efficient but still kept a strong safety net.

For more than 40 years we have linked together food and farm policy in 5-year farm bills. Nearly 72 percent of the SNAP participants are families with children, and more than one quarter of participants are in households with seniors or people with disabilities. This is not the time to make the deep cuts, as proposed in the House bill, to programs that provide important nutritional support for working families, low-income seniors, and people with disabilities with fixed incomes.

Yet what we have seen is that those cuts--which we will be discussing--on the House side include 170,000 veterans who would be cut off from food assistance if the House bill were to pass. The Senate bill, on the other hand, makes reforms that were necessary, that bring the debt down by $4 billion, reforms that were necessary. So it is not like there were no reforms to this program in the Senate bill. As I noted, 68 Senators voted for this bipartisan bill, including 18 Republicans.

The cuts proposed by the House are in addition to the $11 billion cuts to the program that will go into place this Friday, when the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act supplemental nutrition payments expire.

This program is already moving in the right direction. As the economy has improved, nutrition assistance has been further focused on families in areas with the greatest need. In fact, the CBO projects that without any changes to the program, the number of people eligible for nutrition assistance and the cost of nutrition programs will continue to fall as the economy improves. In this way, nutrition programs operate a lot like the farm safety net for agricultural producers. Just as agriculture payments spiked during the 2012 drought, which was the worst since the 1950s, the need for nutrition assistance, for example, similarly increased when our economy was struck with the worst recession since the 1930s.

When farmers are blessed with a strong harvest or when workers bring home a paycheck from a new job, we have designed agriculture and nutrition programs to adjust accordingly and be reduced.

I believe that instead of trying to find ways to make people ineligible for nutrition assistance, we need to focus on real solutions that put people back to work. This farm bill is an opportunity to do that, as are a number of these efforts--Innovate America, workforce training--and bringing in other things we should be focused on, bringing the tax reform in, bringing the corporate tax rate down and paid for. But if we continue to engage in the brinkmanship as we did in the last month we will never get to the core issue. I believe our country is on the cusp of economic expansion. I believe we have so many opportunities out there when you look at how we are situated with the increase in manufacturing and exports. We need to do work with the immigration bill to help the economy move forward, instead of what we went through last month.

I think this farm bill is the first chance to show that, out of this chaos, came something positive. It is a 5-year farm bill. It worked in the past. It brings the debt down by $24 billion. It is a bipartisan bill. Let's show the people of America that we mean business about working across the aisle.

I see my colleagues here from Tennessee. I have just about 3 minutes more on a very different topic, and that is the nomination of Patty Millett to the DC Circuit Court.

In the past few weeks, as I mentioned, we have made some efforts to come together and get work done on behalf of the American people. There are many of us who work together in relationships of trust, and I hope that continues with regard to nominations.

Patty Millett would make an excellent addition to the court on the DC Circuit, and I urge my colleagues to vote for cloture and to confirm her without delay.

Patty Millett has extensive Federal appellate and Supreme Court experience. She previously served 15 years as an attorney on the appellate staff of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, and then as an assistant to the Solicitor General. She has argued 32 cases in the Supreme Court--32--in addition to dozens of cases in other appellate courts across the country. In addition to her work for the Justice Department and in private practice, she has also devoted substantial time to pro bono work. Ms. Millett clearly has an impressive professional background, but even outside the legal world she volunteers as a literacy tutor and for the homeless in the DC area.

She was given the Attorney General's Distinguished Service Award for representing the interests of the United States before the Supreme Court and the National Association of Attorneys General award for assistance to the States in preparation for their appearances before the Supreme Court. Ms. Millett is the kind of woman we should have on the bench. It should be no surprise that the nonpartisan American Bar Association committee that reviews every Federal judicial nominee unanimously gave her its highest rating, and over 100 leading lawyers and law professors wrote a letter in support of her nomination. This letter included 7 former Solicitors General who served under Democratic and Republican Presidents alike.

Clearly there can be no question she has the experience and ability to sit on the Federal bench. She also has the support of the Fraternal Order of Police, the Police Executive Research Forum, the National Women's Law Center, the Women's Bar Association, and the National Congress of American Indians.

Ms. Millett is well qualified, and we should confirm her now.

One justification--and there is only one that I have heard and I don't think it is a good one, and I am about to debunk it. The only justification I have heard is not about her at all, it is about the DC Circuit. Some of my colleagues think they should remain with three openings on the bench.

I don't think this argument squares with the facts. Currently, 3 of the 11 seats on the DC Circuit are empty. According to the Administrative Office of the Courts, senior judges--judges who are partially retired--are now involved in over 40 percent of the cases that are decided on the merits.

Before he was our Supreme Court Justice, John Roberts was confirmed to sit on the DC Circuit. Ten years ago when Chief Justice Roberts was confirmed to sit on that circuit, the average judge on that court had only 125 pending cases. Today, with 3 vacancies on the court, that number is 185 cases. Those are the complex cases that are pending. Even if we fill all the empty slots, the judges on the DC Circuit will still have more pending cases on average than John Roberts did when we confirmed him to sit on the DC Circuit back in 2003.

There are no excuses. We have a finely qualified nominee, with 32 Supreme Court arguments, support of the nonpartisan group that looks at these nominees, someone whose spouse served in the military for 22 years, someone who raised her kids while he was over in Kuwait, and we are going to turn her down? That makes no sense to me at all, and I urge my colleagues to help Patty Millett get into this job to do what she says is the highest honor you can have; that is, public service.

She should be confirmed without delay. The Senate should have confirmed her this week. We heard from the American people--we all heard this when we were home--how they are sick and tired of this kind of delay and partisanship. She is a fine, highly qualified nominee. She should get an up-or-down vote.

I yield the floor.

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