Unanimous Consent Request--S. 2253

Floor Speech

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Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, too often this body talks about supporting our veterans while doing far too little to pass critical legislation that would actually help them.

The Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, of which I am a member-- and I am joined by my colleague on that committee, Senator Tillis, with whom I have worked on a number of issues in our time together in the Senate. Chairman Isakson and Ranking Member Blumenthal have had in this committee perhaps the best cooperation of any standing committee in the Senate. And we continue to work to address challenges facing veterans and the Veterans' Administration.

Through hearings and legislative markups, we have listened and learned from veterans. As a result, we have worked together across the aisle to produce legislation that reflects the needs of those who served our country. It is a minimum we ought to be doing, and I think we are generally doing that pretty well.
One result of our efforts has been the bipartisan Veterans First Act.

It is a good bill that comprehensively addresses a host of issues facing veterans, including education benefits, homelessness, health care, and VA accountability. As we see too often, even commonsense legislation like Vets First can't make its way to the floor. Our inability to act on this doesn't mean we shouldn't try to address specific issues that have bipartisan support.

One of those issues which I hope we can agree on is the need to provide relief to veterans who, through no fault of their own, were-- there is no other way to say it--bilked by the for-profit school ITT.

Veterans and other students were betrayed and bilked, and taxpayers were fleeced. Veterans who were attending ITT at the time of its closure lost the GI bill or VA benefits used to pay for their education. Meanwhile, all other students who were enrolled at ITT were eligible to have their Federal student loans discharged. So if you are not a veteran and you had Federal student loans, you could get those loans discharged. If you are a veteran under the GI bill or VA benefits, you couldn't. It wasn't anybody's intent to do that, but that is what the law says.

I know Senator Isakson, the chairman--and we are joined by Senator Carper on the floor as well--he is interested in this. I also know that Senator Tillis has cosponsored my bill to actually fix this. This is something we need to do. We are not the only ones who believe action needs to be taken. Governor Mike Pence, the Governor of the State next door to mine, Indiana, who is the Republican nominee for Vice President, supports this.

The closure of ITT was the fault of the management of that school, who spent a lot of money on marketing and a lot of money on helping students get financing but not much money on education and even less on job placement for their students. The closure of ITT was not the fault of the veterans, for sure, not the fault of the students, but now veterans are worried about being able to pay their rent and pursue their education, which is what this legislation is going to allow them to do. In my State of Ohio, 520 veterans have been impacted by ITT's closure.

There are some questions of finding a way to pay for this legislation, but I believe finding a pay-for is a red herring. We are simply giving the VA the authority to provide relief to veterans. No one is running around trying to find a pay-for for the Federal student loans that are going to be discharged. So we are saying we are just going to do the discharge on the nonveteran students, and we have to find a little legislative sleight-of-hand pay-for to take care of the veterans. That just doesn't make sense. Why should veterans be treated differently or worse than nonveteran students? All we are looking to do is to make sure veterans are treated like all other students who attended an institution like ITT or Corinthian, another scam institution that shut down.

Veterans were promised GI benefits when they signed up to serve our country. ITT has cheated them out of the quality education they earned.

If we fail to act today before leaving town, we abandon the responsibility to our Nation's heroes.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 2253 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

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