Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I rise to discuss a CRA resolution that we will be voting on soon, and it is a CRA resolution to challenge a regulation of the Trump administration concerning the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program is a venerable and bipartisan program that was first included in the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, supported in a very bipartisan way during the Presidency of President George W. Bush.

The conference report including this program passed the Senate with a 79-to-12 vote, and many of my Republican colleagues, for example, who were there at the time--Senators Grassley, Barrasso, Collins, Murkowski--are still here in the Chamber strongly supporting this program. It has been very bipartisan.

The program is pretty straightforward. It does what it says. It provides loan forgiveness for college and even some graduate loans for students who decide to go into public service careers. The longer you stay in that career, the more you get your loan forgiven. So it was bipartisan recognition that we want people to pursue public service careers.

The administration of public service loan forgiveness was put in the Department of Education, and during the first Trump administration, his first Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, and officials at the Department dramatically reduced the number of public service loans they would forgive. At one point, Secretary DeVos made a comment along the lines of, why is it important to go into public service rather than go into the private sector? They were not approving the forgiveness of loans for those who had gone into public service careers because they didn't fundamentally believe in the program that Congress had in a bipartisan way put into law.

President Biden restored the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program to what it was intended and forgave the loans of many people who are pursuing public service careers.

Just, you know, doing what Senators do, what the Presiding Officer and I do, traveling around the State, it has been pretty heartening to meet people and be told, the forgiveness of my student loan at age 35 or at age 45 after a long career as a teacher or another public service or healthcare professional has meant so much to my family and so much to my ability to move ahead.

So that is what the program is--an important one, a bipartisan one, still in law.

The Trump administration has decided--in the midst of dismantling the Department of Education--Secretary McMahon and the President have said they want to dismantle the entire Department. And they are taking pieces of it--career and technical education, for example--and trying to give it to the Department of Labor, which doesn't even want it and isn't really suited to managing it.

Or they are taking the administration of student loans and trying to hand it first to the Small Business Administration, who didn't want to administer it, and then maybe to the Department of Treasury.

In the midst of dismantling or handing off or divesting many programs, the Department has also decided it wants to go after Public Service Loan Forgiveness. But they are doing it in a fairly pernicious way that has earned the objection, not only of folks on my side of the aisle but also the objection of groups like the Cato Institute that are traditionally conservative policy organizations.

What is the regulation that we are challenging? The Trump administration proposes to allow the Secretary--in this case, Secretary McMahon--to individually determine whether or not an individual's job is, in fact, public service and to make that determination based on the Secretary's view of the political viewpoint of the organization for which the individual works and whether that organization is doing something that the administration doesn't like.

Now, this is a pretty dramatic and radical power to put in the hands of the Secretary of Education. Imagine if there was a Democratic President and we said we would give to the Democratic Secretary of Education the ability to determine whether or not a particular student or particular public service worker would receive loan forgiveness after they have chosen their profession to go into.

Now the administration has sort of marketed this as: We don't want to consider for public service jobs that may be doing things that are illegal.

So they said, for example: We would not want to forgive the loan of a person working for an organization that aids and abets people who are here without legal immigration status.

Well, I will give you an example. Public school systems in the United States are required to serve all who register, regardless of immigration status, pursuant to a Supreme Court decision that is about 50 years old. A teacher who works in one of those schools is assisting an undocumented person, a young student who is required by law to serve.

Is that teacher, because the teacher teaches English as a second language or the teacher teaches in a school and offers services to students who do not have lawful immigration status--is that abetting illegal immigration?

The Trump-era regulation would allow the Secretary of Education to say: Yeah, you don't get your loan forgiven because of the particular students you work with because of the particular class you teach-- English is a second language class--because of the percentage of your students who might be here without legal documentation.

So get this. The teacher is required to offer services to those students by a binding Supreme Court precedent, but the Trump-era regulation could allow the Secretary of Education to take that teacher, who has been in that classroom for 10 years or 20 years, and suddenly say: But you don't get Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and the regulation vests that sole decisionmaking authority in the hands of the Secretary of Education.

Give you another example. Part of the healthcare safety net in this country is free clinics. Free clinics provide medical services through physicians and other allied health professionals to all comers, and they generally don't inquire about someone's immigration status.

We need healthcare workers, nurses, doctors, and others to work in free clinics. Someone could say to one of these healthcare professionals, who don't make great salaries in these institutions: Wait a minute. Your clinic provides services to people who are not here with legal documented status. Therefore, we are not going to forgive your loan.

After you have chosen a path and done a job and done it for years and now you feel like you are entitled to have your loans forgiven, suddenly the Secretary of Education could just say: We don't want to forgive your loan.

There is another provision in the regulation that I found challenging. It said loans could not be forgiven for any

organization that illegally discriminates. Now, I am against illegal discrimination, and I know every Member of this body is against illegal discrimination.

But the Trump administration has been pushing universities and threatening to cut off their funding if they have diversity programs, arguing that those programs are illegal discrimination, without any court ruling saying that they are illegal discrimination, without other legal justification for their illegal discrimination.

And they have even gone so far as to pressure the president of my flagship university, the University of Virginia, to resign because of diversity programming on the campus. And they threatened to force out the president of another university in Virginia, George Mason University--that president refused to resign--because of the completely unsubstantiated allegation that diversity programming on campus is illegal discrimination.

Now the Trump administration has not been able to get a court to say this is illegal discrimination, but they are forcing universities to even push for the firing of the presidents on their view that diversity programming is illegal discrimination.

So say you have worked and now you are a faculty member or say you have worked and now you work at the university health clinic or say you have worked and now you work for a university custodial service or the university campus police--and you are providing a public service in that way--but the Secretary of Education says: Yeah, but I don't like George Mason's diversity programming. I don't like UVA's diversity programming. So because I don't like the institution you work for, I am going to deny you Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

The administration says it wants to go against those who might be working for sanctuary jurisdictions. This is not a label that I have a lot of firsthand experience with in Virginia because I don't believe there are any sanctuary jurisdictions in Virginia, but there are communities in the United States that have declared themselves sanctuary jurisdictions. There are cities and counties. I don't believe any States have.

So what if you are a hardworking police officer and you had a career for a community and after a city council election, there is a new city council that suddenly says we want to be a sanctuary jurisdiction?

The Secretary of Education could say to the hardworking police officer, the hardworking firefighter, the hardworking teacher in the public school system: I don't like what your city council did. Therefore, you are not entitled to Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

I think the idea of politicizing this and giving the Secretary the power to deprive individuals of something they should be entitled to by statute is very, very dangerous.

Let me read some concerns that we have heard expressed. Here was a comment that was made against the Trump regulation from someone in Pennsylvania: My husband's military service is qualifying employment for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. The promise of PSLF was, and continues to be, a significant factor in our family's long-term financial planning, helping to make the sacrifices inherent in military service more manageable. We planned our financial future with the understanding that this program exists. To have the rules change significantly or become even more complex would feel like having the rug pulled out from under us. Military life already presents unique challenges for tracking payments and certifications through the frequent moves and deployments.

Streamlining must mean making PSLF more transparent, reliable, and truly manageable for servicemembers and their families with clear communication and accurate tracking. Putting the rules about PSLF up to the determination in each individual case of the Secretary worries a family like this.

Here is another comment submitted for the Record in response to this regulation: PSLF is a critical background to current military readiness directly because of medical services. We are only able to partially fund training of required doctors. We only pay them 20 to 50 percent of what they can make in the private sector. We retain them because of their deep patriotism and the ability to make it make sense by having PSLF after 10 years of public service.

All of these medical specialists and their families give up many other things in service of our troops, dependents, and country. They are not seeking to rob an education from a high-dollar school. They are accepting the lowest-paid medical job because of their passion for the military.

Taking away PSLF for military members or those providers who serve them just makes the sacrifices they make so much more difficult.

And here is a submission from a citizen in Alabama who commented on the proposed regulation: As a physician in Birmingham, AL, I am writing to urge you to protect the PSLF program and income-driven repayment plans. We have many poor and underserved patients in America, and many of these patients are treated by nonprofits who help cover the cost of their care. Without PSLF, physicians are incentivized to, instead, find the highest-paying job or even leave direct patient care in order to find more lucrative positions in the insurance industry or consulting.

PSLF has helped me maintain my values and seek out a job in a nonprofit, serving patients who need them most. Please maintain this program to allow physicians like me to serve their patients.

These are the kinds of concerns people have--hardworking public servants--who would be entitled to loan forgiveness under the bipartisan program that was enacted in 2007.

And my argument to my colleagues is giving this Secretary of Education--or any Secretary of Education, including under a Democratic administration--the ability to cherry-pick this person and that person and say: No, I don't consider you worthy of loan forgiveness because I don't like the politics of the city you live in, the State you live in, or the organization you work for, is a very serious danger.

And I will conclude and just give a related example that is very, very recent of how giving a Cabinet Secretary this power is likely to lead to abuses, and it is related to education. It is not Public Service Loan Forgiveness, but it is related.

In early March, Secretary Hegseth the Secretary of the Department of Defense said that 13 universities in the United States would no longer be eligible to have senior service corps fellowships, and that is senior members of the military assigned to fellowships at the university.

One of the universities was William & Mary in Virginia, the College of William & Mary. And the reason cited for removing the eligibility of these 13 universities was the Secretary decided on his own--as this regulation would allow Secretary McMahon to make this decision on her own--Secretary Hegseth said that William & Mary and the other 13 universities were woke and weak. Because of wokeness and weakness, no longer will we allow senior military service to get fellowships at these universities.

Woke and weak.

We just had an Armed Services Committee hearing. I got to ask the key Pentagon official at the Pentagon: What is woke and weak about the College of William & Mary? It is the Nation's oldest public university. It educated Thomas Jefferson. Its most--one of its most recent chancellors--who is kind of the titular head of the university--was Bob Gates, who was Secretary of Defense under Republican administration. But according to Pete Hegseth, it is woke and weak.

Three weeks after this declaration was made that William & Mary was woke and weak and, thus, could not sponsor senior service corps fellowships, militaryfriendly.com ruled--awarded William & Mary the label as the most military- and veteran-friendly university in the United States. And that was based on data--1,600 students at William & Mary who are active or a veteran--an active ROTC program in the Army; an active ROTC program in the Navy; a clinic at the law school, the Lewis Puller clinic, where law students help veterans access VA benefits; a unique program in the school of education at William & Mary that--it might be unique in the country--that trains individuals to provide counseling to members of the military and their families.

The same publication militaryfriendly.com said that the MBA program at the College of William & Mary was the best MBA program in the country for military members and veterans. And yet a Cabinet member said that is woke and weak.

And so you could easily imagine people who are serving veterans at William & Mary in the veterans clinic, people who are providing counseling training in the counseling center, working other programs, who themselves might feel like they qualified for Public Service Loan Forgiveness--but now the Secretary of Defense has said the whole institution is woke and weak--you could easily see them because of that capricious and arbitrary label, which is against all evidence, you could see them deprived of the opportunity to have their loans forgiven.

This regulation just puts too much power in the unaccountable hands of a single person. We should not allow it to happen under either a Democratic or a Republican administration. For that reason, I will bring this motion to the floor presently.

Mr. President, when Lisa Smith was just 3 years old, she was trafficked--just a sweet little toddler, blond hair, the cutest little thing, not much younger than my daughter is now. When she should have been outside, kicking a soccer ball, playing with dollies, on a playground, with little friends, she was, instead, being abused--and in the most brutal, brutal fashion.

Her predator abused her and mutilated her and took pictures of it and videos and posted them to the internet, to the dark corners of the web, for the sick adulation of other predators.

This went on for months and then for years. And that is where Federal investigators first found Lisa, first noticed her, first saw the images. They could see this beautiful little girl. They could see the sick torture that she was being forced to endure. They could see the pain in her face. But they had no idea where she was.

They had all of the images. They saw all of what she was suffering through. They knew that she was out there. They knew that somebody was posting this over and over and over again. She knew that other predators were looking at it, and they were responding to it, but they didn't know where to find her. They didn't know how to rescue her.

I wish I could say that Lisa's case is unique. I wish I could say that there were no other children like her in America. But the sad fact of the matter is that Lisa's case is increasingly common in the United States of America today.

I want you to take a look at this poster. This is the United States, and these red dots represent the IP addresses of individuals who have shared child rape images in just the last 6 months. There are 338,000 dots on that map. Let me say that again: 338,000 dots of known instances where a predator has shared, posted to the internet, images of child rape, child abuse, child sexual exploitation.

The number of child exploitation reports last year increased to 20.5 million in this country--20 million reports of child exploitation, the vast majority of those tied to online child exploitation.

Interpol estimates that there are 90,000 images that the government has of child rape, child exploitation, child sexual abuse. But what we don't know is who the child is or where she is--90,000 of these images but we don't know where they are. We don't know how to rescue them.

This is the crisis that is increasingly confronting every American family. Every family with children faces the risk that their child-- when they log on, when they post something on the web, when they get a phone--that they will be solicited by a predator, that they will be lured into a dangerous situation by a predator, that they will themselves be trafficked--children taken from their homes, children lured away and kidnapped, children forced into sex slavery all across this country.

We know they are out there. We can see the images, but we don't know how to find them. And the internet has made this a crisis all across the country. It has made it a pressing crisis for every family in America.

The truth is, while child abuse is, sadly, a longstanding phenomenon, child predation and child trafficking now are fed and nourished and nurtured by social media, by companies that know that these images are being posted and don't do anything about it, by the purveyors of online platforms that allow their entire platform to be taken over and essentially run as a child trafficking ring.

The internet has made it much, much worse. It has made it a crisis. It has brought this problem to the doorstep of every family in this country.

And the question that I want to ask today is: What are we going to do about it? What are we going to do for the tens of thousands of children, like Lisa, who are out there, who are in need, who are being abused, who are being brutalized? Even as we stand here on this floor, for those children who need rescue, what will we do for them today?

Because the time has come to do something. The time for merely standing by and sitting back and hoping for the best has passed. There are too many children whose lives are being destroyed, even as we speak.

We have terrific Federal investigators whose job is, whose work is to identify and find these children. At the Department of Homeland Security, there is an entire unit called the cyber crimes unit that contains and includes forensic investigators who analyze the sorts of images that were posted here, that you see reflected on this map, who analyze them and try to find where the children are.

Here is the only problem with that. There are only seven of them. That is right. There are seven forensic analysts, seven experts who can analyze these images--90,000 images, at least, that the Government knows of, with these lost children; 20 million reports of sexual exploitation; and yet only seven analysts who are able to identify and rescue these children.

If you look at this map again, there is a sea of red dots. If you look closely, there are also blue dots, but you would be hard-pressed to find them. The blue dots represent the number of active investigations of child sexual abuse, of child online predation. They are completely lost in the sea of red.

Our children are increasingly lost to predators, to traffickers, to abusers. And, yet, our government is not doing nearly enough about it.

The investigators are there. They are capable. They are ready. They need help.

What can they do? What could the Department of Homeland Security, what could law enforcement do if they had the resources, if they had the support that they needed?

Well, I will give you a sense of it. They could do what they did for Lisa. What happened was Lisa's predator posted images of her online, and an investigator in the cyber crimes unit at Homeland saw the pictures and started drilling down on them.

He started analyzing every frame, every second of the videos, every little detail of the photos, everything he could get his hands on. And he started noticing a few telling signs, a few clues that maybe Lisa was somewhere in the southern part of the United States.

And then, one day, he was able to make out a playground and able to drill down, to zoom in on the playground equipment with enough specificity that he could begin to run it across other images of playgrounds in cities across the South. And, sure enough, in time, he was able to isolate which playground this was in the particular city in the South.

And after that, Homeland sent a team of investigators to start walking blocks--that is right; get out on the streets and walk them--to start walking up and down to see where exactly is that playground. Would Lisa come back to it? Where else might she be?

Are there other children in the region who might know, to interview, to talk, to see?

And here is what happened. They found her. They found her. As it turns out, she had never left home. You see, her predator--her abuser-- was her father, who from the time that she was an infant serially raped and brutalized her and posted all those images.

And, you know, he thought he was really clever about it. He took a lot of careful steps to keep his identity a secret. But these investigators, these great law enforcement, these cops--that is really what they are at Homeland Security--they were better. Oh, they are good. They are very good. They found her. They got him. They rescued her.

There are tens of thousands of other children just like Lisa. It is time to rescue them. We can do it. We can help them today. We can send more investigators into the streets. We can put more cops onto the beat. We can stand up a program to train State and local and Federal law enforcement agents together, to combine their efforts, to work together to bring home children like Lisa. We can do it. The time has come to do it.

And I am here to say we will do it because in the Homeland funding bill that this body will take up in short order, there is the largest investment in anti-child trafficking in the history of this body. This bill contains funding and directives for 200 new agents and investigators to go after child traffickers--from 7 to 200--200 new cops who can analyze those images, who can go after the traffickers, and who can go rescue children like Lisa.

It also contains new funds for programs to bring together State and local and Federal law enforcement to coordinate their efforts and to deploy them together into the field to rescue our children.

It was an incredible privilege to work on this legislation and to get it into this bill. And I particularly want to thank my dear friend and a terrific advocate for children across this country, Tim Tebow.

Yes, you heard me right: the Heisman Trophy winner and NFL quarterback, who I think will be known, when it is all said and done, for something other than sports. I think what Tim will be best known for is his love and compassion for the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable.

Tim has been working on this for years. He has been to Homeland. He has seen the cyber crimes unit. And, together, he and I worked on this legislation to create these 200 new investigators--200 new cops--to get out there and go rescue kids--new programs for State and local law enforcement. And with his support and the support of my colleagues, it is now in this legislation.

I hope, in 48 hours' time or less, we will be able to say we have voted to send these rescuers out onto the streets; we have voted to save these children.

The time is now. This is a moral challenge for this body to stand and protect the most vulnerable among us, our children--to stand and protect those who need it most, to say that we will no longer sit back and make excuses, but we will act to save. We will act to rescue. We will act to help the weak. We will act to save these children.

Let's do it. Let's do it now.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I come to the Senate this afternoon with a simple proposition and a resolution that recognizes that simple truth, and that is that: Climate change is real.

Earlier this year, I came to the floor, and I asked my colleagues if they could all agree on this simple scientific fact.

On this occasion, I also asked my colleagues to acknowledge what the fossil fuel industry has known for nearly 60 years, which is not only that climate change is real but also that they are the primary cause of climate change--their emissions. Unfortunately, Republicans refused to acknowledge those facts.

So I came back and asked for a simple recognition that sea levels were rising as a result of climate change, and Republicans refused to acknowledge that.

I came back and asked that we recognize, very simply, that oceans are warming because of climate change, and Republicans refused to acknowledge that fact.

So let's try this. It is super simple.

Resolved, That the Senate recognizes that climate change is

real.

That is the text of this resolution. It is a simple, four-word proposition that I hope we can agree on.

But just to show the fact base that this simple fact stands on, we can start with NASA. NASA has pretty good scientists. They are actually driving rovers around on Mars. They are pretty good at what they do. And here is what NASA maintains:

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an

unprecedented rate. [And that] human activity is the

principal cause.

And if you don't trust NASA, if you don't want to take their word for it, you can just take a look at the data. It is pretty straightforward.

This graph reflects the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is a known thing. It is done by measurement. I hope we still believe, in the Senate, in measurement. This chart shows what is called the Keeling curve--daily atmospheric CO2 concentrations measured at scientific observatories. The historic data going back is actually collected from testing air bubbles frozen in ice sheets. And I have been to the Ohio State lab where some of those ice cores from old glaciers are maintained, from where they take those measurements. The Ohio State scientists know what they are doing. The measurement is not that complicated. So that is the track of CO2 in the atmosphere according to the Keeling curve.

Here is the next fact: Global average temperature is increasing at an accompanying rate as the CO2 emissions climb. You can see how well it tracks. Global temperature is not that hard to measure. Again, we are dealing with measurement--in effect, thermometers. It is not that hard.

And if you look, as I said before, at what is going on with the heat in the oceans, here is how that tracks. And the reason that the ocean heat tracks the CO2 concentration and the land heat measures is because most of the excess heat that fossil fuel emission causes gets absorbed by the oceans. We would already be on an unlivable planet if it weren't for the oceans absorbing 90 percent of that excess heat.

And the amount of heat that the oceans absorb is pretty astounding. You have to measure it in zettajoules.

Last week, I explained that we are now warming the oceans by 23 zettajoules a year, breaking the ocean heat content record for the ninth consecutive year.

As I said before, what is a zettajoule? A zettajoule is the unit of heat measure--the joule--with 21 zeroes behind it. That makes it a very big number. That is actually a billion trillions or, to put it the other way, a trillion billions. It is an enormous amount of heat. It is more than 40 times the total amount of energy that human beings generate on all of planet Earth to warm ourselves, cool ourselves, drive our cars, run our motors, push refrigerators--whatever it is we are trying to do. The whole energy footprint of humankind on planet Earth is half a zettajoule. And the oceans, because of that excess fossil fuel emission, are absorbing more than 40 times that much. It has a huge magnifier effect.

And that does things like drop the Antarctic ice shelf. And when the Antarctic ice mass shrinks, the ice that is on the land that goes into the water does what? Raises the sea level.

You can test that proposition for yourself by putting ice in a cup and letting it pour into another cup as it melts, and you will see the level of the cup rise.

So here is where global sea level has been going. Again, we are not dealing with complicated stuff here. We measure heat with thermometers. We measure sea level rise with tide monitors. It is basically a yardstick, and you go and look at the time of day when the tide is the same, and you measure where on the yardstick the sea level is. This is not something that is complex or amenable to much legitimate confusion or dissent.

Here we can look at the areas burned by wildfires. It is not just coasts and oceans that are getting clobbered by our emissions, but the area in the United States burned by wildfires keeps climbing and climbing. And the harm that this causes goes on and on. Hurricanes driven by warmer seas are becoming stronger and wetter. Wildfires driven by drought and wind are burning far more land.

And it is not just scientists who are reporting what they measure. You can actually go back to a very interesting and somewhat unique dataset. In Japan, in Kyoto, believe it or not, the Japanese people have been measuring the peak bloom of their cherry trees for 1,200 years. It is one of the longest datasets on the planet: 1,200 years of when Kyoto's cherry trees hit peak bloom.

And you can see, going back to the year 800, it moves fairly steadily along

until you get to the Industrial Revolution, until you get to the fossil fuel emissions barrage that drove the CO2 concentrations so high. As CO2 went up and as the planet heated, spring came sooner. And so you see here, earlier and earlier and earlier and earlier comes the day of peak bloom. I thought that was interesting because I thought a 1,200-year dataset kept by the Japanese people was interesting.

So that is where we are. We have more violent storms. We have more ferocious and damaging wildfires. We have hotter temperatures. We have a dramatically warming ocean.

And as I have said, climate change has moved from the science department to the economics department because all of those science measures bring costs onto the American public. Droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes disrupt agriculture and the transit of groceries, and they make food more expensive for Americans.

These climate impacts drive up homeowners insurance in regions where the climate risk becomes unmanageable. And they drive down property values, because when your homeowners insurance cost doubles or triples and threatens to double or triple again, that cost knocks down the value of your home. And we are seeing that right now in Florida.

And then, of course, all of this drives up energy bills at a time when oil prices are already extremely high because of Trump's mad war in Iran.

All of this is real in family budgets today, and it is a big deal. It is a big cost when homeowners insurance, which starts as a big number, doubles, as it has in Iowa in recent years. It is a big deal when you get told by your insurance company that you are fired, they are not going to insure your property any longer, and now you have to scramble to find insurance. And when you do, it is worse. It is more expensive, provides less coverage. There is a huge cost factor, and there is a huge hassle factor for real Americans right now.

That is our reality. Climate change is real. Can we agree on that simple truth? That is my question today.

Mr. President, therefore, I ask, as if in legislative session, unanimous consent that the Committee on Environment and Public Works be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 553; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I just want to make sure it is absolutely clear that that argument is what Republicans have sent to the floor of the U.S. Senate to question the measurements and the facts of climate change. That is what they sent to the floor.

The questions are the talking points of the fossil fuel industry. To what extent does man cause it? Here is what NASA says:

There is unequivocal evidence that the Earth is warming at

an unprecedented rate. [With] human activity . . . the

principal cause.

And lest it be not clear that human activity is fossil fuel burning and emissions. That is not a question. That is a known thing, just ask

Mr. President, the month of May is a very busy time of year: graduation season, recital season, and, of course, planting season for American farmers. Here in the Senate, lawmakers will burn the midnight oil this week to pass a reconciliation bill that delivers essential funding for national security and public safety.

Well, I want to assure my colleagues that this Senator is never too busy to set the record straight, and today, I come to the floor to set the record straight on E15.

E15 is a higher blend, higher octane fuel that is 85 percent gasoline and 15 percent homegrown American ethanol.

Last week, the House approved landmark legislation to make year-round E15 the law of the land and lower gas prices for Americans from coast to coast. The driving force behind the House victory was Iowa's House delegation. That shouldn't surprise you because Iowa is the leading producer of ethanol. That victory was led by Congressman Randy Feenstra, Congressman Zach Nunn, Congresswoman Ashley Hinson, and Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks. I applaud all four of these House Members for their effort and for supporting a major industry in Iowa and probably about 40,000 jobs in Iowa, and I am glad to take up the baton with a bipartisan coalition here in the U.S. Senate.

With those generalizations, I would like to shed some light on what year-round E15 would do. E15 would offer Americans a lower price fuel option when they fill up at the pump, giving families somewhere between 10 and 30 cents per gallon. That is a big savings. Making E15 permanent delivers more choices for the consumer and year-round savings for families who are facing these higher gas prices that we have seen since the war in Iran started. So it is very simple: A vote for E15 is a vote for lower gas prices.

Year-round, nationwide E15 would bring certainty to fuel refineries, to the marketers, to the retailers, and the renewable fuel producers. No more costly switchovers in the summer when, under law, ethanol cannot be sold in certain parts of the country. It would end a patchwork of regulations from one year to the next, boost the domestic gas supply chain, and it would surely unleash America's domestic energy dominance. Unleashing E15 stops Americans from being held hostage to foreign crude oil. It reduces carbon emissions and tailpipe pollutants and would pump $14 billion into the U.S. farm economy. On top of all those advantages, E15 is pro-environmental. At a time when farmers are looking for expanded markets, E15 would deliver for corn farmers and create more jobs in rural America. E15 puts American families, our farmers, and our biofuel producers in the driver's seat to power forward clean, affordable, homegrown fuel.

Here is what year-round E15 does not do, and I emphasize this part of my remarks because there is a lot of lack of knowledge about E15 and maybe a lot of lack of knowledge about ethanol generally. And this is from what I have been hearing from my colleagues. It would not force Americans to fill up their gas tank with E15. It would not force fuel retailers to even sell E15. In short, it would not create a mandate. And how many times have I heard from my colleagues that it would be a mandate? In fact, EPA Administrator Zeldin confirmed this very fact to my colleague from Nebraska just last week. E15 is not a mandate, and that is from EPA Administrator Zeldin.

President Trump delivered his seal of approval for year-round E15 during a visit to my home State in January. He called on Congress to pass E15 without delay and said he would sign it as soon as it reached his desk.

Vice President Vance and Secretary Rollins have also traveled to Iowa to endorse E15 because they know what I know: Ethanol is good for national security, good for the farm economy, and good for U.S. energy independence.

My efforts to help get homegrown fuels from the field to the pump started five decades ago during the energy crisis of the 1970s. That energy crisis was called that because--it was referred to as an oil embargo, and it was something that OPEC forced upon the entire world.

Two decades ago, I worked with President George W. Bush to create and expand the renewable fuel standard, known here in Washington among energy people as RFS. Last year, the RFS celebrated 20 years of success, paving a cleaner, more energy independent future for Americans. Within those 20 years, I have worked with the Obama, the Trump, and the Biden administrations to expand E15 into our domestic fuel supply.

Having said all that, guess what happened. The sky didn't fall. No refineries shut down.

So that brings me to the Chicken Littles inserting themselves into today's debate, and I am talking about the so-called midsize refiners. They are running around this town trying to gut the hard-fought year- round E15 victory that passed with bipartisan support in the House of Representatives. It is interesting this coop of Chicken Littles is now crowing.

After 8 years of Presidential waivers that allowed for E15 summertime sales, the refineries are now trying to convince people in Washington-- including some of my colleagues here in the U.S. Senate--that the sky will fall if we pass permanent year-round, nationwide E15.

So let's get back to the facts. We have had E15 by Presidential waiver since 2019. Ambassador Zeldin has confirmed that in these 8 years, not one refinery closed because consumers had the choice to purchase E15.

For those saying that refineries have been ignored in the E15 debate, that is surely not the case--and after 16 years of working on this issue, I would know. Refineries have been deeply involved in negotiations for years. There have been very high-level talks on the topic of E15, and the Rural Domestic Council in the House was specifically created to hear from people with these refineries.

In her remarks here on the Senate floor last week, my colleague from Iowa mentioned that the annual earnings of the Nation's six midsized refineries are more than all of America's family farmers combined.

Now, there is nothing wrong with making money--that is the beauty of the free economic system that we have in America. It has powered our economy and fueled innovations for the last 250 years.

However, we shouldn't let this bill's opponents talk out of both sides of their mouth. You can't take in record profits on the one hand and claim you are a step away from bankruptcy because of E15 on the other hand.

Homegrown E15 is an example of the entrepreneurial spirit and discovery that makes America great. E15 powers up American domestic energy, lowers prices at the pump, and boosts the farm economy.

You add all that up, and E15 is a win for America and for Americans. America's farmers and families are counting on this.

The commonsense choice is very clear--America needs permanent year- round E15 from sea to shining sea.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, tomorrow, the State of Tennessee is planning to end the life of Tony Carruthers, a man with severe mental health conditions who was forced to represent himself in a murder trial 30 years ago.

Forensic evidence never connected him to the crime. Key witness testimony has been discredited. Fingerprints and DNA found at the crime scene were never fully investigated

even though they could exonerate Mr. Carruthers. Despite all of this, his execution is scheduled to continue tomorrow as planned. By 12 midnight tomorrow, Mr. Carruthers will depart this Earth for a crime he may not have committed.

When I was first elected to Congress many years ago, I was part of the majority of Americans who supported the death penalty for the most heinous crimes. Over the years, my views began to change for a number of reasons.

First, there have been numerous cases of potentially innocent people who have been executed, including as recently as 2024, and over 200 people who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated since 1973. One study found that more than 4 percent of the individuals on death row were likely innocent, and this figure does not include those who pled guilty to crimes they didn't commit to avoid execution.

For many on death row, their punishment stems from their inability to afford counsel and their struggles with mental illness. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, approximately 90 percent of people facing capital charges cannot afford an attorney. Researchers at the University of North Carolina have found that 43 percent of individuals executed between 2000 and 2015 had been diagnosed with a mental illness at some point in their lives--43 percent. The death penalty is not a punishment reserved for the worst of the worst; it is one reserved for the poorest of the poor.

In addition, it is a penalty disproportionately faced by Black Americans. Despite being 13 percent of the U.S. population, Black people make up 41 percent of all the prisoners on death row. A coincidence? Numerous studies have found that Black defendants are more likely than their White counterparts to face the death penalty.

On top of all this, it is far from clear that the death penalty even serves its primary purpose. There is yet to be conclusive evidence to demonstrate that the death penalty deters people from committing heinous crimes compared to the threat of spending life in prison.

Faced with all of this, 15 years ago, I announced that I could no longer support the death penalty. Luckily, I was in good company. I was not the first public official whose thinking about this issue changed. Supreme Court Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens had a similar journey to my own. While both initially ruled in favor of the death penalty, they eventually came to the same conclusion: that after decades of trying to make it fair, we had largely failed as a nation.

In the year 2000, in my home State of Illinois, George Ryan, a Republican Governor, instituted the first statewide moratorium on executions in the Nation. In 2003, Governor Ryan cleared death row by commuting the sentences of 167 inmates to life in prison.

In 2021, in his first year in office, President Biden instituted a moratorium on the Federal death penalty. Then, in December 2024, in response to a request from me and 11 other Senators, President Biden commuted the sentences of most individuals on Federal death row to life in prison.

Today, I am reintroducing the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act. This legislation would prohibit the imposition of the death penalty as punishment for any violation of Federal law and require the resentencing of those previously sentenced to death row.

This bill is particularly important today. Last month, President Trump's Department of Justice announced that it was bringing back firing squads and seeking to return to the use of electrocution and lethal gas for executions. Meanwhile, the State of Alabama became the first government in the world to carry out executions by nitrogen suffocation, an untested and inhumane death penalty method.

The Supreme Court has declined to intervene, over the dissent of Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson.

Listen to what Justice Sotomayor wrote:

Allowing the nitrogen hypoxia experiment to continue

despite mounting and unbroken evidence that it violates the

Constitution by inflicting unnecessary suffering fails to

protect the dignity of the Nation we have been, the Nation we

are, and the Nation we aspire to be.

These barbaric tactics will be remembered as a stain on our Nation's history. We must not engage in the very conduct we seek to punish. My bill would ensure we do not.

I understand this subject brings up people's strongest emotions. When faced with the horrific acts of some of the people on death row, the hatred they hold, and the pain they caused, it is understandable to want them to face a punishment commensurate with their crimes. But how many innocent people must be put to death to feed a feeling of vengeance? How many Americans must be denied justice in the name of grief?

State-sanctioned killing is not an effective way to make our country safe. It is not guaranteed to only punish the guilty. It is not who we are.

I hope my colleagues will join me and together end this cruel and unusual punishment in America once and for all.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.