A concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2026 and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2027 through 2035.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, people following the Senate floor will know that hundreds of times I have come to the floor with my trusty, increasingly beat up ``Time to Wake Up'' poster to describe the various manners in which the fossil fuel industry has corruptly obstructed our ability to solve the problem of climate change that is caused by fossil fuel emissions.

They might also remember that I have come to the floor dozens of times to give my ``Scheme'' series of speeches about the corrupt manner in which the Supreme Court has been captured and put into the service of a gang of rightwing billionaires who tend to be fossil fuel billionaires.

In this speech, the ``Time to Wake Up'' series and the ``Scheme'' series converge. I don't know quite how to describe it, but maybe it is ``Time to Scheme Up'' because, for sure, that is what has been done in this country by the fossil fuel industry to blockade our efforts to solve the pollution hazard that they have created for our people--a pollution hazard that is now real and immediate in our economy.

Look no further than the State of Florida, where climate risk has thrashed the home insurance markets to the point where the home insurance market collapse has cascaded into mortgage markets, which has, in turn, cascaded into real estate values--property values.

Last year, Florida led the country in lost property values. This year, there was an article in Newsweek just a few days ago about how 6 to 8 percent losses are predicted in Florida real estate values because of that cascade. Property is very hard to sell if you can't get a mortgage on it, and it is impossible to get a mortgage on it if you can't get insurance on it. And even if

you can get insurance, if the insurance costs $14- or $15- or $20- or $30,000 a year, you add all that up, and it comes off the value of the home, which is why you are seeing people unsuccessfully trying to sell homes in Florida for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more less than they paid for it.

So this is on its way. It is coming right now. I am just going to continue to dig into how it is that we got here because how we got here involves a lot of mischief, a lot of real problems. One of those problems came to light just recently in the form of a number of memos from within the Supreme Court from the Justices to each other that were released or leaked--somehow came to the New York Times--that describe how it was that the captured Court put an end to the Clean Power Plan of the Obama administration before it even came to life.

Before even a court decision had been made about the merits of the rule, five Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices stepped in and killed that rule in the crib before it could have any real effect.

Charles Pierce has written a pretty good summary of that New York Times article. He said:

The New York Times published a trove of personal memos from

the members of the Supreme Court outlining the court's

promiscuous use of the so-called shadow docket. It has become

the carefully constructed conservative majority's favorite

work-around to kill policies it doesn't like and support

causes that it and its corporate patrons do.

What appears to have happened here is that the shadow docket was born in the crib-killing of the Clean Power Plan.

This is quoting the New York Times story:

By a 5 to 4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted

President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, his signature

environmental policy. They acted before any other court had

addressed the plan's lawfulness.

Not a Court of final impression, a Court of first impression--the first one to look at it. That is not the way it ordinarily works.

The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a

word of reasoning.

That is similar to the way the shadow docket has been working--before briefing, before argument--a decision without legal reasoning provided.

It continues about the Chief Justice:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., has cultivated a

reputation for care and caution. [These] papers reveal a

different side of him. At a critical moment for the country

and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in

pushing to stop Mr. Obama's plan to address the global

climate crisis.

I will get into this a little bit further as I continue through my remarks, but the basic summary is that the Court concluded that without stopping the EPA's rule before it went into effect, before any court had actually considered it, that would cause irreparable harm to the fossil fuel industry--specifically, mentioning that private industry will suffer irreparable harm--this, at a stage in the proceedings, where the question of whether that harm even existed had still not been properly litigated.

So I go back a ways on this. In 2015, in one of my ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches, I said:

The Supreme Court has handed the polluters a heavy cudgel

with its misguided Citizens United decision, allowing big

corporations to spend--or more important, threaten to spend--

unlimited amounts of undisclosed money in our elections. More

than anyone, polluters use that leverage to demand obedience

to their denial script.

Another one, 2017:

The Supreme Court's Republican appointees got in the habit

of doing what they were told by the forces that appointed

them (which include the fossil fuel industry, which asked for

the Citizens United decision), and in a fateful combination

of obedience and political ignorance, they wrecked our

politics.

A year later, I described how:

Republican strategists are expanding their grip to the

Supreme Court, building there a reliable Republican majority.

I warned that we mustn't try to replicate that apparatus. We must expose it. And when we expose one part of the apparatus, we expose all because it is the same crew behind packing the courts and denying climate change and running the dark money machine.

In January of 2010, I said:

The five Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the fossil

fuel industry the Citizens United decision.

I said:

In January 2010, the five Republicans on the Supreme Court

gave the fossil fuel industry the Citizens United decision;

the industry instantly turned its new political weaponry on

the Republican Party; and bipartisanship on climate change

was stamped out by fossil-fuel threats.

This integration between the fossil fuel industry and the Supreme Court and the dark money power that the fossil fuel industry has used to crush climate action in Congress is something that has been apparent for some time.

In 2020, I added:

Citizens United unleashed toxic doses of money, and

unprecedented doses of virulent dark money, into our

political atmosphere. [Once] democracy is poisoned, stunned

by secret fossil fuel money and threats, [it fails] to listen

to plain warnings.

In 2022, I called this ``the Court that dark money built.''

In 2022, I said:

[I]t is probably more accurate to say that we now have the

Court that dark fossil fuel money built.

So it comes as little surprise that these memos from within the Court should reveal that linkage between the Republican-appointed Justices and the fossil fuel industry. And, of course, it should come as no surprise that the roots of this shadow docket that has been used so politically by the Republican majority on the Court--the roots are found in an act of service to the fossil fuel industry billionaires who captured the Court.

If you look at the scheme to maintain the fossil fuel industry's free-to-pollute business model where they get away with polluting as much as they like with no cost or consequence, you have to look at the Supreme Court facilitating this.

Citizens United, of course, signaled the end of climate legislation because the unlimited dark money that the fossil fuel industry could use to shut down climate action in this body was successful. Unlimited fossil fuel dark money was brought to bear on Congress, and our ability to solve this problem collapsed.

Look before the Citizens United decision. Look back to 2007, 2008, 2009. My first years here, there was robust negotiation on major climate legislation--four different strategies here in the Senate; three major bills, bipartisan bills; and a Presidential candidate in John McCain who ran on a perfectly legitimate climate platform. All of that dead--dead--the day the Citizens United decision came down and the fossil fuel industry pounced with its new dark money power.

But it is not enough to stop legislation. If you want to protect your free-to-pollute business model, you also have to stop regulation, and that is where this Clean Power Plan decision came in. That is where the subsequent major questions doctrine came in. That work by the Supreme Court signaled the end of climate regulation as the Supreme Court intruded into a decades-long regulatory process and rebooted it to protect against regulation that would limit the free-to-pollute business model of the fossil fuel industry.

As I have said in other speeches, that major questions doctrine did not pop from the heads of the Supreme Court Justices in that decision. It was cooked up in fossil fuel-funded doctrine factories, massaged, maneuvered into conferences, propagated by the Federalist Society, called up at conferences. It was groomed and grown so that the Supreme Court could pick it up in a decision, which, of course, they did.

So if you shut down climate legislation and you shut down climate regulation, what is left is climate litigation--that people harmed by all this damage, by all this pollution, usually have a right to bring a lawsuit. And sure enough, lawsuits are emerging. So the next project of the Court is to attack climate litigation, and sure enough, the fossil fuel industry is all over that Court, asking for it to shut down the prospect of climate litigation.

And guess what. That little rascal Leonard Leo, who was the fixer, the implementer of the Court capture scheme, who worked with Trump's counsel, McGahn, to get the three Supreme Court Justices Trump supposedly appointed--separate argument: I think they were actually selected by the Koch brothers' political operation, and Trump was the chump at the end of the deal who signed off on it.

But Leonard Leo and his billionaires were the ones who put that whole

scheme together. They put the whole concept of a Federalist Society list together and the completely untrustworthy President Trump being obliged to say publicly that he would pick off that Koch brothers' list. They called it the Federalist Society list because calling it a fossil fuel billionaires list wouldn't sell so well. And then they ended up with these Justices. The guy in the middle of all of that was this little fixer, Leonard Leo.

Guess what Leonard Leo is doing now. He has an array of maybe 25 front groups that he orchestrates. Some of them are actual corporate entities. Some of them are what are called fictitious names for his corporate entities. So you have a front group, which has a fictitious name, that you operate through. Why you need to do that is a little hard to say, but if you are up to no good, I suppose you want as much camouflage as possible.

What Leonard Leo and his front groups are all over right now is trying to shut down climate litigation, to make it a clean trifecta so that one industry is free to pollute as much as it wants with no legislation, no regulation, and no litigation that can stop it.

Again, it goes without saying that pollution is not something that should be allowed. It is certainly not something that should be allowed for free. But money will buy you a lot, and the fossil fuel-funded phony flotillas of front group amici who come into the Court to tell it what to do--and have, I would say, a 100-percent winning record before the Court--are starting to gather around shutting down climate litigation as well as regulation and legislation. In other words, a captured Court is delivering the goods for the billionaires who captured it.

So let's go through these different memoranda as they came out. The first is from Chief Justice John Roberts dated February 5, 2016. He is responding to emergency applications seeking to have the EPA's Clean Power Plan stayed.

On the very first page, he communicates to the other Justices:

Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is

causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the

domestic power sector.

That is a factfinding. It is a factfinding made without any court having found that fact. It is a factfinding by a Court that is not supposed to engage in factfinding in the first place. It is a disputed fact in the case before the case is even litigated. Yet here is the Chief Justice of the United States going with the factual argument of one of the parties even before arguments related to an emergency stay.

He has to admit to his colleagues that ``the rule does not require emissions reductions until 2022.'' It is dated 2016. Six years later, it might require emissions reductions. But then, February 5, 2016, he says that ``its impact is being felt now.''

He is taking the side of one party on a contested fact and saying that the impact of that contested fact, as he sees it, is actually being felt now, 6 years ahead of when anything has to happen.

He says that ``the applicants indicate''--again, an assertion by a party--the applicants untested, unchallenged--``applicants indicate that they are currently in the process of committing time and resources to compliance.''

That is the reason to shut down the Clean Power Plan?

He says that ``the impact of the rule will reduce coal production for power sector use by 2.0 percent.''

Over a 2-percent reduction, he jumps completely out of his lane, makes factfinding, and shuts down the regulation before it has even been considered by the lower courts.

Then he says that the ``harm . . . is irreversible.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the Chief Justice memorandum printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.

That memorandum was responded to rather quickly by Justice Breyer, who noted:

First, it is unusual for this Court to issue a stay of an

agency's order during the time that the Court of Appeals is

considering its lawfulness.

It is a live legal dispute in the court of appeals, and the Supreme Court is jumping in to stay it? That was not just unusual; it was unprecedented. As Justice Breyer points out, ``it is difficult at this point to say that the absence of a stay will cause irreparable harm.''

Even among the Justices, that is a contested fact, and yet the Chief Justice is willing to rely on his view of that contested fact even though it is supposedly not a factfinding body in the first instance.

As I mentioned a moment ago and as Justice Breyer points out, ``the order does not require any company to take action for six years.'' So it was hardly an emergency.

Finally, he pointed out that ``all of the applicants'' were ``free to renew their applications for a stay'' once the DC court of appeals had done its work and come right back to the Court and get the stay then rather than to jump ahead of the circuit court of appeals. And it notes that the circuit court of appeals has agreed to proceed on an expedited basis.

Well, it didn't take long for the Chief to respond to that. He wrote right back saying that ``private industry will suffer irreparable harm from a rule that is--in my view--highly unlikely to survive.''

So now he is not only making factfindings that are contested even within his Court and that he shouldn't be making in the first place, but he is also predicting the legal conclusion of how this is going to end up in his Court.

He says that the ``Court will not issue a decision until 2018 at the earliest''--still 4 years before that date--``long after the real-world impacts of the rule would have been felt in the absence of a stay.''

Again, more and more factfinding.

He says there will be ``on-going, cumulative, and irreversible harms that private parties are incurring each day.''

Again, that is a contested fact, but he is willing to say that as if it were an actuality and not a point in contention.

Justice Kagan comes back to him to say:

As far as I can tell, it would be unprecedented for us to

second-guess the D.C. Circuit's decision that a stay is not

warranted, without the benefit of full briefing or a prior

judicial decision.

She calls this a ``drastic and unusual remedy'' and points out that this fact that Chief Justice Roberts has so readily lurched to--the applicants' assertion--``is both entirely speculative and highly doubtful.''

So now you have another Justice challenging the fact that the Chief Justice offers as Gospel.

She says:

It is implausible that such a minor emissions reduction--

Two-percent reduction in coal--

to be achieved six years hence will require substantial and

irrevocable commitments of resources in the coming months.

Then in comes Justice Sotomayor.

I agree with Steve's [Breyer] proposal and Elena's [Kagan]

supplement to that proposal. As Elena notes, it would be

unprecedented for us to grant a stay before any court has

reviewed this complicated and complex case.

She says:

[N]o applicant has identified a single real plant--

An actual, real facility--

as opposed to a hypothetical ``model plant''--that is in

immediate danger of closure absent a stay.

She challenges the costs that have been discussed by the Chief Justice, and she points out that ``an emergency stay on limited briefing before the D.C. Circuit will hear argument on this regulation in just four months.''

Just wait 4 months and get the proper order--circuit court of appeals, then Supreme Court.

Faced with that, in chimes Justice Alito, brought onto the Court with Leonard Leo at the White House helping make the selections. He concludes saying:

A failure to stay this rule threatens to render our ability

to provide meaningful judicial review--and by extension, our

institutional legitimacy--a nullity.

Instead of robust judicial review, our opinion will be a

mere postscript.

Remember, this is a rule that won't have effect for 6 years, where there will be a proper appellate court decision below in 4 months, and all of that is intolerable to Justice Alito, a product of the ``billionaires/Leonard Leo'' court-packing operation.

And the closer is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who writes an unusually brief

decision, compared to all the others, or a memorandum, compared to the others, simply concluding: ``[F]airness to the parties counsels that we should grant [the stay] now,'' and ``I agree with the recommendation of the Chief.''

That gave the Chief the votes. They granted the stay, and the Clean Power Plan died.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the remaining memoranda that I referred to be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks in the sequence in which I described them.

Mr. President, what is the backdrop to all of this? The backdrop to all of this is the massive amount of harm that is caused by fossil fuel emissions. The pollution is really astounding.

The International Monetary Fund most recently assessed the cost of fossil fuel pollution and of its free-to-pollute business model in the United States of America at $770 billion in 1 year--$770 billion in benefit to the fossil fuel industry, a form of subsidy, from being allowed to pollute for free and not being obliged to clean up its mess. They are allowed to cause $770 billion worth of harm to Americans for zero dollars.

When you are allowed to cause $770 billion worth of harm to ordinary Americans for zero dollars, you have a massive motive to corrupt. You have a massive motive to apply political influence. You have a massive motive to take advantage of the dark money that you pressed the Supreme Court to allow and authorize, and bring that to bear on Congress to make sure that your $770 billion annual pollute-for-free subsidy is protected.

What did you note about my discussion about the Court's conversation on harm? What you should have noted is that 100 percent of the Court's conversation on harm was on harm to the polluters. It was the only harm that the Chief Justice mentioned or considered.

The entire argument about staying the Clean Power Plan hinged on analysis of harm that only looked at the harm to the polluter. There was no mention of climate change. There was no mention of the harm of emissions. There was no discussion of the health damage from climate change and what it is doing now and could be projected back then to do to insurance markets; what it was causing in sea level rise; what the ancillary pollution of fossil fuel that isn't climate change pollution but is lead, mercury, SOX, NOX, particulate matters, is doing.

They literally turned a blind eye to fossil fuel pollution measured at $770 billion worth of harm, most recently--total blind eye to it-- and focused only on the harm that would be done to the fossil fuel industry from having to comply with clean power rules.

Other studies have shown that the amount of money spent on the operation to capture the Court--a short word on Court capture, it goes back to the well-acknowledged notions of Agency capture or regulatory capture in the bad old days. Mining interests would make sure that all their friends were appointed to the mining safety commission so they could know the mining safety commission would always give them the answer that they wanted.

That is Agency capture.

In the bad old days, railroad barons would make sure that all their friends and lackeys were appointed to the railroad rates commission so they could be sure that all the railroad rates that were set were advantageous to them and that they could make sure that they got the rates that they wanted. That was called Agency capture.

It is a renowned phenomenon. It is written about constantly in administrative law. There is a whole field of economics that studies it.

What happened here is that Agency capture or regulatory capture was brought to bear on the Supreme Court, and it has now turned into, in essence, a captive body that does this bidding.

The number that I am referring to is the amount that was spent on that Court-capture operation. People who do really good research have dug into this, and at this point--more research will make the number bigger certainly. But at this point, it looks like about $600 million-- million with an ``m''--was spent on the Court-capture operation.

Now, that is a lot of money. But it is not a lot of money if you are defending a $770 billion annual subsidy that lets you pollute for free when you shouldn't be allowed to do that and nobody else is allowed to do that.

Protecting that $700 billion for $600 million is probably the most lucrative investment the fossil fuel industry has ever made.

And if you pile up the years since the Clean Power Plan was stopped-- that was in 2016. Now, it is 2026--so 10 years. That subsidy number has grown over the years as the International Monetary Fund has done a more and more detailed and better job of figuring out all the added harms, as harms are piling up.

So if you look at 10 years, it is not $7.7 trillion. It is probably a number closer to $6 trillion. But think about that. What the Supreme Court did in this one decision, by breaking all of its own rules and looking only at the fossil fuel industry's harm, is to set loose $6 trillion worth of harm over the next 10 years that all of us have had to pay for in health, in harm, in lost property values, in increased insurance, in a myriad of different ways--$6 trillion, call it, over those 10 years.

That makes $600 million to capture the Court that made that decision an amazing payback, but a really, really dangerous payback for the American public.

I will conclude by saying that whether you look at this as an aspect of the scheme to capture the Court or whether you look at it as an aspect of the endless fossil fuel pollution that is causing us to need to wake up before it is too late--either way you look at it--the rot runs deep around fossil fuel, and it seems to have infected the Court right over there.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I was out in the hallways a week ago, and a reporter asked me a reasonable question. She said: Do you think Democrats overplayed their hand in the negotiations over the DHS budget? Did you ask for too much, thus prompting the moment that we are in today as we do something unprecedented, debate using reconciliation to appropriate money for the ongoing expenses of the Federal Government?

My answer was a confident no, for a few reasons. First, our asks were pretty minimal. All we wanted was to make

sure that the money we were sending to the Department of Homeland Security wasn't used for illegal purposes, it wasn't being used to tear gas elementary schools or conduct ``show me your papers'' raids in our cities.

A lot of things around here are about politics, but this didn't really seem to be about politics. I just think that we all have an obligation to only appropriate money to the Federal Government when the Federal Government is acting lawfully.

But there is another element to this. We definitely didn't anticipate that Republicans were going to pull the plug on those negotiations when they did. I was part of those negotiations up until the last minute. We thought that we had a potential deal in place in order to bring Republicans and Democrats together around funding all or most of the Department of Homeland Security.

We didn't get that done because Republicans decided--the Republican leader decided--instead to fund the Federal Government through this process, reconciliation, whereby Republicans only need 50 votes.

Now, both sides have used reconciliation to get things done that they wanted to get done, but never before has reconciliation been used as just a straight substitute for the appropriations process. Traditionally, appropriations bills need 60 votes. That means that the budget that we write for the country every year needs to be one that Republicans and Democrats support. But we are here today because Republicans didn't want to negotiate with Democrats over the Department of Homeland Security budget because they knew they could pass that budget with only Republican votes.

Now, listen, I am actually somebody that believes it is probably time to change the rules of the Senate. So I am not going to sit here and tell you that I am defending or willing to defend all of the current rules of the Senate. But let's just be clear, once Republicans have taken the lid off this jar, there is no putting it back.

Republicans are now using reconciliation to fund the ongoing appropriations of the government in an area where it was hard to get agreement with Democrats. Democrats are going to do the same thing. Regardless of how the rules change, now Democrats are just going to say: You know what? When we have power, we don't need to negotiate with Republicans over the hard stuff. We don't need your votes because we will just go fund the government through reconciliation.

So you have changed the practice of the Senate here, and you are going to have to live with the changes that you have decided to make because there are a lot of folks here who have defended the 60-vote threshold for appropriations. Well, that is probably going away, even if the rules don't change now because of the actions that you have taken.

But I guess I come back to this sort of basic obligation that we have, which is to just make sure that we don't fund illegality. A judge in Minnesota issued a ruling--this is at the height of the assault on Minneapolis--that ICE was in violation of almost 100 court orders.

That is stunning. Again, this isn't 100 instances where ICE was violating the law. This was 100 instances where ICE was violating the law, a court told them to stop, and ICE didn't stop. My Republican colleagues claim they are for law and order. How do you defend an Agency that was told to stop acting illegally and on 100 occasions, when reading the court order, just said: Forget it. We are not obeying what the court tells us to do?

When we say this is an Agency that was and is out of control, this is what we mean, an Agency that does not care about the law, does not care what courts say, thinks it is accountable to no one--except for the President of the United States.

We can't fund that kind of Agency. We would be violating our oath of office, all of us, to fund an Agency that just doesn't care about the law. To get 100 court orders telling you to obey the law, you have to be in violation of the law thousands of times.

In fact, Federal courts have ruled, just between October of 2025 and February of this year--that is October, November, December, January, February--over 5 months Federal courts ruled that ICE unlawfully detained not hundreds of people but thousands of people; 4,400 times in 5 months courts have ruled that Americans or legal residents of this country have been unlawfully detained.

That is illegal behavior at scale. And I don't care what your politics are, whether they are right or left, they are inclusionary or nativist, you should not be willing to fund an Agency that just doesn't care about the law at scale.

Mr. President, 48 people have died in ICE custody, 17 in just the last 4 months, right? The cameras aren't in Minneapolis like they were, but 17 people have died in custody in just the last month. Between 2017 and 2021, when Biden was President, there were a total in those 4 years of 52 people that had died. People are dying in ICE custody at a rate four times higher than during the Biden administration.

ICE has detained 6,200 children. We have put 6,000 children in jail. Seventy-three percent of the people that ICE has arrested have no criminal record; 95 percent of them have no violent criminal record. They say that they are locking up the worst of the worst; 5 percent, 1 in 20 have a violent criminal record.

Mr. President, 170 U.S. citizens have been detained. Almost all of them were Latino. You saw the videos of ICE and CBP officers going through the streets just detaining people based upon their accents.

Just this week, ICE detained the wife of SFC Jose Serrano. He is an Active-Duty United States Army soldier who has served our military for 27 years, including service in Afghanistan.

His wife wasn't not following the rules. She was obeying the rules. She was showing up to her court appointments, but they detained her anyway and now they are threatening to send her to Mexico, a country with which she has no ties. Sergeant First Class Serrano, because of his military service, is not allowed to travel to Mexico. Twenty-seven years he has been serving this country, and they are going to deport his wife who is following the law to Mexico and basically guaranteeing they will never see each other again.

Last month, a 5-year-old who was nonverbal with significant disabilities was put in jail at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, a detention center that I tried to get into to inspect because of claims of horrific conditions, and I was not allowed to go into that facility.

Again, this should trouble Republicans and Democrats. I didn't show up unannounced. I gave them notice. They still didn't let me in. Even though the law explicitly states that any Member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, has the right--the statutory right--to inspect facilities.

This little 5-year-old, nonverbal 5-year-old was in jail for 3 weeks. This place is called the baby jail. The boy literally melted down while he was there. He struggled to eat. His stomach became visibly swollen because he was literally suffering from malnutrition, and he couldn't go to the bathroom. He was only released after a children's entertainer named Ms. Rachel highlighted his case in a video. Like, what are we doing? What are we doing? Like, intentionally abusing children? This wasn't before Minneapolis; this happened just a month ago.

Yesterday, it was reported that the Trump administration is in discussions to send more than 1,000 Afghans who were in the United States because they helped us during the Afghanistan war--they would be under the threat of death if they stayed in Afghanistan; we emergency evacuated them to the United States because they helped us, because they protected our troops. And the Trump administration said yesterday that they are going to take 1,000 of those Afghans, heroes, that helped protect our troops in Afghanistan and they are going to send them to the Congo, just for the point of being cruel, just because it is mean, just because it would be kind of funny to send a whole bunch of Afghans who helped us in the war to a country that is in a humanitarian meltdown right now.

So no, none of us should be signing on to fund an Agency that is this lawless and this inhumane. That is the bottom line.

But here is the second bottom line: People are suffering in this country right now. And they are not suffering because we let immigrants into America, they are suffering because gas prices in some parts of the country are

over $6. On average, gasoline is over $4. It was just $3 a few months ago. And it is $6 and $5 and $4 for one reason only: this insane, incompetent war that is being waged in Iran. That is the only reason that these gas prices are so high right now.

The national average, as I said, is over $4. Americans have now paid more than $16 billion more at the pump than they should have simply because of Trump's war. Sixteen billion dollars out of the pockets of American consumers, American families, American small businesses, sent to the oil companies who are, by the way, making a killing off these high prices, just because of Trump's incompetent war in Iran.

Americans, since Trump came into office, have spent $2,300 more on goods and services because of inflation and tariffs. The average family has spent an extra $2,000 in the last year and a half on the things that they buy every day because of Trump's inflation and because of his tariffs.

There are 15 million people in this country who are on the verge of losing their healthcare because of a law that Donald Trump and Republicans passed in this Congress ripping health insurance away from seniors, the poor, and the disabled.

The Consumer Price Index is up 3.3 percent over last year. That is closing in on double what the Federal Reserve's target is. Unemployment is up since Trump took office. Long-term unemployment is way up since Trump took office. Unemployment for Black workers is up since Trump took office.

The tariffs, which are part of the reason that Americans have spent more than $2,000 extra because of Trump's policies, were supposed to be tough, hard medicine in order to bring factory jobs back to the United States. Biden had increased the number of manufacturing jobs in this country. We had more manufacturing jobs at the end of Joe Biden's term than we had at the beginning.

Well, do you know what has happened since Trump took office? He has reversed all of that progress. The tariffs aren't bringing more manufacturing jobs to the United States. We are losing manufacturing jobs. We have lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump became President.

So we are paying higher tariffs, and we are losing manufacturing jobs. Like, it doesn't make any sense.

And so we are going to spend--this week on the floor--giving a blank check to an immigration enforcement Agency that is out of control, while ignoring the real problems that Americans are facing.

We could have spent this week--Republicans could have spent their reconciliation process on gas prices or the healthcare catastrophe that is about to hit Americans or reversing Trump's tariffs or trying to actually do things that will bring manufacturing jobs back to this country, but they are doing none of that.

There is no conversation on the Senate floor right now about gas prices. There is no conversation on the Senate floor being led by Republicans about inflation. There is nothing being done to bring our manufacturing jobs back. There is no second look at the last reconciliation bill they passed, which is going to end insurance for 15 million Americans.

Instead, Republicans are handing billions of dollars in a blank check to an immigration enforcement Agency that right now is hunting 5-year- old kids with severe disabilities and locking them up in baby prisons to the point that they have swollen bellies because of their sickness due to the inhumane conditions.

They are locking up the family members of 27-year military veterans fighting for this country, just because it is mean and cruel.

So we are going to have a chance to debate this over the next 24 hours and vote on it, but I think the American people are seeing where Republican priorities are: not on the stuff that matters to American families.

I am not saying that the people of this country don't want a secure border--they do--but that is not what we are debating here. We are debating funding an immigration enforcement operation that is going after legal citizens, that is not targeting people who are a threat to this country, that exists just to try to stoke fears of our neighbors, that tries to make people think that immigrants are the biggest threat to this country so that you are distracted from the fact that Donald Trump is stealing from you--the most corrupt President in the history of this country.

We could be spending this time--we could even try to come together, Republicans and Democrats--to do something about inflation or the cost of gas. We have been begging our Republican colleagues to vote with us on these resolutions to stop the war in Iran because that is probably the fastest way to get the gas prices to come down.

We could spend time working across the aisle to try to address the issues that are a real crisis for American citizens right now: costs, inflation, gas prices, health insurance.

But, instead, we are about to send another blank check to an Agency that is unconscionably out of control.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague Senator Baldwin and others for continuing to bring this debate before the Senate again. It is just extraordinary that this is the most significant military action that the United States has taken in decades. And there has yet to be one single hearing, one single debate, one single vote on an authorization of military force.

I want to target my remarks today on just what has happened over the past 2 weeks because we tend to bounce from one news cycle to the next without being able to really connect together the growing incompetence that has defined the management of this war.

We shouldn't sugar-coat or normalize this degree of gross, unacceptable incompetence being exercised here. We essentially have a talk show host and a couple of real estate developers who are in charge of our war strategy, and we are getting essentially what you would expect if you put a talk show host and a handful of real estate developers in charge of a major Middle East war.

If millions of lives weren't at stake--and that is really what is at stake as the global economy threatens to melt down because of rising gas prices and the fact that one-third of all fertilizer supply is right now stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, if this wasn't really about millions of lives being at stake, this would be the stuff of farce, one mistake just compounded by another.

So many of us believe this war has to end right now because as each mistake gets bigger than the next, the hole for the United States, for American families, for our national security gets deeper and deeper.

So I am literally just going to very quickly run you through what has happened in the last 2 weeks.

So we all remember on April 7, when Trump posts on social media that he is going to destroy Iran's entire civilization. He says:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought

back again.

Later that day, he announces that there has been a cease-fire. But within hours, there is essentially diametrically opposed interpretations from Trump and the Iranians as to the terms of that cease-fire. The next day, he puts out a series of posts saying:

A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they've

had enough! Likewise, so has [everybody] else. The United

States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in

the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action!

By the end of day on April 8, the cease-fire has fallen apart. Iran says that a cease-fire in Lebanon is also necessary in order to get the Strait of Hormuz opened. Trump is unable to secure that. So by the end of the day, the day after the cease-fire is announced, the cease-fire no longer exists.

Two days later on April 10, Trump sends his Vice President JD Vance to Pakistan for negotiations.

On April 11, those negotiations are concluded after what appears to be an hour or two of face-to-face negotiations. Vance gets right back on a plane after--having spent an entire day--1 day--negotiating the end of this war to come back to the United States.

That day, Trump says:

Their Leadership is DEAD!

Not true.

The Strait of Hormuz will soon be open . . .

Not true. The U.S. delegation, led by Vance, comes back to the United States without an agreement.

On April 12, Trump announces--this is the day after the negotiations fall apart--that he is setting up a blockade. So the Iranians have a blockade on the strait. Now Trump announces a layered second blockade. But he is still saying that negotiations are going great. He says:

[T]he meeting the day before went well, most points were

agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR,

was not.

Of course, that is not true. Virtually nothing was agreed to in that meeting.

He says the next day that his negotiators, who were talking about a 20-year moratorium on enrichment of uranium, do not have his support. He says:

I have been saying they can't have nuclear weapons . . . so

I don't like the 20 years.

I mean, we have never seen this before--literally a President in public contradicting his negotiators who were negotiating the terms of an agreement just 2 days ago.

Three days later, on April 17, Trump says that Iran again has agreed to everything, including removing enriched uranium. Trump says our people are just going to go get the uranium and bring it back to the United States.

Within hours, Iran says this is not true. They say: We have the right--a sacred right--to enrich uranium on our soil.

Trump says his negotiators are not considering releasing sanctions. Two of his negotiators go to the press and say they were talking about releasing sanctions.

Again, this is just diplomatic malpractice. The President of the United States and his negotiators are arguing with each other in public through the media.

Then, on April 19, Trump says he is sending Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan for new talks. The top negotiator, JD Vance , apparently has been sidelined. The administration then says Vance is indeed going to Pakistan. Trump goes back to the press and says Vance is not going to Pakistan. The White House scrambles again and confirms that Vance will be going. The problem is that the Iranians have not agreed to the negotiations.

So a day later, the President says Vance and his delegation are on their way. Come to find out they are not leaving for Pakistan because the Iranians are not agreeing to negotiate.

I mean, I get it that we have come to kind of normalize this kind of incompetence, this kind of planned, executed chaos, but we are on the floor week after week asking our colleagues to end this war because this is an embarrassment to the United States of America. The President and his negotiators are arguing in public with each other. The President is literally deciding by the hour whether his son-in-law is in charge of the negotiations or whether the Vice President is in charge of the negotiations. The President is lying consistently about the nature of the negotiations, saying things have been agreed to that clearly have not been agreed to--helping the Iranians blockade the strait.

We have never seen a foreign conflict mismanaged in public like this before. I understand many of my Republican colleagues want to support their President, but we are becoming a laughingstock in the world while at the same time, we are hurting Americans who are now paying billions more in gas prices. We are risking a global famine as fertilizer is unavailable to poor farmers all over the world, and economies are shutting down because of the high price and shortage of fuel.

The costs of keeping this war going 1 more day are just too high both in reputational costs to the United States but also in the cost to lives and the pocketbooks of millions of Americans.

I know my Republican colleagues have a hard time breaking with their President. I will say that many of us--in closing--on the Democratic side certainly had a hard time breaking with our President as well, whether it was Barack Obama or Joe Biden, but on multiple occasions, we did. Many of us stood on this floor and argued against President Obama's intervention in the Yemen war. Many of us stood on this floor and argued against Biden's policy in Gaza. That wasn't easy, but we thought it was important for us to separate ourselves from our party loyalty when we thought our President had gotten it wrong for America's national security.

It is time for our Republican colleagues to join us in one of these resolutions because it is just so clear to the entire world that if this war continues

even for another day, the reputational cost to the United States is potentially unrecoverable.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I want to spend a few minutes telling you about why I held the vote-arama tonight on reconciliation. Our leader is going to make it to happen a lot quicker than I am. He has got the patience of Job.

My Democratic friends--and they are my friends; I don't hate anybody--agreed to a budget for the Department of Homeland Security as part of our normal budgetary process.

They changed their mind, as is their right. But it caused the Department of

Homeland Security to be shut down, and it hurt a lot of people needlessly. It didn't hurt us. It didn't hurt us. We are still getting paid. We are still going home. But it hurt a lot of people.

And our leader decided that he was going to negotiate with my friend, Minority Leader Schumer, and Senator Schumer was going to meet us halfway and figure out a way to get the Agency open.

He and my Democrat colleagues did agree to open everything but ICE and, I believe, border security. They will never agree to fund ICE-- never, not in your natural lifetime, not in mine. They won't do it.

My friend Senator Schumer did the right thing last March, when we were shut down. He agreed to release some of his Members to let us open the government back up. The loon wing of his party--that is what I call them; if you disagree with me, you can tell me why--beat him bloody. They hit him so hard--now when they hit him, they are just working on scar tissue--for doing the right thing.

Now, I don't consider all of my Democratic friends to believe in defunding ICE. The people in control do. They know it. I know it. We know it. They will never vote to fund ICE. This is the same group of people that wanted to defund the police, and we know how that vampire movie turned out.

Now, they will deny it, and that is their right. But it is the truth, and everybody in this body knows that.

But, nonetheless, our leader said we can work it out.

We didn't work it out. They never agreed to fund ICE, and they never will.

Now, about--I don't know; time runs together up here when you are having fun--a month ago, 6 weeks ago, 2 months ago, we started talking about reconciliation and doing it without Democratic votes, even though the Democrats would be welcome to join us.

I want to give full credit. Ted Cruz, I believe, was the first one to do it. I was second. And Ted went first only because he beat me to it but also because Ted pointed out, in President Trump's first term, that we shouldn't leave efforts to do reconciliation on the table. He was right then. He is right now.

The leader said OK, finally, after doing everything he could, except standing on one leg and barking like a dog. Senator Thune did everything but stand on one leg and bark like a dog to get Chuck to agree. It was his right. Chuck wouldn't agree. And for all I know, John did stand on one leg and bark like a dog. It didn't work. So we finally said: OK, let's do the reconciliation.

Now, once we started talking about reconciliation, which Senator Cruz and I and others pushed, I said I wanted to try to use--well, I said, first, I refuse to believe that Democrats in the Senate and the House cannot adult hard enough to come up with a couple of issues that we can agree to do, in addition to funding ICE and border security, in reconciliation. I didn't believe that then, and I don't believe that now.

Some people said I am naive. Maybe so, but I still believe it. And I still think we ought to try. Why? Because there is not going to be a third reconciliation bill. I am not seeing--I am not saying anybody is lying. They are not. People probably intend to do a third reconciliation bill, but you are not looking at Bambi's baby brother here. There won't be a third reconciliation bill.

You know it, and I know it. This is it. This is the last train leaving the station. Maybe we will do some other bills. I don't know. I am labor, not management. That is above my pay grade. But this will be the last one where we can add stuff to it.

And I would like to see us come up with one or two issues that will help the American people with the cost of living and other things that I know Republicans can agree to. And my Democratic friends, like Senator Durbin, whom we are going to miss--and I mean that--are welcome to come aboard if they want to.

One of the things I also said I wanted to try to do in reconciliation was the SAVE Act. Here is what I want to do, and I am willing for all of us to put our heads together to figure out how to do it.

The American people no longer have confidence in our elections. You can debate whether that is justified or not, but it is just a natural fact. I think that we can restore confidence in our Federal elections if we do three things: if we come up with a way to make sure that everybody who is registered to vote is an American citizen. I think we can restore confidence in our elections if, No. 2, we pass a rule for Federal elections that says you have to prove you are who you say you are in order to vote. And, No. 3, I would like to see us--I consider this part of the SAVE America Act, but it is not traditionally a part. I think we ought to go back to having an election day and not an election month. I know some votes come in late. I get that. We are smart enough to figure out a way to accommodate that. But this election month stuff is just undermining the people's confidence, both Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. That is what I mean when I say the SAVE Act.

And I have said that I am going to try to put the SAVE Act on the reconciliation bill, and I want to keep my word. Where I come from, your word is your bond.

Now, Senator Thune, our leader, came to me earlier--and so did Whip Barrasso--and said: Some Senators want to do the vote-arama tonight, and they have got to get home for various reasons.

And I have been there.

And if you insist on going tomorrow--because, frankly, I am. I am worried about the health of some of our Members--not that they are in bad health, but it is hard to stay up all night. It was hard to stay up all night when I did it in college. I was studying, of course.

But, anyway, I said: No, I would rather go tomorrow. I am going to object.

And John explained to me, and others did as well: The majority wants to go.

So I said: OK. I will pull my hold.

I didn't realize it then. This is my fault. I thought everybody knew I wanted to offer amendments. I didn't realize then that there was a way, procedurally, for me to be blocked from offering my amendments. That is my fault. I just didn't know the rules.

Do you want me to talk again about our rules, Tony? I won't get off on that tangent.

Did I mention they were put together by a heroin addict with a socket wrench? If I didn't, that is how I feel about rules. But, anyway, that was my fault.

So I called Senator Thune back and I called Senator Barrasso back and said: Guys, my bad. I was ignorant. I am redoing my hold because you all have the right to block me from offering amendments, but I have the right to exercise my procedural rights and start this thing tomorrow and leave more time to debate. And I apologize to every one of my colleagues. I have been there. I am sorry. But I will tell them I am sorry.

So I put together my amendments. I have got five of them, and I showed them to Senator Graham and Senator Barrasso and Senator Thune. I just left their office.

So if what we talked about leaked, I am not going to leak it. You will know it was one of those three. They promised me they wouldn't leak it.

Here is what I want to offer. And they can stop me, but I can stop us from voting tonight, which is going to hurt some of my colleagues, and I don't like to do that.

I think that we should instruct the appropriate committee--I will get into it, if you want to; it is the Banking Committee--to come up with a bill to prevent medical debt from being reported to the credit rating agencies and ruin the credit of all these people who are too poor to be sick, including middle-class Americans, because their credit gets screwed up, and it makes it harder to get the money to pay off the debt.

Now, the hospitals and others, they are foaming at the mouth right now and having a grand mal seizure. But I am sorry. That is the way to effect the cost of living in America that every mom and dad is worried about at night. I wanted to do that. I still want to do that.

I wanted to instruct the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to provide that, before the United States of America agrees with the United Kingdom to give away our military base in Diego

Garcia, two-thirds of the Members of the U.S. Senate have to vote to do that.

What Prime Minister Starmer is doing right now is deep-dish stupid. He says he is going to stop, but he may be back.

I wanted to offer an amendment to instruct the Finance Committee to put together a bill that would eliminate Federal income taxes and State income taxes, if our colleagues would go on with it, for our poll workers. They don't make but $50 or something. Why do we make them pay taxes?

To allow the American people to buy insurance across State lines--now the insurance commissioners are having grand mal seizures too, but we ought to talk about it.

The bill would also increase the minimum distribution age of retirement--the required minimum distributions from retirement accounts--to 76. Right now, it is 75, and you have got to take it. And they tax the living bejesus out of you. Some people need it; others don't.

I was going to ask the Finance Committee to come up with a bill to allow every American who has suffered a casualty loss to be able to deduct it below the line on their income taxes. That will help with affordability.

I wanted to ask them to put together a bill so that when you sell your home--I think you get--$500,000 of the sale is subject to capital gains. I am sorry. I am kind of tired. I may be wrong on that, but, anyway, you get a specialty tax break. Hell, we set that limit in 1997.

I would like them to talk about increasing it. If the Finance Committee thinks it is a bad idea to increase it, I would like to ask them to at least index that figure, that special treatment, to inflation.

I have some other things, but we have got a good Finance Committee, and they can come up with a bill that will help our people deal with the cost of living because if you think that the American people--moms and dads--when they lie down to sleep at night and can't, they are worried about the cost of living, you will never own your own home. Everybody here knows that.

I have another amendment to instruct the Senate Rules Committee to put together a bill that tracks my rule that I can't get brought to the floor. So I am going to turn it into a bill to withhold pay from Senators during a shutdown. They can get their money back after the shutdown is over. I know that hurts some Senators more than others because some of them have houses that are bigger than a Costco. I get that. I am not one of them. But we have a lot of people in the TSA and other people in the DHS who have various levels of income and wealth. So it just seems to me there ought to be some shared sacrifice.

I have another amendment to--oh, I have another amendment that would--I am sorry to take so long.

I think my Democratic friends--gosh, I hope I am wrong, but I think my Democratic friends are going to shut down the government right before the midterms. I hope I am wrong. If I am, please make me wrong. I will come to this floor and apologize to every one of them by name if I need to, but I am scared they are going to shut down the government and create chaos. So my other amendment would be to instruct the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, which already has been instructed--it is germane--to take Senator Lankford's Prevent Government Shutdowns Act, which is S. 2721, and Senator Ron Johnson's Shutdown Fairness Act, which is S. 3012--you won't find two smarter people in the Congress than James Lankford and Ron Johnson--and marry those bills so we will be ready in case anybody tries to do a shutdown on us.

And I am sorry to pick on my Democratic friends. Hell, we have got some Republicans who could try to shut it down too. That has been known to happen. But, anyway, it will stop it. Whatever knobhead wants to shut down the government before the elections, this will stop it, and that is one of these things I wanted to do with my amendments.

Finally, I have an amendment to implement my version of the SAVE Act. You have got to prove you are an American citizen. This would instruct the Rules Committee. Prove you are an American citizen. Prove you are who you say you are to vote, and let's go back to having an election day and not an election month. I have got a lot of confidence in the Rules Committee. They are really smart Republicans, and they are really smart Democrats. They can do it, and I want to instruct them to do that.

Now, they can stop me, but I can stop us from voting tonight. I don't want to do that; it is going to hurt some of my colleagues. I was going to stop us from voting tonight to try to prove my point because what you allow is what will continue around here. I am pulling my objection except for my right to offer the SAVE Act--my version of the SAVE America Act. If you don't want to vote for it, don't. All I ask of you is to think about it, to trust our Rules Committee, and to follow your heart but take your brain with you because the American people-- Democrats and Republicans and Independents--are questioning our elections.

This isn't about any one person--everybody is entitled to their opinion--but I am telling you whoever loses in the next round of elections--in the next round of elections, if we go back to an election month, they are going to go: We got it stolen. It has got to stop. That only happens in a country whose Powerball jackpot is 287 chickens and a goat. That is not America, and we can stop it with this.

Anyway, that is where I am. So I appreciate your patience. I am going to release my hold. I have been told I will be able to offer the SAVE Act. Do whatever the hell you want on it. Vote for it. Vote against it. Just follow your heart. Take your brain with you. Give the Rules Committee a chance. And that is where I am. My work here is done.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, in my prior remarks, in one respect, they were not exactly a model of clarity, so I want to be clear. I don't want to do anything to hurt the reconciliation bill. I like my amendments that I talked about. I don't know whether they will pass. If they don't pass, I will tell you how I will sleep tonight--with a fan on, because I think they are good amendments. But I am going to pull them down, except for the SAVE Act, because I don't want to do anything to keep ICE and Border Patrol from being funded. And I am pulling them down.

I think Lindsey could stop me anyway. He says he doesn't know how. But remember when I said Thune is going straight to Heaven? Lindsey is going to have to be persuasive. But I know he can stop me. But rather than make him do that and, if it gets on, jeopardizing this resolution, I am going to pull them all down but the SAVE Act.

I am coming with the SAVE Act. Do what you want. Follow your heart. Take your brain with you. If you don't vote for it, that is cool. I am still going to sleep with the fan on and sleep well. I would appreciate if you would consider voting for it.

Have a little confidence in our Rules Committee. I haven't met a dummy yet who is on the Rules Committee.

And I am done. What am I supposed to do now?

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask with respect that there be order in the Senate and conversations be taken off the floor.

Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 5414 and ask that it be reported by number.

Madam President, this amendment would instruct our Rules Committee to come up with an elections bill. It is my version of the SAVE America Act, but you can call it what you want.

It would ask the Rules Committee to do two things: require that in Federal elections you have to be an American citizen to vote and provide for the provisions to enforce that.

No. 2, it would require that in Federal elections you have to prove you are who you say you are in order to vote, and it would provide provisions to enforce that.

No. 3, under this, it further instructs the Rules Committee that we are going to go back to having an election day and not an election month, and it instructs the Rules Committee to provide the provisions to enforce that.

Now, I did not just pull this bill yesterday out of my rectum, though I will concede sometimes I do my best thinking there.

I have been talking about this bill for a month, so it should come as no surprise. Now, some say it can't be done under the Budget Act and under the Byrd rule and reconciliation, and you know what? They may be right.

But you know what else? They can't predict the future. They are not clairvoyant. They have to wait on the future like the rest of us.

I hope you won't vote against this bill just because President Trump has talked about it, this amendment, rather. If you think this is just a Republican issue, then you are not revolving in the same direction as planet Earth.

There are plenty of Democrats and plenty of Independents that are worried about the integrity of our elections, and this would allow the Rules Committee to try to resolve some of their concerns.

I trust the Rules Committee; there is not a dummy on there. There are plenty of Republicans and plenty of Democrats. There are a lot of smart lawyers in the U.S. Senate, but they are not the only smart lawyers in America. And, in fact, believe it or not, there are some lawyers not in the Senate who are smarter than we are, and I trust the Rules Committee to go find them and try to craft a bill to fit within reconciliation, working with our esteemed Parliamentarian.

Last two points: If this amendment passes, and I hope it will, the Rules Committee is going to have to saddle up and ride. I am asking them to do it within weeks, days, if possible. That is probably too ambitious. If they have to work weekends, I will stay here with them. Fine, do what you think is right. Don't vote against this just because President Trump has talked about it. Follow your heart. Take your brain with you.

I respect everybody in this body. Everybody. If you vote against this bill, I

am not going to say a word, and I am sure as hell not going to go on social media and call you an ignorant slut. That is not the way I roll, unless I am pushed too far.

I yield back.

Madam President, we will never know until we try.

Pursuant to section 904, with respect to my colleague, I move to waive, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Vote on Motion

Mr. President, I rise today because our Republican colleagues have introduced a new budget resolution to yet again utilize a special process called reconciliation. We just voted a short while ago on a motion to proceed. That motion to proceed succeeded along purely party lines, and that takes us into the realm of this special device called reconciliation.

Just 10 months ago, we already had a reconciliation bill that is sometimes called H.R. 1. President Trump called it the One Big Beautiful Bill, but much of America has a different name for it. They call it the Big Ugly Betrayal. Why? Because it betrayed families in America to fund tax breaks for billionaires, and in the process, it added to our national debt. It slashed $1 trillion from healthcare programs for families. It kicked 15 million Americans off of their health insurance. It took food off the plates of more than 3 million families with children. Why? To give away the Treasury to the richest Americans. What other phrase could possibly describe this other than ``families lose, and billionaires win''?

But it isn't just today's families who lose from that bill; it is the families of the next generation because that bill added, according to the Congressional Budget Office's independent, nonpartisan estimate, $30 trillion to our national debt over 30 years, and that is only if their inflation or interest rates are accurate. They note that, in general, their assumption was that interest would not go above 4 percent, but at 1 percent higher, that $30 trillion in debt for the next generation, which essentially doubles our national debt, would instead be adding an additional $50 trillion.

I am sharing this because this bill--this second reconciliation bill during the Trump administration--builds on the foundation of the first. The first one was ``families lose, and billionaires win,'' but could this bill possibly be different? Not only is this bill not different, but its entire existence involves a betrayal of this Senate Chamber because the bill is based on a provision in budget law from 1974, the Budget and Impoundment Control Act.

Every single Senator who voted on that bill voted in favor of it-- Democrats and Republicans together--because the complete agreement was that it would be used only to decrease the deficit, and every single Member thought we needed to have an instrument to control the deficit.

OK. Fine. Well and good. That was in 1974. But in 1996, Republicans decided they wanted to give away even more treasure to the richest Americans, so they said: The problem is we can't do that because it increases the deficit rather than decreases the deficit. There isn't a pathway to do it because we know we can't get 60 votes to close debate on giving away the Treasury to the richest Americans.

So the then-leader, Robert Dole of Kansas, proceeded to appoint a Parliamentarian who had worked for him and who had also been around in 1974 and understood that the entire reconciliation was about reducing the deficit, and the result was a ruling that that core premise could be stood on its head. You could use reconciliation not to decrease deficits but to increase them. It meant you could do a massive tax bill giveaway to the richest Americans. That is at the foundation for both of the Bush tax cuts--or tax giveaways to the rich, maybe, to more accurately describe it--and to a similar bill that was done last year and to a similar bill that was done in the first Trump administration.

So here we are. In addition to impacting tax legislation, this change saying that this special device that everyone agreed was only for decreasing the deficit could be used to increase the deficit meant that it could also be used in the fashion that it is being presented by my Republican colleagues today.

So the pillars of that initial act are all being violated--the pillar that in the first 10 years, there could be no net deficit; that after the first 10 years, there could be no deficit in any individual account in any individual year; that the budget had to be based on real numbers, not phony numbers; and that the real numbers would come from an independent Agency set up by the bill at the Congressional Budget Office. But that bill last year, the ``Big Ugly Betrayal'' bill, toppled all of those pillars--immediate deficits, long-term deficits and long-term debt, using fake numbers on the analysis, all of it--so there is no foundation for accountability left.

That is the background for what brings us to today and to the vote that was just held in which the majority party said: We are again going to present a bill that increases the deficit and increases debt.

Wow. I must say this is not the way I would like to be celebrating our 250th anniversary. Wouldn't it be great if, on a bipartisan basis, we restored accountability to our national budget? Wouldn't that be a way to celebrate this anniversary and help create a foundation for the next generation to thrive rather than shortchanging the children of today, who will be adults in the near future, and shortchanging the children of the children of today? But there we are. Instead, the majority party has decided to celebrate our 250th anniversary by--well, by expanding secret police in America, because that is what the bill is all about that they have presented.

We know what the foundations are for families to thrive. It is healthcare. It is housing. It is education. It is good-paying jobs. We know that you also need investments in infrastructure in order to make all of that happen.

So will this bill that the majority just presented address the issues families are facing?

Will it be designed to bring down the cost of groceries? No, it will not.

Will it be designed to bring down the cost of healthcare, perhaps by restoring the tax credits that their last bill took away from millions of families? No, it will not.

Will it be designed to bring down gas prices, which are more than $1 higher than before the war was launched on Iran? In my State of Oregon, a gallon of gas is over $5 and a gallon of diesel is over $6. This is the Bush tax on ordinary families. Was it designed to bring that down? No.

How about to expand nutrition assistance--nutrition that was savaged in the ``Big Ugly Bill'' 10 months ago? Does this bill remedy that to help the children of America get enough to eat so they can actually study when they are in school? No, it does not.

Does it address the mass shortage in housing that has resulted in really high rents? No, it doesn't help that either.

How about investing in first-time home ownership to help restore the dream of home ownership because that dream has been dying? No, it doesn't address that either.

How about helping the United States prepare for unexpected disasters--wildfires? floods? hurricanes? No, it doesn't do that.

Does it, perhaps, reduce our debt? No, quite the opposite. It is unpaid for, and it increases our debt.

So nothing to help working families; nothing to improve affordability--a major crisis across this country; nothing to reduce the deficit and debt.

Instead, this bill is ICE and CBP--Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection--up to $140 billion. There is a set of instructions being sent to committee, and each committee is being told: You can spend up to $70 billion. Two committees. Seventy billion. That is up to $140 billion.

But when I say that this bill is all about funding ICE and CBP, you might say: Wait, didn't we do that 10 months ago? Didn't Republicans, on party line, pass a bill to give massive amounts of money to ICE and CBP just 10 months ago? And your memory would be correct.

This is the budget for ICE, and you can see that it increased modestly from 2017 to 2024, but look at this--an additional $75 billion, roughly equal to seven times its normal annual appropriation.

So it funded also CBP in a very similar fashion--only gave an extra 65 billion to CBP. So 75 billion to ICE; 65 billion to Customs and Border Protection. Massive, mega increase in expanding Agencies that have been empowered by this administration to operate like secret police.

So instead of this bill being used to address the concerns of families across America, this bill is being used to expand the operations of Trump's secret police. That is what this bill is.

Now, of this massive amount of money that was provided 10 months ago, how much has been spent? Now, you would assume, because Republicans are coming back and saying: This is a top priority in America, that that money--that extra 75 billion for ICE and 65 billion for Customs and Border Protection--must have been spent.

Well, now, the Office of Management and Budget, which is in the executive branch--it is run by Mr. Russell Vought, who was the chief architect of Project 2025 aimed at creating an authoritarian state-- they issue a report monthly. It is called monthly Report on Budget Execution. And the forms, for those of you who want the details, are called SF-133.

We looked at those forms for this last month, and what those forms say is that 63 billion of the ICE spending has not been obligated yet. It is not even under contract. It isn't that it hasn't gone out the door; it is not even under contract. And of the 65 billion for CBP, 40 billion is not yet obligated.

That means $103 billion of the money that Republicans gave to expand ICE and CBP is still available. So why the hell is the top priority in America getting another $70 to $140 billion for these two Agencies, as opposed to addressing all the significant national challenges that we have--all of the challenges that families have as they are pressed to the wall by the cost of fuel and the cost of healthcare and the cost of housing and the cost of medicine? Why isn't this bill addressing any of that? And instead it is providing $70 to $140 billion more for two Agencies that still are sitting on top of over $100 billion from last year's bill.

I noted that the goal of this bill is to expand the secret police in America. Those are strong words because ICE and CBP were not secret police before this administration, but this administration changed their conduct.

They turned them into a force that operates in secret and is terrorizing communities across this country--operating in secret wearing masks, operating in secret in uniforms without identification, operating in secret in vehicles that are unmarked and sometimes have had their license plates removed to make them as untraceable as possible, operating without warrants and crashing through people's doors, stopping citizens without cause--pulling their weapons, bashing out their windows, and dragging people out of their cars.

These are the tactics of secret police around the world, and they are happening right here in America, right now.

And in that cultivated manner of thuggery, they are not just pulling out their weapons; they are pulling the triggers. Ruben Ray Martinez-- shot dead. Renee Nicole Good--shot dead. Alex Pretti--shot dead.

The day after Renee and Alex were shot dead in Minnesota, two individuals were shot sitting in their car just blocks from my house in Oregon. We didn't know that they were mortally injured because the administration wouldn't release any information.

Thankfully, they did not die. The woman, on that occasion, was shot through the chest. The man was shot through the arm--sitting in their car just one day after Renee and Alex were shot in their car.

It is certainly clear that what these two Agencies need is not more money. They are sitting on $100 billion-plus in unobligated funds. What they need is more accountability. That bill should be on the Senate floor--the one that says no face masks, no uniforms without ID, no vans without license plates or ID, no breaking down doors without warrants, no invading sensitive places like hospitals and churches and synagogues and mosques and daycares. That is the bill.

What we need now is not more money. It is more accountability-- standard practices for the way public officials operate in a democratic republic. Instead, we now have standard practice of this administration for how secret police operate under an authoritarian organization.

My colleagues across the aisle have said: Well, we need to fund these organizations because they aren't funded. Well, clearly, if they still have $100 billion sitting in the bank, sitting in their accounts with the government, they are funded.

And as for the rest of Homeland Security, that is not funded because the House of Representatives killed the bill. In that case, I can thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who came together and said: Homeland Security isn't just about ICE and CBP. It is also about FEMA-- emergency management. It is also about TSA that provides support to get us through the airport. It is also about Cybersecurity, which is important. It is also about the Coast Guard. And the Coast Guard is so beloved in my home State of Oregon, as it is, I imagine, in every coastal city.

And so every single Senator said: Yes, fund those four Agencies while we continue to debate both ICE and Customs and Border Protection. We all agreed. In fact, the Speaker of the House agreed and said send the bill over. And then it got over there, and he got cold feet.

He got cold feet because he didn't have the support of President Trump, and he didn't have support of some Members of the most right- leaning wing of the Republican Party. That was the moment that Trump could have instantly made one phone call and that bill would have passed.

So if they are not funded, it is because the President chose to keep them unfunded, and the House of Representatives chose to keep those additional Agencies--FEMA, TSA, Cybersecurity, and Coast Guard-- unfunded.

In addition, this bill doesn't just provide 1 year of funding. It says: Fund them--that is, ICE and CBP--this additional funding on top of the $100 billion they still have--fund them for another 3 years.

Now, I would like to just remind my colleagues how extraordinary this is. Reconciliation was never supposed to be about spending money. It was supposed to be about deficit reduction, but now, we are taking a bill that was in the regular appropriations process and funding two Agencies for 3 years--that is their plan. And that is simply wrong because it means we are saying that in this--the start of the second year of the Trump administration--they are going to fund these Agencies through Trump's entire administration.

You know where this leads. There will be another administration in the future, and they will say in the first year of the administration: Fund all 4 years. Hell, fund 5 years--1 year into my successor--fund that. What does that strip away? It strips away the accountability involved in the budget process.

Further, going down the road, we are creating a vortex of unaccountable

spending and debt and a failure--a failure--to restrain this type of massive misspending of American money. It is our treasure. Our treasure is being spent, not for the things that Americans are concerned about but for doubling down on the expansion of Trump's secret police.

This vision of families lose and billionaires win began with Trump's inaugural speech. He didn't line up the champions for families behind him. There was no healthcare champion. There was no housing champion. There was no education champion. There was no champion for infrastructure in America. But there was a line of billionaires standing right behind the President. That is what this administration has been about: families lose and billionaires win.

Well, there is a better vision for our Nation, and that better vision is families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share. That is a vision--in a government by and for the people--that all 100 Senators should be supporting: Families thrive, and the rich and well-off pay their fair share.

Let's work toward that vision--not just in this year or in the year to come but for the next generation and the generation that follows.

Mr. President, we are here tonight because our Republican colleagues have introduced a budget resolution. It is a budget resolution that unlocks the reconciliation process.

But before we examine this next reconciliation bill, let's recognize that it has been just 10 months since we passed the last one. That was the one that was known as H.R. 1, or in Trump lingo: One Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, most of the Nation called it ``One Big Ugly Betrayal'' because that was a more accurate describer of what it did to families across our Nation.

It slashed a trillion dollars from healthcare programs--a trillion dollars from healthcare programs--for families. It kicked 15 million Americans off health insurance. That certainly doesn't help American families.

It took food off the plates of more than 3 million families with kids. You know, kids can't really do well in school if they are hungry; making them deliberately hungry--what were you thinking?

What were you thinking in destroying healthcare by a trillion dollars for 15 million Americans, taking food off the plates of 3 million families with kids, and to do it to fund tax breaks for billionaires? Wow. That is all about government by and for the powerful.

But you know why I love this country? Because it is all about government by and for the people. That is the vision our Nation was founded on. That is the beauty of a democratic republic.

But what did we get last year? We got the opposite. We got the opposite--the type of policy that comes out of a strongman state, the type of policy that comes out when the powerful exercise tyranny over the people--the type of tyranny our Founders revolted against when they created our Nation. That is what we saw 10 months ago: families lose and billionaires won.

And that is not all that bill did. It also gave 65 billion to Customs and Border Protection and 75 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. And that amount of money was about seven times a normal annual appropriation.

We can see here in this chart 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, all less than 10 billion; 2025, and there we are. So much more. The annual appropriation, plus this extra for ICE of an additional $75 billion.

And anyone looking at the chart goes: Wow. They already prefunded, for multiple years, ICE. They did exactly the same thing for Customs and Border Protection--CBP.

So we heard a few moments ago from my colleague at the head of the Budget Committee that ICE is out of money. Oh, really? Not true. That CBP is out of money. Not true.

In fact, the President's Office of Management and Budget puts out a monthly report, so go look it up yourself. They are sitting on $103 billion of unobligated funds.

So they already have funds for this year and next year and the year after. So the entire premise of this bill is completely false-- completely false. They don't need more money. What they do need are reforms about their conduct across America because they have been terrorizing our communities across our country because this administration said: No longer will you use

the standard practices of ordinary enforcement that have been the standard in our Republic and democratic republics across the land. Instead, we are going to start violating those standards. We are going to put on face masks. We are going to rip the ID off the uniform so you can't tell who we are. We are going to use vans that have no label on them, and we are going to sometimes even strip the license plate off in order to disguise who we are, not because we are under cover but because we don't want people to be able to say: Can you believe what happened when those CBP agents came to town or those ICE agents came to town? Hard to say that when they are not identified.

But those standards exist because there is accountability to the citizens of the country. Again, government by and for the people, not by and for the powerful.

There are things called civil rights that this administration has forgotten about. They proceeded to say: We don't need warrants to break into people's homes. Are you kidding me? Every sixth grader in America has heard about the Bill of Rights and that we have the sanctity of our homes, and the government can't break in without a warrant. But this majority party, led by Trump, said: Yes, you can. Forget the Bill of Rights. Forget the Fourth Amendment.

And then when we detain people, you have another right, and that is to contact a lawyer. But we are going to detain you and not let you contact a lawyer. We are going to detain you and not let you contact family.

And when family says: Where did my family member go that you-all swept off the street? We are going say: We don't know. We moved them. We don't know where. That is not conduct acceptable in a democratic republic with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.

Well, since ICE and CBP have already been prefunded, since they are sitting on $103 billion of unobligated funds, what is this all about? It is about the majority saying: We want to drive home the point that we are just fine with the way ICE is conducting themselves. We are so fine that we won't reform any of those violations of civil rights or constitutional rights in order to have a normal budget process regarding CBP or regarding ICE.

Well, if we are going to have a special reconciliation process when ICE and CBP have already been prefunded, how about we actually address issues that America cares about because that extra money isn't going to help with the border because they are already funded.

It isn't going to help improve security because they are already funded.

But you know what is not adequately funded? Healthcare is not adequately funded. There isn't a dime in this bill for healthcare. That is important to the American people.

There is not a dime in this bill to help with the rising grocery prices that have gone up, up, up under Trump's stewardship--a whole lot of it impacted by his tariffs, which were themselves unconstitutional.

There is not a dime in this bill to address the gas prices, which are over $5 a gallon in my State, and diesel is over $6 a gallon. Go talk to a farmer across America and see if they are happy and ask yourselves: If we are doing a special budget process, why not address some help to our farmers who are impacted not just by the high cost of diesel for their tractors, they are being extraordinarily impacted by the tariffs as well. Why not help them?

Why not reduce the debt? This bill increases the debt. It is unpaid for just like the Republican war in Afghanistan was unpaid for, the Republican war in Iraq, going after nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, was unpaid for. They launched wars that undermine our security and cost the American Treasury $8 trillion of debt because they wouldn't pay for it, and now that debt is coming home to roost. And it means more interest payments, and it means paying higher interest. It means less money for those fundamentals for families, like healthcare and housing and education--the foundations for families to thrive.

So there is not a dime for working families, not a dime to improve affordability, not a dime to reduce a deficit or the debt; but there is, in this bill, the instructions to two committees to spend up to $70 billion apiece.

Now, my colleague clarified that they are not really going to ask for $140 billion but, more likely, $70 billion. OK. Well, $70 billion, that is a lot of money. What could $70 billion buy for America's families? Well, it could, every year for 3 years, pay the entire salary of 330,000 teachers across America. Wow. What an impact that would have on classroom size in our Nation--a real investment in our children for the next generation. Or that same $70 billion could hire 200,000 police officers every year for 3 years. What an investment in public safety for communities across this Nation. Or--we have been watching the dream of home ownership die. Back in 2020, the median age for buying a first home was about 33 years of age. Six years later, the median age for buying a home: 40 years. In 5 years, the median age has gone up 7 years because nobody is able to buy a home in America--in part because private equity is buying up all the houses and driving up the prices, and because our economy for the rich billionaires is not providing the type of wages for middle-class America it provided before.

So how about downpayment assistance to help people become homeowners? That same $70 billion, that would provide 7 million American families with a $10,000 downpayment grant to help them become a homeowner.

So 330,000 teachers a year for 3 years, 200,000 police officers a year for 3 years, 7 million families getting $10,000 downpayment grants. I make these examples to point out how large this sum is and how much need there is in America for us actually to invest in families--not tax breaks for billionaires but in families, in housing, in healthcare, in public safety, in education.

That bill 10 months ago--that bill was families lose, billionaires win. Families lost healthcare. They lost nutrition. Billionaires got massive tax breaks. And to help fund those tax breaks for the billionaires, their bill added--get this--$30 trillion to the national debt over the next 30 years. And if interest rates are 1 percent higher than the interest rate used in the Congressional Budget Office's model, it is $50 trillion in additional debt over the next 30 years.

So bankrupting America, failing to invest in families, going through this charade for two organizations that are already sitting on $103 billion and obviously pre-funded, that is not about building a better America. That is about families lose and billionaires win. That is about undermining the future for the next generation rather than building a better future for the next generation.

There is a better vision for America than families lose and billionaires win. It is families thrive; and billionaires, they pay their fair share. Families thrive; billionaires pay their fair share. Investing in education helps families thrive. Investing in healthcare helps families thrive. Investing in housing and home ownership helps families thrive. Investing in infrastructure helps build the physical infrastructure for the next generation.

But this bill says to hell with all of that; we are going to, instead, create this false story about unfunded Agencies that are already sitting on $103 billion.

Let's reject this vision that is designed for families lose and billionaires win and instead adopt the vision of families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, time to get this show on the road, so I yield back all remaining time on the Democratic side.

Mr. President, my colleague from Kentucky is right that this bill is unfunded, that it adds to the deficit and adds to the debt. And maybe the best way to address that is not to send $70 billion to two Agencies that are sitting on top of $103 billion right now of unobligated funds. They couldn't even get started spending that massive amount from H.R. 1 last year.

But blindly slashing away at scientific research when China is producing four times the patents that we are producing each year, blindly slashing away at Pell grants, which, under this proposal, would be equal to 2 million individual students losing their Pell grants-- that is the type of detailed work that needs to be done in the authorizing committees and in the Appropriations Committee. This slash- and-hack strategy is way off base.

Mr. President, the bill cuts $16 billion from education. It doesn't say specifically where, but that is a good example of the type of thing that could happen.

Vote on Amendment No. 5378

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 5235 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, in the State of the Union, President Trump has told the story of Rachel Wiggins who had lost out to private equity 20 times in trying to buy a house.

After all, it is very hard to compete against an all-cash offer, fast closing, no inspection. The President said: I am asking Congress to act because we want homes for people, not corporations.

And the Senate did act, and they included in a bill--the ROAD to Housing Act--an element--and my compliments to my colleague from Ohio and my colleague from Massachusetts who worked together to get the element into that bill.

But right now down the hall, private equity is lobbying like hell to make sure that element never passes. We have an opportunity tonight to send a message that we agree with the President, that we have a challenge in home ownership because home ownership is dying, and one of the factors is private equity buying up the homes.

Mr. President, let's pass this amendment and restore home ownership.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Vote on Amendment No. 5235

Mr. President. I would like to thank the Democratic staff of the Senate Budget Committee for all their hard work on this resolution, both through extensive preparation and diligent staff work during floor consideration. Staff includes: Ben Ward, Mike Jones, Jill Harrelson, Josh Smith, Tyler Evilsizer, Melissa Kaplan-Pistiner, Misha Rafiq, Brian Lyons, Anna Barnes, Connor Jennings, Ethan Rosenkranz, Andrew Cobian, Anirudh Srirangam, Fiona Forrester, Lauran Pauley, Hilary Gelfond-Gross, Madilyn Shirley, John Bratton, and Mina Shahinfar.