Guarding Readiness Resources Act

Mr. President, I am on the floor today to talk to my colleagues about something that is happening right in front of our eyes. It is a set of events that aren't random--they are connected to one another--that threaten to destroy this country that we love.

Everybody can see it, but for some reason--maybe the exhaustion of the aftermath of a brutal election, maybe the distraction of the Christmas season, maybe just an instinct to flee instead of fight-- there are far too many people who are denying to themselves what they are seeing.

What is happening right now is that Donald Trump and his billionaire advisers are unfolding for the country in real time a plan to transition this country from a democracy to a restrictive oligarchy, where political opposition is silenced, where the media isn't free, and where government just exists to enrich a small cabal of elites that surround the man in charge.

I know a lot of my colleagues do see how these dots exist and how they connect, and I know, in your gut, a lot of you see the specter of the disaster that is coming. But if you don't, I want to spend just a few minutes laying it out.

To make things simple, I am just going to focus on three events that happened in the last 7 days: the recommendation by House Republicans that Trump critic Liz Cheney be subject to criminal prosecution, the lawsuit filed by Trump against an Iowa pollster and an Iowa newspaper, and the decision by ABC to pay Trump $15 million to get rid of a bogus lawsuit.

First, the recommendation from House Republicans that Liz Cheney be prosecuted. Liz Cheney was a member of the January 6 Commission that tried to find some accountability for the assault on this Capitol that resulted in people dying, that resulted in an officer with blood running down his face running into this Chamber to rescue us before the violent rioters got ahold of us.

Donald Trump did not like that narrative that he had something to do with, that he inspired the January 6 riot. He doesn't even like the narrative that January 6 was a riot. His events are opened by the January 6 choir in commemoration of the events that day.

What happened this week is that Donald Trump made good on his promise. He said during the campaign that he was going to use the military, law enforcement, and the National Guard to deal with ``the enemy within.'' When asked who ``the enemy within'' was, he said: Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Democrats.

Now, people laughed it off during the campaign because that doesn't happen in America. We don't use law enforcement to lock up your political opposition. But that is exactly what is being recommended when it comes to Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney did nothing criminal. There is not even a whiff of a criminal allegation. She was just in charge of a Commission that Donald Trump opposed. But House Republicans, taking orders from Donald Trump, just recommended that the next administration, the next Department of Justice, criminally prosecute Liz Cheney.

By the way, Liz Cheney won't be the last. There will be other political opponents of Donald Trump who are referred for prosecution.

Now, that would be laughable today under an FBI and a Department of Justice that doesn't lock up people for political reasons, but Donald Trump is changing the guard at the FBI. He is putting in someone loyal to him as the next Attorney General. The person he is going to put in at the FBI wrote a book about how important it was to eliminate from government anybody that doesn't line up with the political priorities of the President. He has said that the people who ran fair elections in 2020 should go to jail because if you didn't run an election that resulted in Donald Trump being elected, then you did something wrong.

This week, the House recommended Liz Cheney for criminal prosecution. Donald Trump cheered that recommendation. And we are getting ready to vote on an Attorney General and a Director of the FBI who have made clear that they are ready to eagerly prosecute Trump's political opponents.

This is really important to talk about because this is one of the key ways that democracies fall all around the world. It, frankly, doesn't take hundreds of political prosecutions; it only takes a handful before ordinary, average Americans just decide that they would be better off staying quiet instead of facing potential harassment or intimidation or a jail sentence for speaking out the way that Liz Cheney did.

The second thing that happened in this last week was that Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against a pollster in Iowa. The grounds of the lawsuit are simple: He didn't like the results of the poll. The poll said the Iowa race was close. The poll ended up being wrong, but he is suing the pollster and the newspaper because he was upset that that poll helped galvanize opposition to him.

That poll, which suggested that race was close, got a lot of people to donate to his political opponent. It gave people in Iowa some hope that maybe a Democrat could win. That is not allowed in Donald Trump's world. It is not allowed in Donald Trump's world for anything to be in service of his political opposition. So he is filing a lawsuit that has no chance of succeeding because he wants to try to intimidate journalists and the press into submission.

Whether we like it or not, it just is true that maybe in the future, a pollster who has a poll in front of them that shows a race closing, shows a race that is favorable to Democrats, won't publicize that poll out of fear of a lawsuit.

Connected to that lawsuit is the third thing I want to talk about: the decision by ABC to pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle a bogus lawsuit--a bogus defamation lawsuit--that would have never succeeded in court. But ABC, for whatever reason, decided it would be better for them to just pay Donald Trump to make it go away.

You are seeing repeated decisions by people in the media to just go along with Donald Trump rather than risk his ire, rather than potentially put their profits at risk if Donald Trump and his regulatory Agencies turn against them. You saw Jeff Bezos tell his newspapers not to endorse Kamala Harris. You have seen an effort by Comcast to divest itself from MSNBC. You have seen ABC pay off Donald Trump $15 million. Over and over again, you see members of the press starting to decide it is just better not to fight him.

These three things taken together show you the playbook: Threaten political opposition with jail, throw a few of them into jail to show you are serious, sue and intimidate and harass anybody that does anything that is helpful to your political opposition, and intimidate and harass the media in the hopes that they will just go away and stop criticizing you.

I don't think it is a coincidence that during this period of media harassment by Donald Trump, when Liz Cheney was referred for criminal prosecution, all the headlines played it totally straight. None of the headlines suggested that the criminal prosecution was bogus, it was built on lies, it was built on no understanding of the law. The headlines just said: Liz Cheney referred for criminal prosecution.

I think it is really important that we lay out what is happening here because this is how a democracy vanishes, but I think it is also equally important to talk about why Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and all of his billionaire friends are engaged in this very coordinated early attack, even before he is sworn in, to try to intimidate his political opposition and bully the press.

The reason they are doing this, the reason they are trying to suppress dissent, is because they are preparing to steal from us. Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies want to be in charge of government so that they can make themselves more wealthy at our expense. They want government contracts. They want to privatize government programs. They want to get bigger regulatory breaks. They want lower taxes.

Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies want government to serve them, but they know the only way they get away with that is if no one holds them accountable. So in order to steal from us, they have to silence political opposition, intimidate activists into submission, and try to get the press to fold. If they do that, then they can get away with using government as a mechanism to enrich themselves.

If you want further proof of their agenda, look what is happening right now, today, as we speak: Republicans and Democrats had a deal to keep the government open and operating, to fund much-needed disaster assistance, and it was killed yesterday by the two billionaires closest to Donald Trump. When asked as to what their alternative was, they said: Raise the debt ceiling. Donald Trump said: Raise the debt ceiling. You will have my support for a continuing resolution if you raise the debt ceiling.

Why do they want to raise the debt ceiling? It is easy. They want to pass a huge tax cut for the billionaires in charge of Donald Trump's government. That is their agenda--big, big tax cut for billionaires and corporations. But the only way you can do that is if the debt ceiling is raised. The only way you can get away with that is if you can borrow more money on the backs of ordinary, average, everyday people in order to pay for that tax cut.

So we are seeing the agenda of the Trump administration before they are even sworn in, in front of our eyes: Rig the rules in order to make the billionaires richer, and telegraph that as your No. 1 priority to Congress.

Listen, there aren't just democracies and dictatorships in the world. There are dozens of countries that occupy a gray zone in between those poles, countries where there are still elections but the media and the political opposition are so weak--weak because they have been beaten into submission by the regime--that the people actually have no power. There are elections, but the same group, the same man, the same family wins every time.

America has been, for almost all of our history, a functioning, robust democracy where the party or individual in power changes regularly because people hold all the tools necessary to choose their leaders. But that could change in a heartbeat, so quickly, but without any one galvanizing moment, that the transition might just be missed by all of us. You could just wake up one day and find out that the rules of democracy have been so rigged that Republicans or the Trump family

never ever lose again and billionaires get to steal from all of us without any accountability.

I know that sounds hard to believe. I admit that I might be wrong about all of this. America's democracy is the longest existing democracy in the history of the world. It has proven to be resilient. It is filled with grit. It has survived challenges before. But like every one of us eventually disappears from this planet, so does every democracy. Every democracy has a last day.

If you look around the world, the steps that lead to the termination of a democracy--the termination, end of self-governance--are shockingly similar from country to country. The wealthy people who control the media and the economy fold into the regime. Better to join than to fight. The citizens get scared of joining up with the opposition movement because they are fearful of harassment. Better to stay quiet than fight.

If we don't speak out more loudly and more boldly about the events of the last week and the way we are seeing a purposeful, detailed roadmap constructed by Donald Trump and his billionaire friends to transition a democracy to an oligarchy; if we don't fight like hell against these nominees, especially those going to the Department of Justice that will execute this assault on democracy, then our Nation, very soon, could easily befall the same as these other destructed democracies.

The survival of our 240-year experiment is facing, right now, one of its most severe tests, and I just think it is time that everybody woke up to that and pulled their heads out of the sand.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak about commitment--commitment across our Nation--in each of our States and towns and cities and in the villages in Alaska, and the men and women who have made a commitment to their neighbors and to strangers and to the broader community. These are our teachers. They are our nurses. They are our firefighters, emergency responders, and police--public servants who manage applications for Federal and State benefits like SNAP, unemployment, and disaster assistance. They ensure that our elections are well run. They get our streets paved and plowed. They have made their commitment to serve. And for many of these public servants, their States have opted out of Social Security, and so they are not paying into the system.

But many of them have had other jobs in the past or will have other jobs in the future. These are jobs that will require them to contribute into Social Security. In many cases, they have contributed to Social Security for an entire career before taking on a job in public service. And then, when they retire--when folks retire, you assume that the Social Security benefits that you have paid into you are going to be receiving. These are benefits that people are entitled to receive, benefits that they are entitled to as the spouse or the survivor or both.

But for decades now, the commitment that these public servants have given to their communities and to our Nation has been returned with two acronyms that have had devastating consequences for, unfortunately, far too many Americans: GPO and WEP. For many in my State of Alaska, these are like swear words--GPO and WEP, government pension offset and windfall elimination provision.

The Social Security benefits of spouses, widows, and widowers were first cut by the GPO in 1977. Then, in 1983, Congress went after the benefits of the retirees themselves with the WEP. These two provisions have been responsible for reducing Social Security benefits from hard- working Americans who have earned them and then from their spouses, widows, and widowers.

And it is in Alaska where the highest number per capita of teachers and public employees are impacted. So when you look at the map of the United States and those areas where you have the highest negative impact from the WEP provision and the GPO provision, it is, unfortunately, in my home State of Alaska.

And it might not sound like a lot--15,156 Alaskans who are impacted by either GPO or WEP or both. These are all their stories. These are all individual Alaskans who have stories about how this has impacted them--like the retired teacher who is just one paycheck away from homelessness because, after serving for years as a teacher, she lost two-thirds of her earned Social Security benefits because of WEP; or the young Alaska widow who is in dire financial straits following her husband's recent unexpected death, simply because of GPO or WEP; or the senior citizen who taught for over 25 years, then turned to commercial fishing, and then he worked for BLM and the U.S. Forest Service--this is a career track that you see with a lot of Alaskans. His Social Security was cut by over 30 percent. So now, at 82 years old, he is still working to make ends meet. This is not retirement, folks.

These aren't hypotheticals. These are real stories from Alaskans who have reached out to me asking me, as their Senator, to help them. I have been hearing from these folks for the entire tenure that I have been here in the U.S. Senate--hearing about the disparate impact on Alaskans, hearing about the inequity, the unfairness: I have earned these benefits, and yet I am not able to receive the full benefit. Where is the fairness in that?

And so I have not just listened to my constituents; I have responded and stepped forward. In every single Congress since I have been here in the U.S. Senate, I have cosponsored legislation to eliminate GPO and WEP, and proudly so. But it has been very frustrating because, over these 22 years now, I have got constituents who are saying: This is happening to me in realtime right now.

And I have to say: This is hard. This formula is not right. We get it. We have got to address it, but this is going to be expensive. So until we are able to do more wholesale reforms, I don't know how we are going to be able to help you in the Senate.

That is not a satisfying answer to that teacher, to that firefighter, and to that widow.

So I was so pleased to be able to cast my vote yesterday to move to passage of the Social Security Fairness Act. I am proud that 72 of us here in the Senate joined together, and I am truly looking forward to final passage of this important measure before I return home.

And when I get home, I will be able to tell school districts that you are going to have a better chance. It is going to be a little bit easier for you to recruit and retain good teachers and principals because the disincentive to work in a State that is impacted by GPO and WEP is going to be gone for us in Alaska.

I will also be able to tell firefighters and the police and EMS responders that they are not going to have the burden of knowing that their retirement is going to be less secure or their spouse's retirement will be less secure after years of putting themselves on the line in service to our communities.

And I will be able to tell my neighbors and the folks I meet in the grocery store and in the community meetings that their service is not more of a sacrifice than it should be.

I am proud of the work that we have been able to do on behalf of Alaskans and for over 800,000 Americans in other States who are affected by GPO and the over 2 million people in the States who are impacted by WEP.

In the next Congress, it is going to be up to all of us to look at Social Security's solvency from a larger perspective, to work on it, debate on it, and vote on ways to ensure that this vital retirement program is going to continue to ensure that Americans are able to retire with dignity and security.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be discharged from further consideration of S. 4511 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I ask unanimous consent that the Lee substitute amendment at the desk be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.