License to Drill Act

Madam President, first, I would like to say that my colleague from Utah was out here a minute ago. We often disagree on many things, but every now and then, we agree on something. I just want to say how grateful I am that the Senate, today, passed by unanimous consent a bill that we have been working on for years and years and years, with the community around Crystal Reservoir, to make sure that that can be transferred from the Forest Service to the people of Ouray, who desperately, desperately need it. I am grateful that we were able to get this done, and we will continue to work on this together to make sure we get it passed in the House of Representatives. So it is a bright light in an otherwise not so bright day legislatively around here in the U.S. Senate.

Trump Administration

Madam President, I wanted to come to the floor because today may be the end of the opportunity to talk on the Senate floor for this session of the Senate before we recess for the coming elections. I wish that there was a lot of stuff that we had addressed together.

The American people are struggling with costs and this economy in a way that they have never struggled before, and that is not an exaggeration. It is true in rural Colorado and in urban Colorado. It is true in Republican parts of the State and in Democratic parts of the State. It doesn't matter. People--no matter how hard they work--feel like they can't get ahead and their kids can't live better lives than the lives that they are leading; that no matter how hard they work, it is becoming harder and harder and, in some ways, impossible-- impossible--to live a middle class life anymore.

For the kids who are graduating from high school right now in America and for the kids who are graduating from college in America, it feels like the American dream is further and further and further out of reach because it is. It is. I see the pages who are sitting here on this floor today. They are the first generation of Americans since forever-- I don't want to depress you tonight, but I guess I can tell you the truth so you can help fix it. They are the first generation of Americans who are likely to earn less than their parents earned if we don't change it. We are living in a world where people who are 30--a lot older than the pages who are here today--on average, are going to earn less than their parents earned.

We are living in a time when 1 percent of the American people own 50 percent of the value of the stock market, and the bottom 50 percent of the American people own 1 percent of the value of the stock market. If you have not been somebody in the United States who owns assets--who owns real estate, who owns stocks and bonds--it has been a tough 15 years or 20 years. It has actually been tough going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, to be honest, when these trickle-down policies started. Ronald Reagan was certainly a purveyor of these. You know, he put in place a lot of the tax cuts and other things that were kind of the beginning of trickle-down economics. I don't think even he could have foreseen what the Trump administration would have done to pursue the kind of trickle-down economics that they have pursued. It has been like a raging forest fire that has gone across the United States of America at a time when our inequality is growing; at a time when Reagan could never have imagined, I don't think, the wealth inequality that we now have in this country, the lack of economic mobility we have in what I still refer to as the ``land of opportunity'' because, in the end, I am relentlessly hopeful about where this country is headed.

But the reality is--the reality is--unless you are at the very top of this economy for decades, you have not done well and your kids have done worse. That is the opposite of the American dream.

I am sorry to say this to the pages that are here, but there was a time in American history--when I was your age, for example--when we took it as a given that each generation was going to benefit from the work of the previous generation, and the greatest gift we could give the next generation was more prosperity than our generation had.

My daughters are now in their midtwenties--actually, to be honest, the youngest is in her early twenties--but my daughters are now in their midtwenties, and they are really serious about the question, which I am not going to repeat on this floor because I would be thrown out for using ``W-T.'' That is their view, though. That is their view because they know a lot about history. They know what the transition was from one generation to the next. They know what the solemn responsibility of every American generation was. And now they find themselves and their whole generation finds themselves completely ignored by this Congress, completely ignored by the President of the United States. He could care less about their future.

I used to be a superintendent of schools in Denver before I came here. I was in business before that. I have had kind of a checkered career on the way to the U.S. Senate. And I can tell you, I can assure you that President Trump does not see the families of the kids I used to work for in the Denver public schools, who are working two and three jobs just to feed their children, who are working two and three jobs just to keep a roof over their heads, just to pay the rent in this economy, this savage economy they are facing.

I am sorry to say this to the pages as well. The Trump administration is breaking new records every week. Gas prices are up 42 percent from the year before. Diesel is the highest it has ever been in American history at $6.50 a gallon. It has never been higher.

There are farmers and ranchers all over Colorado who have had to put thousands and thousands and thousands of incremental dollars, of extra dollars they don't have, dollars they need to invest in their own kids' future, dollars they need to invest in their own businesses--they are having to burn it in their tractors because Donald Trump decided to go to war in Iran--against the advice of all of his advisers, by the way, who told him that

if you drop bombs on the mullahs, they are not going to abdicate; who told him that if you drop bombs on the mullahs, there won't be a regime change, and, in fact, the people that come will be more radical than the ones you are attacking; who told him that they would close the Strait of Hormuz; who told him that you better watch out, Mr. President, because you might be facing--and since you don't probably drive a tractor, you may not care as much, but the farmers and ranchers all over America are going to be facing diesel prices that are $6.50; that it will be the difference between their ability to afford healthcare or invest in their business or pay for their kid to go to higher education, to learn a trade. That is all going away because of these insane prices--gas prices up 42 percent and diesel at $6.50.

Now, something that is hard to understand for some people around here is the effect of these interest rates, which are hitting some of the highest levels we have seen in decades. The 10-year yield is the highest level since 2007--20 years ago, two decades ago. You have to go back 20 years to get to an interest rate like this. The 30-year reached its highest level since June 2002. That is a catastrophe for anybody in this economy who is trying to borrow money. This is a catastrophe for anybody in this economy who is trying to pay a mortgage on a house.

Mortgage rates are now over 7 percent in the United States of America because of Donald Trump's policies, because he invaded Iran, because--I have to say both parties are somewhat responsible for this.

My friend that I respect so much from Oklahoma is here. By the way, my oldest daughter is living happily--happily--in Tulsa, OK, because she can pay I think 28 percent of her income in housing. She is very, very happy to be there at a time when, in lots of other places, no one, you know, who is her contemporary, who went to college with her, can afford to pay to live anywhere. So she is delighted to have a chance to be there, to be working in Tulsa. But for people that are trying to buy a house in America, for her generation, rates are now at 7 percent, and none of them can afford to buy a house.

By the way, they got--I can't use those words. They got totally--you know the word I want to use--when interest rates were at zero, when the Federal Reserve was trying to keep interest rates at zero because the first Trump administration would say: Keep them at zero. Keep them at zero. Keep them at zero.

And what did that do? Yes, the loans went to zero as well--they were low--but the price of housing went through the roof; the stock market went through the roof. Anybody who had assets, anybody who was rich, anybody who had a fancy house anywhere in America benefited hugely.

We are in that moment again. We are in that moment again, the moment we have been in for almost 50 years in America. When the economy grows, the wealthiest people do incredibly well, and for everyone else, it is like a recession. In fact, it is a recession. It is a recession.

When there are recessions in America today, those are real recessions for working people and for poor people. For wealthy people, that is a period of economic growth. Our Nation has detached the wealthiest people. It is like they are in a capsule floating above all of us. They are in a capsule floating above all of us, and when the economy does well, they do great; when the economy does poorly, they do poorly.

I wish everybody well, everyone in this economy, but the reality for everybody else--in fact, I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that for 95 percent of Americans, for decades, the periods of economic growth have basically acted as recessions, and recessions have been devastating.

For the next generation of Americans, for my kids' generation, they can't even get a glimmer of economic prosperity, where their share of the American dream is going to come from, their opportunity to be able to participate meaningfully in this democracy and in this economy. And they are all smart. They are all--my daughter will get mad at me, but she is teaching a history class at a community college in Tulsa. And they know the history of this Nation. They know we have been a nation that stood for freedom and for opportunity for all these years. But something is broken in the way this works, and it doesn't work for them.

If you wonder, by the way, why we are facing all this division and chaos in our politics, if you wonder why we seem to be living in a moment when no one in this Chamber can work together and where the American people are--at least the ones that are on their social media-- are relentlessly at war with each other on that social media, there might be a lot of reasons, but I am telling you the real reason is because we have lost the sense of economic opportunity in the Nation because we don't really have it anymore for the people that are coming after us, and our gaps in wealth are just getting larger and larger and larger and larger. The chance for people to get ahead is getting harder and harder and harder. That always breeds politics of division; that always breeds the politics of chaos.

I wish Donald Trump were interested in any of this, except for the division and the chaos. His politics has been a politics of sowing division, of sowing chaos, of preying on the divisions we have, and we have, unfortunately, fallen into that trap at a time when America actually needs us to be solving the problems they are facing, and I think a lot of folks feel like we have just given up on it.

Our kids are reading--our literacy levels in America are worse than they were 30 years ago, and they were low 30 years ago. We spend twice as much as any other industrialized country on healthcare, and we get much worse results.

When Ronald Reagan--I mentioned him earlier--when he was President, we had the same life expectancy of everybody in the world. Now we are 6 or 7 years behind the industrialized world here in the United States. If you are African American in this country, whether you live in Oklahoma or Colorado, your life expectancy is even shorter than that.

The good news is that there is no shortage of challenges we could confront. I will give you another one that I know my colleague cares about and I care about. We now have $40 trillion of debt on the balance sheet of this country--$40 trillion. That is one of the reasons why interest rates are going up the way they are.

From my daughters Caroline, Halina, and Anne's perspective, their generation's perspective, they look at that and say: What did we get for that? You guys went out and borrowed $40 trillion. Like you put the biggest mortgage that you could ever pull out of a bank on the United States of America.

Imagine if our country were a big house, and you went out there and took a $40 trillion mortgage on it, and then you built yourself a swimming pool, and you built yourself a bunch of statues. I suppose, in the case of Donald Trump, you bought yourself a bunch of gilded stuff that you hung in the Oval Office or tried to knock Jack Kennedy's name off the Kennedy Center by putting your name up there, which doesn't deserve to be up there. It shouldn't be up there. You spent your time building statues and layering them in gold leaf.

The next generation of Americans might rightly say: You borrowed $40 trillion for this?

The reality is that all of that pales in comparison to the tax cuts these guys have given to the wealthiest people in this country without paying for it. All of that pales--and I just want to be honest and admit that it pales in comparison to the $8 trillion we essentially lit on fire in the Middle East to pay for two forever wars there that, by the way, President Trump said he would never repeat.

He got elected--actually, Barack Obama got elected by first saying: I am not against all wars, but I am against dumb wars.

He found a way to jump a whole generation of politicians to become President on the strength of that argument.

Donald Trump made a very similar argument, which is: No more long wars. No more forever wars.

Now he has created one. This war of choice in Iran is going to be a war that ends when the mullahs decide. That is a long war. That is a long war.

I have a long memory. I can remember. I can remember. This is long before you guys were born. I remember when our folks--our diplomats were

taken hostage in Tehran. These are the people we are dealing with.

By the way, I am the first person to say the mullahs and Iran should never have nuclear weapons. They should never have nuclear weapons. That is what makes this even more irresponsible. He has no strategy. He has no game plan. He has no budget for what he is doing.

(Mr. HUSTED assumed the chair.)

He is consuming, by the way, missile after missile after missile that is really important to our deterrence of China and in the Pacific theater. And he hasn't paid for a single dollar of that--not a dollar, not a dollar.

By the way, I think all of us should be voting against his defense budgets. I am. I am, partly because they are not paid for but also because he has no strategy.

That is the best way for us to end this war. That has happened before.

We are not powerless. The U.S. Senate is not powerless. People on this floor, in both parties, they brought the Vietnam war to an end by saying: We are going to cut it off if you don't stop.

And we are in that position today.

I would be shocked if there is anybody over there who really supports what the President has done in Iran. I certainly can't find anybody in Colorado who is a Republican, a Democrat or unaffiliated--almost anybody, almost anybody--a handful who believe this was a good idea, especially the next generation.

And certainly not our farmers and ranchers, who are facing higher input, as I said, and now higher borrowing costs because of this President's policies and weakening commodity prices, because we have a completely incoherent trade policy.

Xi Jinping was just over here. Donald Trump did nothing to get him to buy our soybeans. And, by the way, having said that he was going to do something about it, he has now allowed Brazil to come and steal our business, which they are doing.

Exports are incredibly important to our farmers, incredibly important to our ranchers, and Donald Trump has cut them off for his ridiculous trade wars.

And I have said for years on this floor: We have to take China on. We have to take China on. But we have to do it in a smart way, not in a stupid way, not in an incoherent way, not in a way that gives Brazil the opportunity to knock our farmers out of the picture.

And I will say that everything that I said earlier about the difficulties of the next generation of Americans, the difficulties of the generation of kids that I used to work for in the Denver Public Schools--all of it is magnified if you live in rural America, if you live in rural Colorado, because it is just harder when you have fewer people.

Healthcare is more expensive. Childcare is more expensive. Groceries are more expensive. Gas is more expensive. Everything is harder, and you have to travel long distances to get places.

And now, everyone in America is spending more. Families are forced to pay more for everything. They are paying more on gas. Bags of groceries are a month's rent now or more. People are having to make choices between buying their kids clothes for school and buying groceries. There are hundreds of more dollars that people are having to spend on electricity and on housing itself and rent.

I haven't heard President Trump talk about any of this because the next generation is entirely invisible to him. He has no concern about it. He is not worried about it. That is not of his concern.

Every day he parades what his real interests are across the front pages of what is left of the newspapers of America and the television and his social media feed. And he is proud of it, by the way. He is proud of it.

So I know, when I talk about this, if he hears about it, he will say: Oh, I got his goat. Well, that is what I wanted to do.

And he is. He is proud of his corruption. He is proud. He wears it on his sleeve.

The latest of this was that he has now spent millions of taxpayer dollars on political advertisements--millions of taxpayer dollars on political advertisements.

I would be surprised if there is anybody here who supports that. We have 330 million Americans. Of that, all but three think that it is a bad idea to use their money--to use taxpayer money--when we have $40 trillion of debt, when we have 7 percent interest rates, when diesel is $6.50 a gallon, and that the President is using our money to pay for ads for his reelection and the election of people in his party in this midterm.

He is hanging his photograph, his picture, on the outside of the Federal Agencies here in Washington, DC. That is not the worst thing that he has done, but it does make me feel, every time I drive through it, like we are living in an occupied state, like we are living in North Korea or Beijing or some other place where the great leader is respected because he tells everybody in the country how they are supposed to think about everything.

I know he thinks he is the greatest President in American history. I know he does. He has even said that. I think he thinks he is greater than George Washington.

None of those people put their pictures on the outside of these buildings. None of these people tried to hang their name next to Jack Kennedy's name or put their photo on the Department of Justice or the Department of Labor.

But part of his renovation of this town has been a billion dollars in White House renovations, including his ballroom and his helipad--a billion dollars that he has spent on the ballroom and the helipad.

And he has cheerfully basically admitted that he has made $1.4 billion in crypto profits while being President of the United States, and his family has made untoward amounts. And he has relationships, the President, all over the world that are helping him pursue those economic interests while he is in the White House.

I know we are living at a really unusual time in American history. I know we are living in a time when there is enormous frustration, when there is enormous anger, when there is a lot of division and distrust. I know we are. But I think it is fair to say that most Americans don't want their Presidents to get rich when they come to office.

I think that most Americans know that no President has ever gotten rich the way Donald Trump has, when they can't even afford to pay the rent, when they can't even afford to buy shoes for their kids and give them school uniforms.

They know no President has put their own face on the outside of these buildings, like this is some cult of personality instead of what it is, which is the American democracy.

I think that most people in America are going to say that they don't really want to live in a country where Federal law enforcement wearing masks can show up in your neighborhood and bang on your door and drag you out of your house, which Donald Trump has also done.

I know that no American would agree--no American would agree--that any President should weaponize the Federal Government for his own political purposes.

This is not a country where, you know, if one party loses and the other one wins, that the one that wins uses its office to weaponize the power of the Federal Government against States that didn't vote for them or disagree with them.

And I am telling you, folks, that if we fall into that trap of treating that as the new normal, we are going to be here for a really long time because this is how democracies and republics die. This is how they spin out of control, when we jeopardize our values and our beliefs for a set of behaviors that are just totally out of the mainstream of American history--in this case, the weaponization of politics.

Colorado has witnessed a form of this firsthand. The administration canceled $109 million of transportation grants. The President denied disaster declarations for the Elk and Lee Fires in Rio Blanco County, and for flooding in Western Colorado.

They tried to block 100,000 families from receiving SNAP benefits. They have tried to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

And most shamefully--I mean, that is a long list. But most shamefully, they stole the promise of clean drinking water from 50,000 Coloradans in the southeastern part of my State who

have been waiting for decades for the Federal Government to finally finish a project that was promised by Jack Kennedy when he went out to Pueblo in 1960 and promised it to the farmers and ranchers there.

We have passed it unanimously in the Senate. We have passed it unanimously in the House. And yet President Trump has taken it away.

So not only is he focused on the things that won't make our economy better, not only is he not focused on the next generation of Americans, not only is he not saying to himself, ``What do I do every day to try to deal with the costs that people are facing and the affordability crisis?''--it is a crisis that they are facing--he is making matters worse. It is like he is going out of his way to make everybody's life harder and worse.

I would be shocked if there are people here who actually support what he is doing in Iran. I know the American people don't. And it is not just because it is crushing them economically because of what the mullahs are doing with energy prices and what they are doing with--not them but what the war is doing with interest rates. It is not just because of that. It is because they can see how ridiculous this is--the lack of strategy, the lack of focus.

They know that he snatched Maduro in the middle of the night and that somehow he decided that dropping the bombs on Iran was going to get the same result, even when all the intelligence said: That is not what is going to happen. You are not going to replace the regime. You are not going to be able to take away their nuclear weapons from the air. They are going to constrict oil from the Middle East.

There isn't anyone in the Middle East that doesn't think they are not going to be paying tolls from now until eternity to the Iranians, to the mullahs, because of what Donald Trump has done.

It is ridiculous. It is not just a war of choice. It is a war that has created catastrophe for the American people.

We have lost the lives of soldiers in this country. They have bombed our military bases and the bases of our neighbors--which, by the way, our intelligence Agencies said they would--and now they are in a better negotiating position than they were before the war was started. And now they have people in charge that are actually more attached, if you can believe it, more attached to the prospect of getting nuclear weapons than the people that they replaced.

As I said earlier, he has put us in a worse position with China. Xi Jinping shows up here, and the President goes and meets him at the airport and drives him back to the White House and genuflects over and over and over to him.

And I can guarantee you, Xi Jinping was happy to be feted this way by the President of the United States because he knows how much advantage he is taking of the President.

The Iran war has been a huge boon to China--and to Russia, by the way. It has put them in a much better position than they were in before he started.

The Ukrainians, with no help basically from the President, finally had Putin on his heels. And they are doing an unbelievable job. We all owe them a huge debt of gratitude. And then President Trump gives Putin the gift of invading Iran, the gift of driving these people into each other's corner.

I mentioned his incoherent trade war with the entire world. We are basically tariffing the entire world, and that is haunting our farmers and ranchers. It is crushing our small business owners all over Colorado--and consumers as well. Consumer sentiment is at the second lowest point in 70 years.

Please stop, Mr. President. Stop. We cannot afford your policies anymore. We are trying to raise our kids, build our small businesses, turn something over to the next generation that we are proud of.

People are stuck in the jobs that they are in because there is nowhere for them to move. The hire rates in America are at record lows. No one can buy a house because of interest rates.

And, by the way, seniors who would like to maybe downsize and move out of their house so that my kids' generation can move in, they can't do anything. They can't go anywhere. And in many ways those folks, our seniors on fixed incomes, they are in as rough a position as anybody because of his policies.

But let me tell the Presiding Officer this. Here is what is happening in Donald Trump's economy right now: Forty-two percent of the recent college graduates in America--42 percent--are underemployed, and their peers are in even worse shape in this country. That is a hard way to start your life. If you are a young man in America today in your twenties, you are making 40 percent less in real dollars than you were in 1976--40 percent less in inflation-adjusted dollars than you were in 1976.

There is no way--no wonder people are getting stuck in their parents' basement. By the way, nothing would fill me with greater joy than having my own daughters move back into my basement, but I get the idea that kids don't want to do that. They want to start their lives. They want to start their businesses. They want to be able to afford higher education, which they can't. And now, even if they get it, 42 percent of them are underemployed.

I will just finish. I know that I have colleagues who want to talk. But let me just say one other thing that has been in the news lately that the President has been happily making news about, which is this whole issue of AI, which is part of the economic anxiety that especially the next generation is feeling--and for good reason. They are worried about what this is going to mean for their jobs and the economy. That is not irrational. That is why I put out language last week to create a new Federal Agency to actually negotiate with these guys.

No one in America has had a negotiation with Mark Zuckerberg over anything. We haven't had a negotiation about our privacy, our data, our kids' mental health, our economic interests. This Congress 15 years ago should have put this in place to deal with, if nothing else, the mental health issues that have been afflicting our kids because of these social media platforms.

But now, with AI, it is clear we have to have--Congress is never going to be able to figure it out. States can't regulate it.

We have Anthropic, one of the leading American companies, says that its technology poses an ``existential risk to humanity.'' That is what they wrote. That is what they wrote. I think about the lawyers that are drafting this stuff for the AI companies that are having to put in it that the technology is potentially an existential risk to humanity. And I wonder, if the worst happens, who they think is going to be there to sue them if they don't put that language in.

But that is where we are. That is what the industry is saying itself. The President has responded with his ``morally binding'' agreement with the AI companies and themselves, calling fears over AI a ``hoax''--a ``hoax.''

We could fix that here. We could create a new Agency in America to have that negotiation with Zuckerberg and the rest of these guys, just like Teddy Roosevelt did, Franklin Roosevelt did. There is a reason we don't have planes dropping out of the sky. There is a reason why we know our drugs are safe. There is a reason why we have been able to proceed with our nuclear weapons and nuclear technology without destroying ourselves. It is because we came together to work together in a way that was rational, created a synergy between the new inventions that were coming on and public safety, preserving innovation in America and public safety. We have to do that again. Well, we haven't been working on that because the President says his agreement is ``morally binding'' with these guys that are themselves saying that their own technology creates an existential risk to humanity.

We could have spent the time fixing our broken healthcare system, which is just becoming more and more and more expensive, in part, because of the President's policies. We could be dealing with our broken immigration system, reintroduce ourselves to the idea that we live in a nation of laws and we live in a nation of immigrants. We do, and we have been both at the greatest moments in this country's history.

I am sorry to say we haven't done any of that. I mentioned education earlier. I mentioned our literacy rates in this Nation that are the lowest they have been for 30 years.

So now we are going into this recess. We have all come out here this afternoon to do our procedural motions on

this floor about various things that we didn't get done. But what we didn't get done is anything to make the American people's lives a little bit better, to deal with the burdens of cost and expense that our farmers and ranchers in Colorado are facing and every small business owner in Colorado is facing, that the next generation all over America is so worried about that they don't even know whether they are going to have a future of opportunity in this country, in the land of opportunity. They don't know whether we have abandoned permanently the obligation that each generation of Americans has to create more opportunity, not less, for the people coming after it. They don't know.

In fact, they doubt it. They doubt it because what they see is the economic catastrophe of the way the economy is working--not just under President Trump but for decades and now much worse under President Trump--and the political chaos that we are leaving behind. That is part of our legacy as well, unless we are going to figure out a way to come together on these fundamental issues and make some hard decisions here and focus attention on the next generation.

I have said many times that I don't blame Donald Trump for being elected President. I am sorry that he was, but I don't blame him for being elected. He won. But the rest of us that don't want to go down this road anymore on the American people's behalf have to find a different path. We have got to find a way to give each other hope in this country that we can make progress; that we can build an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top; that we can have a Tax Code that actually supports work instead of passive investment, instead of just the assets that go up every time we pass a bill around here that wastes more trillions of dollars of the American people's tax money.

I am optimistic about that. I am not optimistic in this moment because we are leaving the Senate floor without having done it. I am not optimistic at this moment because Donald Trump is more focused on putting gild stuff on the walls of the Oval Office; putting his name on the Kennedy Center; building a ballroom; building a new triumphal arch in Washington, DC; breaking the Reflecting Pool; his own crypto. He is more focused on that than he is on the issues that we need to focus on. But there is nobody here who is surprised about that. He is not doing anything he didn't say he would do.

We need to find a way to create confidence in the American people so we can build a politics that is not just about chaos and division, that is not just about fanning the flames but is actually about embracing the next generation and our responsibility to them, our obligation to them--and I would say to this country--to fulfill and to live up to the example that our parents and grandparents set for us and to make sure we get this right before we move on. That is what we need to do, and I believe we will.

I appreciate the indulgence of the Presiding Officer. I am sorry to have gone on so long tonight. I thank the Presiding Officer for the time, and I thank my colleagues for giving me the chance to speak on the floor.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for allowing me to be able to slip in and do a quick history moment on the floor of the Senate. It is an interesting day, the 30th of September 2026.

Fifty years ago today, there was the passage of an appropriations bill that was just another appropriations bill, except this one was a little harder because it was actually a veto override.

Let me set the context for you. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled on something called Roe v. Wade. For the previous 200 years as a country, every State made a decision about abortion. That was the way it worked. In 1973, the Supreme Court stepped in and said: Nope, every State has to allow abortion across their State, and changed what we had been as a nation for 200 years to a nation that required an abortion in every single State.

Well, that was in 1973. In 1976, Congress--both House and Senate--had a serious conversation about are we going to fund abortion with Federal dollars. At the time, just to give you some history context on this, Carl Albert was the Speaker of the House. A Democrat from Oklahoma was actually the Speaker of the House. The majority leader of the Senate was also a Democrat. This was a Democrat-led House and Senate.

They debated it, and out of the House came an amendment called the Hyde amendment. It was named after Henry Hyde, who worked across the aisle and said: We may disagree on this issue of abortion that just came from the Supreme Court 3 years ago, but we should agree that we shouldn't allow Federal funding for abortion.

So a Democrat-led House of Representatives passed an amendment in the appropriations bill in 1976 which we still call the Hyde amendment today. It is interesting to be able to think about, at that time, in Congress, of the 535 Members of Congress, there were 100 pro-life Democrat Members of Congress. Now, 50 years later, there is one pro- life Democrat Member of Congress. A lot has changed in that time period.

But this simple agreement that we should not use Federal dollars to pay for elective abortions; that when I pay my taxes on April 15, it shouldn't be to pay for someone's abortion down the street--that was the agreement that was set in 1976.

Now, interestingly enough, it passed in that appropriations bill in the House. It was sent over to the Senate and passed in the Senate. It went to the President of the United States. It was a Republican President--Gerald Ford--at the time. He vetoed it, and it came back to Congress. And with 313 votes in the House of Representatives, they overrode President Ford's veto to pass that appropriations bill, including the Hyde amendment, on September 30, 1976, 50 years ago today.

I just thought, for just a moment, in all the chaos and of all the stuff and lots of important things that we are trying to be able to resolve today, for just a moment, we should just pause and remember the 50 years that we have had this simple agreement. Every single year since then, we have had this simple agreement: We will not use Federal dollars that come from taxpayers to pay for elective abortions across the country.

Some of us are still crazy enough to believe every child is valuable. We don't believe and I don't believe that some children are disposable and some children are valuable. I think they are all valuable. And I think there is some great value in telling the American taxpayers: You don't pay for the taking of human life; you pay for research from NIH and other things to be able to protect human life. That seems to be a better value.

Interestingly enough, studies have been done showing that 2.5 million children are alive today because of the Hyde amendment that passed 50 years ago. Those are folks teaching in schools; those are police officers; those are folks working in manufacturing; those are small business owners all across our country--2.5 million of them--that are alive today, just living life, doing their stuff, because the Hyde amendment passed 50 years ago. And it still gets passed every year.

I just thought for just a moment, in the Senate, we should pause and remember that day.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, earlier today, I joined Senators Capito, Heinrich, and Whitehouse in introducing comprehensive, bipartisan permitting reform.

That agreement is the product of many, many months of negotiations and years of work to address a problem Congress has talked about for far too long: It takes too much time and too much money to build things in this country, and that problem is becoming more urgent by the day.

America's energy needs are growing rapidly. We need more energy, and we need it now. That means producing more energy. It means building more infrastructure, and it means making sure that Federal Agencies responsible for reviewing permits actually have the resources to process those permits in a timely manner.

Madam President, that brings me to the first bill that I just asked the Senate to consider today and that we just passed through the Senate today, the License to Drill Act.

The Bureau of Land Management currently charges a processing fee for each new application for a permit to drill on Federal lands. Those fees help fund the people and resources that process those permits, but that authority expires tonight at 12 midnight. The License to Drill Act extends it through fiscal year 2037 and directs those fees to the Bureau of Land Management Permit Processing Improvement Fund.

The idea is straightforward: The money collected from permit applications should help process permit applications. That is, after all, how we keep things moving. That is how we get a lot of these things done. So if we expect American energy producers to

navigate the Federal permitting process, as they must and as we must expect them to do, the Federal Government should have the capacity to give them that answer. The bill we just passed advances the ball in precisely that direction.

Look, permits should not simply disappear into some bureaucratic black hole. As we confront rapidly growing energy demand--the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time and the stakes for which are unbelievably high--unnecessary delays in bringing new American energy production online carry real consequences.

This bill, also, did not appear on the floor out of nowhere. It went through the committee process. The Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the Senate, which I chair, examined it and advanced it unanimously.

The same is true of the two other measures that I just brought before the Senate and passed this evening.

H.R. 6380, the Chiricahua National Park Act, would redesignate Arizona's Chiricahua National Monument as Chiricahua National Park. The legislation has already passed the House. It was considered by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and it was favorably advanced by the committee. With this, this bill is on its way to the President's desk for signature.

H.R. 837 conveys the Pleasant Valley Ranger District Administrative Site in Arizona to Gila County. That legislation has also passed the House and gone through the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. In its having now passed the Senate, it will be on its way to the President's desk for signature.

These measures all have certain things in common. They have been examined, they have gone through the committee process, and they are prepared now for the Senate to act, which the Senate has now done, for which I am very grateful. That work has been done here.

In a moment, when we are working on a much larger task--on the large and intimidating but also incredibly important task of comprehensively reforming America's permitting system--this is a commonsense set of proposals deserving to pass today. I am so grateful that they have passed. I am grateful to my colleagues on the committee and to my Senate colleagues for helping to make that happen.

I yield the floor.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 7831) to amend the Mineral Leasing Act to extend the period of time during which the Secretary of the Interior is required to collect a fee for each new application for a permit to drill, and for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and to add extraneous material on H.R. 7831, the bill now under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 7831, the License to Drill Act, sponsored by Representative Kennedy of Utah.

Since its creation under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Permit Processing Improvement Fund, or PPIF, has been a critical tool for the Bureau of Land Management. Congress created this program to provide BLM with the resources necessary to process Applications for Permits to Drill, or APDs, in a timely manner. To support that effort, Congress authorized an APD application fee to help fund the PPIF and reduce permitting delays.

Over the years, BLM has relied on the PPIF to ensure APDs are processed consistently and efficiently. While past administrations have not always maintained a satisfactory APD approval record, the PPIF has served as a reliable backstop, helping maintain continuity and staffing at BLM field offices.

Under President Trump, Secretary Burgum's Department of the Interior has approved 63.7 percent more Federal and Indian drilling permits than the previous administration had approved during an equivalent period of time in office. In fact, President Trump's BLM has approved 6,027 new oil and gas permits and more APDs than any other year over the past 15 years.

Just last month, the Department of the Interior generated over $4 billion in total receipts from a BLM oil and gas lease sale in New Mexico and Texas under the Working Families Tax Cut Act. That is four times the previous record. This commendable performance demonstrates strong demand for domestic energy production on Federal lands, the Trump administration's success in unleashing American energy, and House Republicans' commitment to responsible management of our natural resources and lowering American energy prices.

H.R. 7831 reauthorizes the APD fee program. The fees, which are paid when submitting an application to drill, are deposited into the PPIF and used by the BLM to support application review and permitting activities. Since the implementation of these fees, operators and industry stakeholders have observed more reliable and timely permit approvals, prompting their strong support for the fees as good policy.

H.R. 7831 takes an important step toward maintaining a predictable, efficient, and durable permitting framework for oil and natural gas development on Federal lands. Reauthorizing fees for oil and gas drilling permits will help ensure that BLM has the resources necessary to process the permits needed to unleash American energy.

I urge all my colleagues to join me in supporting H.R. 7831, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Kennedy), the lead sponsor of the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Stauber), who is also the chair of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources.

Mr. Speaker, I, again, urge my colleagues to support the License to Drill Act.

America has some of the richest energy resources in the world, and House Republicans are working alongside the Trump administration to put those resources to work.

I, again, thank Representative Kennedy for his diligent work on this issue, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Chair Westerman and his outstanding staff for their help in getting this bill to the floor.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of my legislation, the License to Drill Act. This bill ensures the Federal Government has the operational resources to process energy permits efficiently without unnecessary delay.

Every American takes part in an electrified economy, whether they choose to or not, and right now that economy is facing a critical point. We are heading toward a severe energy deficit.

We possess the most dynamic economy in the world, but every single engine of that economy runs on power. We need more of it every year to build, manufacture, and to put people to work, yet much of our existing generating capacity is at the end of its useful life. As those plants go offline, our energy deficit worsens.

We cannot close an energy gap this massive with wishful thinking. We must take practical steps to meet demand because meeting demand is how we keep energy affordable for working families.

The answer isn't to bet everything on a single source. The answer is an all-of-the-above energy strategy. We have already proven that this works. Just last year, the United States produced more energy than at any point in its history, hitting record highs in oil, natural gas, and renewables simultaneously, but when one source is choked off, everyday Americans pay the price.

Producing that energy requires the capacity to efficiently permit it. Right now, a single permit can sit for months, not because the technology or industry isn't ready, but because the Federal Government often lacks the ability to keep up.

Let's be clear: Cutting red tape is not about cutting corners on safety. It is about speeding up our bureaucracy. We can maintain rigorous oversight without ensuring years of needless delay. Every day a permit sits idly on a bureaucrat's desk is a day that costs American jobs, drives up utility bills, and hands global leverage to our adversaries.

My License to Drill Act will extend a proven, bipartisan program that has successfully cleared permit backlogs since 2004. By utilizing an industry-funded fee model, energy companies foot the bill for the administrative costs of these reviews. This means faster approvals, smaller backlogs, and more American energy, all without costing the taxpayers a single dollar.

The License to Drill Act is a commonsense step in the right direction. Let's keep American energy moving forward. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.