A joint resolution terminating the national emergency declared to impose global tariffs.

Mr. President, yesterday marked 100 days since Donald Trump was sworn in as President. It happened right down that hallway. He promised a golden age for America. He has not delivered that golden age. In fact, in that 100 days, all he has delivered is chaos and destruction.

Consumer confidence is plummeting, and today we learned that our economy is shrinking. This is all a totally self-inflicted, Trump- inflicted wound on America and American families.

That is here at home. On the world stage, Candidate Trump promised to be the great peacemaker, to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza on day one, but he has nothing to show for that other than distrust from our allies and smiles from our adversaries. He has thrown the Ukrainian people under the bus, and in Gaza, the hostages have not been released, and we are witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Over the last 100 days, Donald Trump has embarked on a lawbreaking spree that has torn up our Constitution, torn apart our government, and torn down our economy.

Over 200 lawsuits have been filed in Federal courts around the country because we are watching this President break laws on every front, on everything from his illegal freezing and impoundments of taxpayer funds for important public programs that benefit communities all over the country, to his illegal firing of patriotic Federal employees, including many veterans who provide critical public services, to letting Elon Musk loose on Federal Government programs with a chain saw--not to make government more efficient but to rig government for the already rich and powerful like Elon Musk at the expense of everybody else.

President Trump has also been abusing his authority to create tariff chaos that has sent consumer confidence plummeting, badly damaging our economy. He is violating the First Amendment by cracking down on students at colleges and universities for their exercise of free speech and right to assemble and also violating another vital constitutional provision: the constitutional right to due process for those who live in America.

It is a staggering amount of lawbreaking in just 100 days. That is why all of us should fight back--in the courts, in this Congress, and in communities all over America.

We know that the American people don't like what they are seeing, what they are experiencing. They are rising up in communities all over America to voice their disapproval with President Trump's performance. They are giving him a big fat F for the first 100 days--total, miserable, failure.

The only people who don't seem to get it are some of our Republican colleagues here in the Congress who apparently live in constant fear of being on the wrong end of a tweet from Donald Trump or Elon Musk and want to look the other way in the face of this massive lawbreaking and ripping up of the Constitution.

So I want to take a little inventory, just a small sampling of the actions of this lawless President. I want to cover four categories: his violations of constitutional due process rights; his violation of First Amendment rights; his illegal withholding and impoundment and freezing of public funds that benefit communities all over America; and fourth, exceeding his authorities, claiming emergency powers that he doesn't have in the area of tariffs, making sham claims to justify his tariff chaos that is sabotaging our economy as we speak.

I want to start with Trump's violations of the constitutional right of due process--a bedrock American principle.

As we speak, President Trump is violating the due process of many, many individuals, including the rights of a man by the name of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was snatched off the streets of Maryland and illegally shipped to one of the most notorious prisons in Latin America, called CECOT. As I have repeatedly said, this case is not about one man alone. It is about all of us. I am not vouching for Mr. Abrego Garcia, but I am vouching for his constitutional right to due process--because, if Donald Trump can ignore court orders and trample over the rights of one man, he threatens the rights of everyone who lives in the United States of America.

Mr. Abrego Garcia had legal status in the United States. He lived in Maryland with his family. He had a work permit. He was an apprentice with the sheet metal workers, SMART Local 100, where he worked full- time to help support his family. He was driving in his car with his 5- year-old autistic son when he was pulled over by Federal agents. He was taken to some facility in Baltimore where he asked to make a phone call to let folks know what was happening. He was denied the opportunity to make that phone call.

He was then shipped to the State of Texas. From there, his feet were shackled. He was handcuffed. He was put in a plane where he couldn't see out the windows, and he didn't know where he was going, and he landed in El Salvador and was taken to one of the most notorious prisons in our hemisphere, a place reserved for the worst of the worst, for terrorists.

Now here is the thing: There was a standing court order not to deport him to El Salvador because doing so could put his life in jeopardy from gangs. Indeed, the Trump administration admitted in Federal court that Abrego Garcia was wrongfully seized and shipped to this prison in El Salvador. But instead of fixing the problem they admitted to in court, what did they do? They punished the lawyer who told the truth in court.

And now the Trump administration is ignoring orders from the Federal district court, the Fourth District Court of Appeals, and a 9-to- nothing order from the Supreme Court. We don't get 9-to-nothing decisions out of the Supreme Court very often. But that is what all those courts ordered the Trump administration to do with respect to facilitating the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia, to facilitate his return.

This is not just trampling over his rights. And, again, I want to emphasize: If you allow the President to trample over the rights of one person, you do threaten the rights of everybody who lives in America.

That is why yesterday I wrote to President Trump about this case, and I am going to read that letter to the Senate so no one can say they don't know what is going on in this matter.

Here is what I wrote in that letter:

Dear President Trump,

I read with great interest your interview with Time

Magazine regarding the Supreme Court's 9-0 decision ordering

you and your Administration to ``facilitate'' the return of

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who your lawyers admitted in federal

court was wrongfully seized and deported to prison in El

Salvador. You conceded in that interview--

This is the interview he had with Time magazine just a short while ago.

You conceded in that interview that you have not asked

President Bukele--

That is the President of El Salvador--

to return him. You also said, regarding this case, that you

``don't make that decision'' because your lawyers do. Your

comments and the actions of your Administration clearly

demonstrate your failure to comply with court orders as you

continue to violate Mr. Abrego Garcia's constitutional and

due process rights--and when you deny the due process rights

of one person, you threaten them for everyone in America. The

American public knows this. Recent polling shows that a

majority of Americans reject your trampling over

constitutional rights in this case.

I went on to write this:

During my visit to El Salvador, I had the opportunity to

meet with [the] Vice President. . . . My conversation with

him revealed the extent to which you and your Administration

are violating the orders of the federal courts and the

Constitution of the United States. Our discussion--

Again, referring to my discussion with the Vice President of El Salvador--

showed that your Administration is doing nothing to comply

with and implement the Supreme Court order to ``facilitate''

Mr. Abrego Garcia's return to the United States and revealed

that the Government of El Salvador is holding him solely at

the request of your Administration and, specifically, because

you are paying them to imprison him.

While I had expected a private meeting with Vice President

Ulloa, when I arrived at his office there were several

cameras rolling--

I think they were probably his own private cameras. I don't know, but they were rolling to record the conversation.

[So] I agreed to have our conversation on the record.

And then I write:

[Mr. President,] I want to report some important details of

our [conversation].

Vice President . . . told me that, ``El Salvador is not

able to take any action regarding the case because the case

is in the U.S. and usually we do not express any opinion on

domestic affairs.''

He went on to say--

I quoted him again--

I mean, the ball is in your court.

Meaning the ball is in America's court, and he used that expression multiple times during our conversation.

I went on to tell President Trump that the Vice President of El Salvador:

. . . made clear that ``once the case will be resolved

definitely and there will be clear instruction regarding this

case . . . El Salvador's government will apply [our]

principles . . . of course we will act accordingly.'' He

indicated that, ``at this current moment we cannot take any

actions because the case is still in the United States'

situation.'' He reinforced this point throughout our

conversation, saying the ``bottom line is this is an issue

that has to be solved in the United States. We have not

expressed, we cannot express any opinion on that case,

because it is up to you.''

Again, this is what the Vice President of El Salvador told me and what I reported to President Trump in this letter.

I went on in my letter to President Trump to say:

All of this makes crystal clear that, even though your

Administration's lawyers admitted in federal court that Mr.

Abrego Garcia was wrongfully detained in Maryland and sent to

prison in El Salvador and despite the Supreme Court's order

to ``facilitate'' his return, your Administration has not

lifted a finger to comply with the court order. As [the] Vice

President. . . . indicated, ``the ball is in your court.''

When I asked--

And I am continuing to report this to the President of the United States.

When I asked [the] Vice President. . . . whether El

Salvador had any evidence that Mr. Abrego Garcia had

committed a crime, his response was, ``how can I have it?''

He said the Government of El Salvador does not ``qualify

those persons who are there, we just take them.'' I asked if

El Salvador is imprisoning Mr. Abrego Garcia simply because

the United States is paying to keep him and others there. His

response was, ``exactly, that's it.'' He also said, ``I mean,

if the person that you send is not a criminal, is not

whatever, I mean it is up to you, that's what I'm saying. I

don't want to express any opinion . . . I think it is up to

you . . . The ball is in your court.''

And the Vice President of El Salvador ``made it clear that they did not review the file of Mr. Abrego Garcia.''

He said, ``we have a deal with the U.S. government. They

send people. We host them. They pay. And that's it.''

When I asked the Vice President why El Salvador cannot

release Mr. Abrego Garcia from prison when the U.S.

government conceded in court that he was wrongfully

abducted--and whether he is being charged under El Salvador's

law--he responded, ``What is your recommendation to El

Salvador's government? We can take him to the airport and ask

an airline to take him to the States? Are you saying the

airline would take a person without a passport? What kind of

visa should we carry?''

He went on to say--this is the Vice President of El Salvador:

President Bukele said we cannot smuggle a person to the

United States. Because if we send a person without a visa,

tourist visa, working visa, student visa, what kind of reason

can we call to get legally into the United States?''

Regarding his papers, he asked, ``Who will provide that? We

don't have it.''

So I continued to report on this conversation in my letter to President Trump, and I said:

I repeatedly pointed out that neither I nor anyone else was

asking El Salvador to ``smuggle'' Mr. Abrego Garcia back into

the United States. That argument is, of course, a red

herring. I repeatedly pointed out that Attorney General Bondi

had said, when President Bukele was in the Oval Office with

you--

Referring to the President of the United States--

that the U.S. would send a plane to pick up Mr. Abrego

Garcia. So, I was not asking the Government of El Salvador to

``smuggle'' him into the United States, only to release him

from prison.

And I pointed out to President Trump that ``Your Administration illegally took Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in a plane, and Attorney General Bondi has said the United States could send a plane to pick him up. And the U.S. government can certainly provide him with the papers necessary to return.''

I went on in my letter to President Trump to say this:

My conversation with [the] Vice President. . . . clearly

demonstrates that the Government of El Salvador has no

independent legal basis for imprisoning Mr. Abrego Garcia;

that, as they readily concede, the only reason for keeping

him in prison is that they entered into an agreement with

your Administration to be paid by the United States. This

also reveals that your Administration could easily facilitate

his release by letting El Salvador know that--given his

wrongful detention--they are not contractually bound to

continue imprisoning Mr. Abrego Garcia. My conversation with

Vice President Ulloa shows that your Administration's claim

that El Salvador is exercising its ``sovereign'' decision to

continue to hold Mr. Abrego Garcia is a farce. The Government

of El Salvador is imprisoning him because your Administration

is paying them to do so and they claim to be contractually

obligated. Obviously, your Administration could say El

Salvador was no longer contractually obligated to imprison

Mr. Abrego Garcia. Then El Salvador can release him, and

Attorney General Bondi can, as promised, send the plane.

I went on to write to President Trump that:

It is outrageous that Mr. Abrego Garcia and his family have

been forced to suffer through this trauma because your

Administration has, to date, refused to follow the

requirements of the Constitution and the orders of the

federal courts. Instead of fixing the egregious

``administrative error'' that the Administration conceded has

wrongfully deposited Mr. Abrego Garcia in a prison in El

Salvador, your Administration chose to attack and punish the

lawyer who told the court the truth. That is shameful.

I went on to write to the President--I think this is important.

It is also shameful that you and your Administration

continue to try to change the subject in this case. You--

Referring to President Trump--

continue to put out information on social media asserting

that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 and Vice President

Vance falsely asserted that he has been convicted of crimes

in the United States. Yet the federal district court judge in

this case said your Administration had presented the court

with ``no evidence linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or to any

terrorist activity.'' So your Administration should put up or

shut up in court. I am not vouching for the man, Kilmar

Abrego Garcia, I am vouching for his rights.

I am going to take a little departure here. I don't know if my colleagues witnessed the interview that President Trump had with an ABC reporter, Mr. Moran, yesterday, but it is all over social media because it turned out that, you know, President Trump had taken a picture of what was Abrego Garcia's fingers, and he had superimposed--or someone in the administration put an ``MS-13,'' written that on. That had been photoshopped or otherwise falsely there. Apparently, no one informed the President of this, or he just decided to pretend he didn't know.

In this interview, he said: He had MS-13 on his knuckles, tattooed. The reporter said: That was photoshopped. And Trump's response was to the reporter: Terry, they are giving you a big break of a lifetime. I picked you, but you are not being very nice.

Well, my point here, again, is whatever evidence there may be, the proper form to submit it is in the courts of the United States. And at least today, judges in those cases have made clear that the declaration has not relied on such evidence.

I went on in my letter to President Trump to say this:

It is also dangerous for you to suggest that we cannot

fight gang violence without trampling over constitutional

rights. More than two decades ago [I pointed out to him] I

helped establish a regional anti-gang task force to combat

MS-13 and other gang violence in the Maryland-Virginia-D.C.

area. We have made substantial progress in this fight, but

there is more that can be done. But that is not what you and

your Administration are doing. You are engaged in gross

violations of the Constitution and due process rights.

I then, in this letter, cite Judge Harvie Wilkinson, who wrote on behalf of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit the following. I am going to quote him, and I have this in my letter to President Trump:

It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of

the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The

government is asserting a right to stash away residents of

this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due

process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.

Further, it claims in essence that because it has [already]

rid itself of custody there is nothing [else] that can be

done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the

intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from

courthouses still hold dear.

I should point out that Judge Wilkinson was a Reagan administration appointee and this was a unanimous opinion of the three-court panel.

I went on in my letter to President Trump to say:

The Fourth Circuit got to the heart of the case. Kilmar

Abrego Garcia was snatched from his car while he was driving

in Maryland with his five-year-old autistic son, then

illegally stashed away in a prison in El Salvador. His wife,

his mother, and his brother have been unable to communicate

with him in any way. He has a work permit and his fellow

sheet metal workers have been organizing to bring him back

[home], as have thousands of Americans. His constitutional

rights must be respected.

I close with this paragraph in my letter to the President:

This case is not about Kilmar alone. It is about everyone

in America. While Mr. Abrego Garcia is at the center of this

case, its consequences impact the due process rights of

everyone who lives in America. If your Administration can

strip away the constitutional rights of one man in defiance

of court orders, it can do it to all of us. I will continue

to fight to defend the Constitution and due process rights of

all who live in America.

That was my letter to President Trump. I haven't heard anything back from them, and they continue to violate the Supreme Court orders.

You know, colleagues, Members can look the other way but cannot deny the fact that this is happening as we speak today. I would urge every Senator to recognize the threat to everybody's rights under the Constitution.

Now I want to turn to another area of lawbreaking--constitutional violations being committed by the Trump administration because not only are they violating the due process clause of the Constitution in the Abrego Garcia case and others, but they are also tearing up the First Amendment and trampling over free speech rights of individuals in America, especially students on college and university campuses but many others as well.

The Trump administration and Secretary Rubio apparently think the First Amendment is like an a la carte menu. In other words, they seem to believe that the U.S. government can punish those who engage in speech that they don't like. That is not how it works. They don't get to cherry-pick speech under the First Amendment and use governmental power, state power, to sanction those who disagree with their points of view.

But that is exactly what they are doing in cases like those of Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, and Mohsen Mahdawi. Mohsen Mahdawi was illegally snatched as he was taking his citizenship test in the State of Vermont.

I want to read one of the questions that is on the U.S. citizenship test. It is important that everybody recognize what we ask those who are working to become citizens to understand. Question 6 on the citizenship test reads:

What is one right or freedom from the First Amendment?

And under it there are a number of things, but the first one on there is speech. The second one on there is assembly--speech and assembly. I think members of the Trump administration need to take a refresher course, the kind we ask citizens to take in this country because, apparently, President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary Rubio, and others would like to cross that question right off the citizenship test.

We observed recently, when Vice President Vance took an overseas trip, that he lectured some of our European allies like the UK and Germany about freedom of speech. He said that they had too many limits on freedom of speech; that they were curtailing freedom of speech for people who lived in their countries, but here at home, they are tearing up the First Amendment of the Constitution. Apparently, here at home for the Trump administration, freedom of speech exists only for those who agree with their point of view.

Mr. President, you know that our colleague who served with us, Senator Rubio, used to take to this Senate floor regularly to talk about an American foreign policy based on democracy, based on human rights, based on freedom of religion, and, yes, based on freedom of speech and suppression around the world, telling other countries that it was wrong to have the governments lock them up for expressing their points of view. And yet now in their home, Secretary of State Rubio is trashing freedom of speech. He is ripping up the First Amendment of the Constitution, and it is shameful. The American people should not stand for it because if you rip up the First Amendment for some people, you threaten it for everybody who lives in the United States of America.

I was fortunate to grow up in a Foreign Service family. We sort of went back and forth between the United States and other countries. I was proud to be from a family that represented the United States overseas. We are far from perfect, and we have a lot of work to do to live up to the principles that we say we stand for around the world. But one of the things we do--or used to do--is stand up as a beacon for human rights and freedom of speech. That is no longer happening. You can't say you want everybody else around the world to live up to that principle when you are violating it right here at home.

Now Secretary Rubio has doubled way back into a McCarthy-era statute from what was called the McCarran-Walter Act. That was a law passed at the height of the McCarthy era, and he is using that to claim that these students represent a threat to the foreign policy of the United States.

It is pretty pathetic that students expressing their views represent a threat to the foreign policy of the United States. We have students of all different faiths who are protesting the war in Gaza and advocating for Palestinian rights. Others may agree or strongly disagree with what they say, but to claim that they somehow represent a threat to the foreign policy of the United States is ridiculous. It is so clearly being used as a ruse to deny their First Amendment freedom of

speech rights that I hope the courts will see right through it. What it is, is an effort to punish speech.

Donald Trump's lawbreaking doesn't end with his efforts to tear up the constitutional rights of due process and the First Amendment. He is also tearing up article I of the Constitution by illegally freezing, withholding, and impounding funds for important public purposes--funds that have been appropriated by the Congress and signed into law.

The Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars of investments to support public services in communities all over America. The latest count is they are holding up about $430 billion that was appropriated by the Congress.

You know, just this morning, we had a hearing in the Senate Appropriations Committee about the Trump administration's freezing and cutting of funds for NIH, the National Institutes of Health. There was lots of powerful testimony from witnesses, including from a mom who was there with her daughter who had suffered through childhood cancer. And because of past research at NIH, her daughter's cancer was, thankfully, in remission, gone away. But she was there--the mother was there--to say she wants other families who have kids with cancer to have the same opportunities and that those opportunities only exist if we continue to do research into lifesaving cures and treatments. And yet, the Trump administration is sowing chaos at NIH and has frozen some clinical trials.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk and his DOGE cronies are taking a chain saw to the Federal Government and are destroying the ability of the Federal Government to deliver reliable services to the American people, like the damage they are doing at the Social Security Administration. First they say there is no more phone service, use the internet. People couldn't get through on the internet. Go to the local Social Security offices. We are closing the local Social Security offices, and, by the way, we are also firing thousands of people so there won't be anyone in those local offices. And then they say: Oh, well, maybe we better turn the phones on again.

This isn't about government efficiency. This is about rigging the government for people like Elon Musk at the expense of everybody else.

This is an issue that should concern every Member of Congress because it is a direct attack on article I, and it is an attack on the American people and their rights to have these investments made when their elected officials direct them to be made on their behalf.

And yet, just yesterday, the head of the Government Accountability Office, as we know by GAO, testified before a Senate appropriations subcommittee that the Trump administration was stonewalling GAO's efforts to investigate this illegal withholding of funds. Gene Dodaro, who is the Comptroller General, testified that the Office of Management and Budget ``has not been responsive'' to GAO's questions about the freezing of billions of dollars in funding Congress had already approved.

Now, this is not the first time we have seen a Trump administration violating the Impoundment Control Act. The last time President Trump was in office, he illegally withheld funds that the Congress had appropriated for helping the people of Ukraine, and he refused to spend those funds--Donald Trump did.

So, back at the time, I wrote a letter to the GAO, asking them to investigate that withholding to see if it violated the Impoundment Control Act. That is a statute of the United States of America. In that case, the GAO found that, yes, the Trump administration--the first round--had illegally withheld those funds. It was an illegal impoundment. So that is what we are seeing right now, and they are not even working too hard to show that they are violating the Impoundment Control Act.

When the head of OMB--the Office of Management and Budget--Russ Vought, was before the Senate Budget Committee for his nomination, at his confirmation hearing, I asked him about the Impoundment Control Act, and I asked him about the past violations of the Impoundment Control Act because, guess what, he also was the head of OMB at the time of the earlier violation, and Russ Vought is back at it again as the head of OMB. So when I asked him about the Impoundment Control Act at his hearing, I got this answer. I asked him about President Trump and the Impoundment Control Act. Here was his answer at the hearing:

Senator, the President ran against the Impoundment Control

Act.

My response to him:

Mr. Vought, I know what the President did. He wants to

change a lot of things. He can submit legislation to do that.

But you are going to be the head of OMB, and here today, at

this hearing, you are refusing to comply--to commit to

comply--with the Impoundment Control Act; is that right? Are

you refusing to commit to complying?

This dance went on and on, and never did he commit to comply with the Impoundment Control Act.

So that is what we are witnessing right now--a violation of the Impoundment Control Act.

We, the Senate, were supposed to get the Trump administration's spending plans for the remainder of fiscal year 2025 a few days ago. For many Agencies, we haven't seen them yet. So we don't know what they say their plans are, but we do know that, as of now, they are withholding about $430 billion of appropriated funds.

Finally, I want to talk about another area where Donald Trump is violating the law to the detriment of our economy, and that is in the area of tariffs.

Now, Presidents, of course, have some authority to apply tariffs, and I have supported targeted tariffs in the past for strategic purposes. But a number of small businesses around the country and others have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration for their illegal use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

I see the ranking member of the Finance Committee on the floor here, and he has spoken to this many times, and I want to thank him for his leadership.

I do want to read directly from the complaint that has been filed because the complaint--and this is one.

Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to counter external emergencies, not to grant Presidents a blank check to write domestic economic policy.

They go on to point out that, yes, we have a fentanyl crisis in America--all of us agree with that--but using this statute, which is for economic emergencies, and using the statute in the way the Trump administration is doing is a gross violation of the President's legal authority.

As we can see by the downturn in the economy--we just learned that we are seeing the economy contract; we are seeing consumer confidence plunge--President Trump's illegal use of that statute is causing incredible economic pain across the country.

So I want to end with this: When you see this kind of massive lawbreaking going on--violations of the due process clause, violations of the First Amendment, violations of article I and the Impoundment Control Act--I mean, you can just take a marker through the Constitution and cross out those provisions, right? The 14th Amendment--cross it out. The First Amendment--cross it out. Cross out article I. That is what everybody in this body who is not standing up to the President is complicit in right now.

What bullies do--and make no mistake, President Trump is a bully. What they do is they try to pick on people they think are weak. If the rest of us don't stand up for the rights of those people, then it is a very fast and slippery slope to losing the rights of everybody who lives in America.

So I hope that, as we review this first 100 days and the massive lawbreaking that is going on and the tearing up of the Constitution and the tearing apart of the government and the tearing down of our economy, we will all wake up because the American people are waking up. They understand what is going on, and they don't like what they see. So we had better do our jobs here in the U.S. Senate, and I hope, starting today, all 100 Senators will begin to do exactly that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, over the past month, we have seen a wave of righteous outrage across the country in response to President Trump's completely lawless move to disappear hundreds of people to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador, without even the barest semblance of due process.

And as I join my colleagues in calling for the Trump administration to abide by the Supreme Court ruling and facilitate the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia--a man they said in court was sent to El Salvador by mistake--I have to emphasize that his case is one of many where Trump has completely shredded our norms and laws.

In addition to Garcia, Trump sent off some 200 people, including innocent people who were in our country legally, to a foreign prison without any due process whatsoever, and they did it all on the basis of some arrangement negotiated in secret and paid for with millions of taxpayer dollars.

What we do know is that many of these people were sent there without any criminal conviction. The administration actually admitted that. In their own court filing, the Trump administration acknowledged that many of these people have no criminal records in the United States, and yet all of these people have now been imprisoned in a foreign country with no end date in sight.

Unconstitutional doesn't even begin to cover that.

There are so many questions--basic questions--about this that we all should be demanding answers to. At the barest, smallest, slimmest minimum--and I mean as a starting point--the administration must release more details about this secret agreement where it is paying El Salvador with our taxpayer dollars to imprison people without a trial-- details like:

Who all is being imprisoned? How long is El Salvador holding these people with Trump's orders? How many people is El Salvador going to imprison under this agreement? What outside contact is possible for those people? And how do we learn their status and condition? Are they alive? Are they healthy? What are the details?

Most of the details we do have are from reporting, and news reports say the deal was only for El Salvador to take convicted criminals. So why did Trump send people with no criminal record?

And, importantly, where in the world is this money coming from? Does anyone here remember voting to pass a single dollar in appropriations to fund a torture prison in El Salvador? Because I sure don't, and the last I checked, Congress has the power of the purse.

Do you know what else we don't know? We still don't know the names of everyone they did this to. Think about that. We don't have their names. That information should be released immediately--today--because there are families who still have no confirmation where their loved ones are. And the only list we have right now was not even released by the administration. It was reported by the press. Some families only learned their son was gone, their husband was gone, their father was gone through photos of them being marched into a torture prison. This is the first, last, and only update we have had on just about all of those people.

We do not know if they are alive. We don't know if they are being treated decently. We don't even know if they have been moved. Even their lawyers can't reach them.

Here is what we do know, though: There are many names on the El Salvador list of people who were here legally who had no criminal record. That seems to be getting lost in the debate for some of my Republican colleagues. This is not about any one case or any one person. It is about a lawless system for the President to deny due process. And when you cut out due process, you put innocent people in harm's way.

I heard one of my Republican colleagues say last week:

I don't see any pattern here.

Well, I ask him now, and I ask everyone now, to pay attention to the full picture because, of course, you won't see a pattern if you just look at one case and you ignore the many, many others.

There is the case of Andry Hernandez Romero. He is a barber who came here legally. He has no criminal record.

There is the case of Arturo Suarez Trejo. He is a musician. He came here legally. He has no criminal record.

There is the case of Merwil Gutierrez, who--you guessed it--came here legally. No criminal record. In fact, he was apparently grabbed by mistake. One officer reportedly said: No, he is not the one. And another said: Take him away anyway.

Trump sent them all to a maximum security prison in El Salvador with no trial--disappeared. They have no contact with their lawyer, no contact with family. We do not know if they are alive, and they don't know if anyone is even advocating for them--how hopeless that must feel, how dark.

So is that enough of a pattern for my Republican colleagues? Do you still need more? Because there is also Jerce Reyes Barrios. He is a soccer player. He came here legally. Again, no criminal record.

There is Gustavo Aguilera, a food delivery driver. Legally here, no criminal record.

Or Anyelo Sarabia--here legally, no criminal record.

I mean, how many more before my colleagues can actually admit this is a pattern? How many people have to be disappeared with no due process before it becomes a problem?

Because, for me, one is too many, and the pattern isn't even over yet.

Trump was reportedly ready to disappear even more people to El Salvador before the Supreme Court put its foot down. In this latest round, the Trump administration was preparing to disappear a man who came here legally and had no record, except a traffic violation. Another was a young man accused of being a gang member because of a photo with a toy water gun. That is the level of so-called evidence that gets you locked away in a foreign torture prison under President Trump.

And I will keep saying it. Most of the people they disappeared have no criminal records, and many were even here legally.

They came here for a better life, and Trump disappeared them based on nothing more than tattoos that say ``mom'' and ``dad,'' or that celebrate soccer teams or a daughter's birth or autism awareness.

And I realize I keep hammering home that many of these people are not criminals and that many of these people came here legally. But I do want to remind my colleagues that this question is not whether someone who has vanished to El Salvador without a trace is good or bad. The question is whether everyone in this country, including American citizens, have the rights they were promised in our Constitution? At the end of the day, it is not about who these people are; it is about who we are--whether we are a country of due process or not, a country of laws or not.

Trump has said where he stands. He literally said: We don't have time to give them due process.

If the Trump administration thinks that someone is a criminal, if they are really bad and dangerous, prove it in court. Prove it. Just simply prove it. It shouldn't be hard. That is how this works. Everyone in this country understands that. You can't just say: Criminals don't get due process when due process is how you determine who is a criminal in the first place.

I mean, in the case of one person they sent to El Salvador, not only did the government's file against him show no criminal record, but it also got his name wrong several times and used two different identification numbers. Those are pretty major errors to make when you are locking someone away, the kind of errors that due process helps to avoid.

That is not some theory. We are seeing it happen in another case right now. There is a couple that Trump is saying is part of a gang. But instead of just disappearing them with no trial to speak of, the administration was forced to prove it--to prove it in court. And do you know what happened? The government failed. The judge found the government's claims completely and wholly unsubstantiated and ordered the couple to be released.

That just goes to show, if we ignore our laws, if we tear down the guardrails that saved that couple, it is not criminals who pay the price; it is innocent people, because due process protects them too.

Due process allows us to confirm whether people are lawfully present. Due process lets us confirm whether Trump is about to send them to a foreign prison. Due process lets us confirm whether people are guilty, instead of going off how they look or what tattoo they may have. And at the end of the day, due process means they get an actual determination of guilt or innocence, instead of getting disappeared with a question mark.

But no one here was told they are facing x years in a foreign prison. There is no end date in El Salvador because there was no sentence, because there was no trial. There was just Trump ignoring our laws, ignoring our courts, and sending people to gulags to rot and die and never be heard from again.

How can anyone ignore that outrageous breach of our laws, of our values?

And as a coequal branch of this government, I want to impress upon my colleagues: It is not just due process that is getting trampled here; it is basic checks and balances.

Trump is imprisoning these people under the Alien Enemies Act. He is using a war power. We are not at war. Everyone here should know that. After all, Congress--we--have to vote to declare war.

I remember every war vote we have taken in my time here in Congress, and I can tell you there has never been a vote on this so-called war Trump declared all on his own.

As if that weren't enough, earlier this month, the National Intelligence Council--the National Intelligence Council--determined that Venezuela is not directing an invasion by gangs. That directly undercut what Trump claimed when he announced his illegal end run around Congress.

Here is the simple question for everyone. There is no invasion. There is no

war. So why is Trump invoking a wartime authority?

But add on top of that that Trump has reached some secret, multimillion-dollar deal to pay El Salvador to imprison these people without a trial.

I am vice chair of the Appropriations Committee. I can tell you, we did not include a single cent, not one penny, for running torture prisons in El Salvador in our last funding bill.

Congress has the power of the purse, but Trump is picking our pockets to fund his own personal gulag.

And, by the way, while we talk about checks and balances, let's not forget how the Trump administration is arresting judges. His allies and advisers are attacking judges publicly and calling to impeach those who disagree with him.

And, of course, Trump is blatantly ignoring the courts. And worse than that, the White House is in open defiance of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court wrote: The administration must facilitate Mr. Garcia's release.

The White House wrote that he is never coming back.

The Supreme Court wrote: People being targeted under the Alien Enemies Act must have a reasonable opportunity to file for habeas corpus.

The Trump administration said: No. We will give them 12 hours.

Foreign policy is not an end run around the courts or the Constitution. The President cannot just be given unilateral authority to cut completely unethical deals with foreign nations.

What happens when a President negotiates in secret to have his political rivals detained abroad? Is that allowed? Can he argue the courts can't require him to call such a deal off? Or maybe he just denies it and says any agreements are state secrets. Does that work?

If President Trump said he would pay El Salvador $6 million to assassinate his rivals, I think we would all agree that that is blatantly unconstitutional. And if the court said he had to facilitate the reversal of that deal, and he said, ``Well, it is a sovereign nation; I can't stop them from assassinating anyone,'' I think we would all have a huge problem with that.

So do we want to say that is wrong now, or are we going to have to wait until he tries it?

What are we waiting for? We cannot just all stand by silently as the President pries open a Pandora's box that is altogether unprecedented and that poses a direct threat to our Republic. And let's cut through this BS where Trump and El Salvador are both trying to pretend there is no way to facilitate the return of people sent there wrongly.

Here is the thing: El Salvador has already sent back people that Trump tried to disappear. El Salvador immediately sent back a Nicaraguan individual, and they sent back women--yes, Trump tried to disappear women to their all-male torture prison in El Salvador. If anyone wants to try and pretend this was some careful vetting process, please explain that to me.

It is not like El Salvador can't send people back. They have already done that.

The administration should be making clear, one, these people were wrongly sent, and, two, that as with others wrongly sent, they need to be returned.

Though I want to keep in mind, of course, that ``wrongly sent'' is still kind of an understatement. The reality is, these people were completely denied due process. The reality is, President Trump is not just disappearing these people to El Salvador, he is disappearing our most basic constitutional rights, and he is doing it in plain sight, not just in El Salvador either, right here in America.

His immigration crackdown is upturning lives and overturning some of our most basic values like freedom of speech. We have people who are here legally who are being detained and threatened with deportation, not for any crime, not for any violence, but for speech, for protest, for things as simple, as fundamental, as writing an op-ed the administration disagreed with--in America, the land of the free and the land of free speech.

Is dissent the bar for deportation now? Is that what this country has come to? What next? How far does Trump's new standard apply? Can you get deported for saying we shouldn't invade Canada? Can you get detained for an op-ed saying Greenland is not going to be a State? Are you going to have legal status revoked for admitting Biden won the 2020 election? Because this seems outrageous, but it seems perfectly in line with Trump's new policy which amounts to ``disagree with the President, your rights are gone.'' That is fundamentally un-American.

And beyond people who are being targeted for protest, there are thousands of students in this country that Trump is trying to push out over minor issues: fishing citations, jaywalking, speeding tickets, even charges that were dismissed. So far, some 1,800 foreign students are having their visas revoked with little to no explanation, to say nothing of due process. And that includes students in Washington State, my home State, at U-Dub, Gonzaga, Shoreline Community College where I once worked, my alma mater, WSU, and more. It is not clear whether these students have done anything wrong, and it is not clear, in some cases, what exactly they are supposed to do next because when the administration can't revoke visas, it has been trying to remove students' records, something courts have already ruled against.

One of the judges really put it best. I want to read this and quote it to you:

I've got two experienced immigration lawyers on behalf of a

client who is months away from graduation, who has done

nothing wrong, who has been terminated from a system that you

all keep telling me has no effect on his immigration status,

although that clearly is BS. And now, his two very

experienced lawyers can't even tell him whether or not he's

here legally because the court can't tell him whether or not

he's here legally, because the government's counsel can't

tell him if he's here legally.

The point seems to be, if we can't deport you, we can scare and confuse you. And to add even more confusion, DOJ announced they were reversing course on some of this only to then say they are still working on a plan to push out all these students.

By the way, we are only still scratching the surface of just how inhumane Trump's immigration crackdown has become. Trump is slashing funds to ensure 26,000 migrant kids have legal assistance, meaning more 4-year-olds are being marched in front of immigration judges expected to make their own legal case with a plushy toy.

Trump is also trying to mass cancel protected status for people who came here who were fleeing harsh conditions and dictators. Trump is sending Christian refugees and women back to live under the Taliban where they will face near-certain persecution.

Trump is sending ICE officials to elementary schools where they tried to gain access by lying about having permission from parents to speak with their kids. ICE officials are arresting people with maximum violence and lawlessness, showing up without judicial warrants, since the Trump administration says it is fine to storm into some someone's house without one; showing up in masks, grabbing people off the streets without any badge or identification to distinguish them from a kidnapper; whisking people away in unmarked cars and even smashing windshields.

Back in my home State of Washington, I heard from folks who saw that firsthand.

Last month, ICE aggressively detained Lelo, a farmworker in my State. And it appears he may have even been targeted because of his advocacy for better working conditions for his fellow farmworkers. They are still denying him bond despite no criminal charges.

I spoke with his wife last week who watched in horror as they arrested her husband shortly after he dropped her off at work. She told me through tears about how officers broke his window and pushed him against the car and how Lelo wants to be free so he can take care of his brothers and sisters and work so they can study. He wants to continue doing his work with the community and with the union. And they are working right now to try to get bond, something I strongly support.

This is not someone with a dangerous record. It is someone with a record of hard work and trying to make his community better.

Skagit County is known for its agricultural industry. That industry does not survive without the immigrant farmworkers who help power that local economy, period. More than that, we

are talking about many families who have been here for decades. They are part of our community. They are not just the people who feed this country, these are people who work hard. They followed the law. They should not be terrorized as if they were violent criminals.

Last week, I met with farmworkers there who told me there have been days they have been afraid to go to work because an unmarked vehicle was seen in their neighborhood. They are absolutely terrified of being grabbed off the street by ICE and locked up with no semblance of due process regardless of their legal status.

And this situation is not unique to Skagit County or even to my State. It is happening across the country. Let's not forget, Trump is trying to deport a cancer researcher to Russia where she fears retaliation for protesting the war in Ukraine. Sending her away would both put her in danger and completely upend groundbreaking cancer research. Her colleagues say her role is irreplaceable.

But it is not just cancer research. Trump also deported a little girl--a U.S. citizen--who was on her way to get cancer treatment. She was with her mother, an undocumented immigrant who was forced to choose being separated from her 10-year-old daughter or being sent away together. What an unthinkable choice to force on a mother. What an unthinkable thing to do to a child, a citizen--a citizen--who is fighting cancer.

And Trump has done that twice. That is right--twice. He has deported a mother along with a kid who is fighting cancer--a kid, by the way, who is an American citizen.

He is doing that without giving these parents any meaningful time to talk to a lawyer or a spouse or to figure out what is best for that child. We know that because Trump deported another U.S. citizen last week. That is right, another one. Trump deported a 2-year-old, an American citizen. They refused to tell this kid's father where his wife and kid were being held. They refused to let him talk to his wife for more than a minute. They even forced him to hang up the phone when he tried to give his wife their lawyer's number. And then, as the judge put it, they seem to have ``deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.''

Now we are hearing about a family in Oklahoma--U.S. citizens who recently moved in who had their home raided by ICE. A mom and her daughters were forced out of their house in the rain in underwear. ICE agents seized their phones, their laptops, even their life savings, and didn't leave so much as a number they could call to get their stuff back. That happened to U.S. citizens who did nothing but move into a new house.

These horror stories underscore something important--Trump's cruel war on immigrants is hurting American citizens too. U.S. citizens are having their spouses ripped away. Even servicemembers are seeing their families targeted. They are having their parents ripped away. They are having their lives turned upside down.

Let's not forget, U.S. citizens are even being detained by this administration. We have several instances now where American citizens have been caught up in Trump's immigration crackdown. American citizens have been detained and wrongly locked up, even after someone showed them their birth certificates--even for days.

Let's keep in mind, if you are a citizen who is mistakenly detained and you are being denied due process and you can't reach someone to show them your birth certificate, how are you supposed to get released? What if you are put on the next plane for El Salvador before you get a chance to set the record straight?

Let's not pretend that is farfetched, not when citizens have already been mistakenly detained, not when the government has already admitted it sent some people to El Salvador by mistake, not when Trump has already disappeared some people who were here legally and many people who had no criminal record with no due process and not when Trump has already said he wants to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador prisons. He was caught on mic telling the President of El Salvador he needs to build more jails, telling him the ``homegrowns'' are next.

What happens when you get sent there, and you can't contact a lawyer? These are serious questions. What happens? Because if there is nothing we can do for the people there now, what precedent does that set for the people that are sent there next?

Mr. President, I have been speaking for a while and posed a lot of questions. I hope my colleagues think about this carefully. I am going to wrap it up, but I want to end with just one more. Where will Republicans draw the line because we are well past the bounds of law, and we are well past the bounds of basic humanity.

So I hope more of my colleagues will join me saying enough is enough and demanding transparency, accountability, and justice from the Trump administration.

That starts with some very basic things. First, accurate up-to-date information on the names of people who are being detained and then deported from ICE facilities across the country, including, by the way, the Northwest ICE Detention Center in Tacoma, so their loved ones and community members can at least know where they are.

And we need a clear list of every person who was disappeared to El Salvador, along with what evidence, if any, the government has as well as the full terms of whatever agreement the Trump administration has negotiated with El Salvador's dictator.

But it doesn't stop there. We need to see clear, good-faith efforts to abide by court orders and to bring back everyone wrongfully, unjustly sent to a foreign prison. We need to have lines of communication so these people can talk to their lawyers or talk to their loved ones and let us know they are OK. And we need due process with evidence, with judges, and a meaningful opportunity for people to present a defense.

Let's be clear, we are not saying everyone is innocent. We are saying no more than what the Constitution says, no more than what the courts have said time and again: Everyone in the United States of America gets due process.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to engage in this great debate that is raging across our country. Turn on the TV, read the newspapers, or open your phone, and you will be overwhelmed by the back-and-forths over tariffs, trade deficits, prices, and markets.

We hear the talking heads say that America simply can't afford President Trump's insistence on more favorable trade policies. We hear much less about whether America can afford to continue down the road we have traveled these past 30 years.

That is not a question that people in this city are asking. For many, it is not a question that appears to have occurred to them at all. The debates right now are about the future and how President Trump's policies will shape it. That is good. These are important debates that we should have. But, today, I rise because I want to speak about the past.

I am speaking as an American but, in particular, as a proud Missourian, a boy from Bridgeton. My folks--they weren't wealthy. My grandfather was an infantryman in World War II and returned from the war with an eighth grade education and some money he won playing craps on the Queen Elizabeth on his way home. All of his children worked in his butcher shop growing up. Later, I remember seeing my dad work 7 days a week on the midnight shift to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. He worked hard and lived honestly. And, just one generation later, look where we are.

What a remarkable story about my life--I suppose it is a remarkable story--but the truth is, it is just how unremarkable it really is in this country. That was the everyday magic of America--a country where lives like ours were not just possible but common. It was who we were.

America built the modern world. Our country was forged by pilgrims, pioneers, settlers, and explorers--men whose dreams were too big for the low horizons of the Old World. Our ancestors settled a new continent, tamed a frontier, raised up a great civilization from the wilderness, and planted our flag on the Moon. It was American genius that connected the world, first

through the great steam engine, spanning this continent from coast to coast, then through the miracle of flight. We gave humanity the telephone, the internet, the skyscraper, modern technology, electricity, and the industrial assembly lines that built modern civilization. Even the things we didn't invent, we perfected. Everything that mattered happened here.

But, over the last few decades, the people in power squandered that inheritance. They sent our children and our wealth overseas to defend the borders of distant nations while throwing open our own borders to a tidal wave of mass migration here at home. They shipped the good- paying, middle-class American jobs that once were the backbone of our economy to places like Mexico and China, transforming once prosperous towns and cities into hollow shells of their former selves, often defined by addiction and death. All the while, in the forgotten corners of this land, the men and women who built this country have suffered in silence. They watch in quiet despair as their towns crumble into disrepair, their way of life disappears, and the country they love slips away from them.

The political ideal of a republic is self-reliance. As our Founding Fathers understood, the art of self-government is about people's ability to rely on themselves. There was always trade, of course--this is a natural and good privilege of productive surplus economies--but in a republic, there was also trade between sovereign, self-sufficient communities. The citizen of the classical republic had no need for cheap trinkets, fashion, and sweatshops halfway across the globe. He and his neighbors were the ones building their homes, growing their own food, and when necessary, taking up arms to provide for their own defense. People who depend on others for essential things cannot rule themselves, and if they cannot rule themselves, they cannot keep a republic.

Yes, times have changed. The economy of today is altogether different than the economy our ancestors knew, but that is no excuse for standing by as our home becomes a dumping ground for cheap Chinese goods. Are we really still a sovereign people today? Our independence and our sovereignty are not commodities to be sold on the global market. We can't and won't make everything here, but we must recover the will and the ability to make the vital necessities of our national life. Our country now depends on foreign imports for most of those necessities.

By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, more Americans now work in government than in manufacturing. Nearly half of our cars, more than 60 percent of our machine tools, 80 percent of our pharmaceuticals, and nearly 90 percent of the semiconductor chips we need for everything from phones to fighter jets are foreign made. That is why the crisis that confronts us today is not merely economic. It is about communism and slave labor versus freedom. It is about who will win the 21st century. The stakes are high. It is about the survival of our civilization. It is about the kind of Nation and people we are and will be: one that creates and builds or one that simply consumes.

In this city, we tend to speak of big, sweeping abstractions--jobs, wages, deficits, growth. We talk as if these things are numbers and graphs. We forget that every job lost to China and every factory moved to Mexico belongs to a real, flesh-and-blood American, with a life and a family and a home. Each and every data point is a fellow citizen, a neighbor, a son or daughter of this great Republic. Since NAFTA, 90,000--90,000--factories in our country have closed. Think about that and what it means to those families. For the people who benefited, this was just an abstract externality. For the workers, the heartland Americans, it was everything. I know these people. These are my people--these are our people--and for too long, they have walked alone. There is no memorial for their sacrifice, no national outpouring of grief for their loss, no powerful interest group to represent them in the halls of power.

Let me tell you what 30 years of so-called free and fair trade has meant for the folks where I am from.

In the 1990s, our political class embraced a new line of thinking: that America could become more prosperous by opening all trade barriers regardless of how other countries treated us. The result was swift and devastating. By 2004, according to some estimates, Missouri had lost well over 31,000 jobs to foreign trade. By 2010, our trade deficit with Mexico had cost us 12,600 Missouri jobs. By 2013, we had shipped 44,200 Missouri jobs off to China. By 2018, Missouri had lost more than 90,000 jobs in manufacturing alone--over 25 percent of our industrial base.

Until a few decades ago, southeast Missouri was a national hub for garment and shoe manufacturing. In the 1970s, southeast Missouri was home to as many as 90--90--shoe plants. The last shoe factory from that era closed for good in 2005. It had begun as a five-story, 92,000-foot international shoe plant in Cape Girardeau, nicknamed ``the Pride of Southeast Missouri.'' At one point, it employed 1,200 workers, but cheaper imports from low-wage countries began to flood the market, and by 1990, the old factory was razed and replaced with a one-story plant of, roughly, 300 to 500 workers. By 2001, that had dwindled down to just 50.

Here is what one former employee told a local paper after the plant closed for good:

Now I am working at the Lutheran Home, driving a van, and

making a third of the amount of money I made before. My wife

also has to work, and, together, we are making two-thirds of

what I made alone at the shoe plant. It is very upsetting.

You get mad, and then you get hurt, and you think about all

the jobs leaving the country and all the people losing their

jobs.

Tri-Con Industries, which makes car seat parts, shuttered its factory in Cape Girardeau, too, and moved its production to Mexico. That was another 200 jobs gone.

There are patriotic shoe companies that still want to build in America. Belleville Boots took over a factory in Carthage, MO, in 2020. There are businesses that still love America, and they want to build on the generations of skilled craftsman in places like southeast Missouri, but for decades, our political class has rigged the rules to punish rather than help companies that put America first. This pattern repeats again and again and in every industry.

Up until the end of the 20th century, Missouri still had a major electronics assembly operation. Zenith Electronics--the last major American TV maker--had a large assembly plant in Springfield, MO. It had been in operation since just after World War II, and at one point, it employed 3,300 Missourians; but those jobs, too, had started moving to Mexico in the late 1990s. In October of 1991, Zenith shut down its plant and shipped its operation down to Mexico, taking out 1,500 Missouri jobs in one blow. In Springfield, the average worker made between 5 and 10 bucks an hour. Down in Mexico, it was just 83 cents.

The high priests of the global economy tell us that this is merely creative destruction and that other, better industries will arise to take their place of the ones that were lost. It is true that some of the workers in Springfield went on to find new jobs, but they were often much worse than the ones that they had before. Five years after Zenith shut down, laid-off workers saw an average pay cut of more than 10 percent. More than half of them had held multiple jobs since being laid off, two-thirds of them with worse benefits. Even the workers who enrolled in job retraining programs fared no better than the ones who didn't.

``Those people had worked there for 20 or 25 years,'' one laid-off worker recalled. ``They were at the top end of the pay scales, and there weren't any more TV repairman jobs out there.''

Toastmaster is a household name. Well, they were headquartered in Missouri, and they made their stuff in Missouri, too, with factories in small towns all across our State; but as we welcomed China into the world economy, Toastmaster began to feel the squeeze of cheap Asian imports. By 2001, every Toastmaster plant in our State was gone, shipping hundreds of jobs from rural mid-Missouri to China. The last one to go, in the town of Macon--near where I went to school--had been in operation since the 1950s. All that remained was a toxic waste cleanup site for the 5,500 people in the town it left behind. Although Toastmaster continued production in certain areas of the United States, Missouri wasn't so fortunate.

Boonville, a town where my grandmother went to high school, was another place that lost a Toastmaster factory. In 2011, the town of about 8,000 people lost its modular home manufacturing factory to the housing crisis too. In 2012, its bread factory filed for bankruptcy. In 2013, Nordyne, which manufactured air and heating products, announced it would be moving production from Boonville to--guess where--Mexico, taking out another 250 jobs.

``From a moral standpoint, it was kicking somebody while they were already down,'' the head of the local chamber of commerce said as he talked to a local newspaper.

This is not the distant past, folks. This is the reality that millions and millions of our fellow Americans in Missouri and across the country live this very day.

Haldex, a brake manufacturer, packed up and left for Mexico in 2020, eliminating the last 154 jobs left at the facility in the suburbs of Kansas City. Layoffs began 2 weeks before Christmas. They will save millions of dollars a year paying Mexican workers a fraction of what they paid back home.

I will tell you one more story from the Bootheel in Missouri.

For decades, the Noranda Aluminum smelter there was a lifeline employer for the folks in New Madrid, Marston, and surrounding communities. These were good, decent, hard-working, salt-of-the-Earth folks. I visited with them. The smelter was the engine for their way of life, but in 2016, Noranda filed for bankruptcy and shut down. Why? Because China's cheap, state-subsidized aluminum had flooded the market, causing global aluminum prices to plunge. In New Madrid--a town of less than 3,000 people--about 1,000 people had gone to find new jobs, usually at much lower pay. The county government went in the red. Local police and ambulance budgets were cut. The local school district lost a $3.1 million tax payment, which forced their own layoffs and saw a 10-percent drop in enrollment as families left the area.

People lost homes, the mayor of New Madrid said. People got divorced. An American town, filled with American families, left for dead by their own country. What did we do to our own people?

This is not to say that Missourians don't want fair exchange, one where they can trade and grow with the rest of the world, but the ``free trade'' that transpired was not free trade at all.

The double-edged tragedy of the system is that not all these companies wanted to leave. Some--perhaps many--wanted desperately to stay. These people were their neighbors, their friends, their family.

But over the past three decades, we punished the companies that were loyal to America while rewarding the ones that weren't. The businesses that were eager to offshore got big bonuses at the American workers' expense. The businesses that wanted to stay here found themselves struggling to stay alive in conditions where they couldn't compete.

Now, some might argue that Americans don't want to make shoes anymore, but we did a generation ago. The American workers of that age knew that there was something meaningful in creating and producing.

Today, we have been taken by the idea that our social status is not what we build or create but what we can afford to buy or consume. It is going to take generations to reverse this thinking. The post-war order has given birth to a shallow morality of materialism that measures values strictly in terms of consumption. This is a poisonous new idea, utterly alien to the traditional American way of life.

Our trade policy, like our foreign policy, failed to adapt to the new reality of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The consequences were nothing short of devastating.

At the dawn of the 1990s, as America looked forward to the new millennium, the architects of globalism beamed about the promise of the open society--a world without barriers or borders where all nations and cultures and economies would meld into one global economic zone.

Thirty years on, what do we have to show for it? At home, our factories and the towns that once sustained them lie in ruin, razed by the ruthless logic of the new global economy and cost-efficiency. The Americans who once worked there were replaced by foreign labor overseas. The Americans who once held on were now being replaced by foreign labor here at home. Their children will graduate into a workforce where nearly 1 in 10 workers doesn't even speak their own language.

The twin horsemen of globalism--unprotected trade and unprotected borders--have been a catastrophe for our civilization. But, in many ways, I don't blame the illegal immigrant who wants to come here in search of work, but we do have a country of laws, and there are consequences. I don't blame the factory laborer in Vietnam who takes the job that once belonged to an American. Do you know who I blame? The people in power who allowed them to do it.

I blame the corporate bosses, the special interests, and, yes, the politicians who sold our country out for a seat at the table of the globalist banquet.

I blame the ideologues of the status quo, the international elites, the so-called citizens of the world who see our country as a global economic zone, a giant shopping mall with an airport attached.

I blame the people in cities like this one, who seem to have forgotten the men and women in towns like Boonville and New Madrid or their brothers and sisters, because ``American'' is not just a box you check on a tax form but a sacred responsibility that binds us to one another, an unbroken chain between our past and our future.

I do not know what the future holds, but I do know what the past has meant. I know that something has to change and that President Trump is the first politician in a generation to even care enough to try.

The 77 million ``deplorables'' who cast their lot with Donald Trump last November were the forgotten Americans--the blue-collar patriots, the conservatives of the heart, miners, mechanics, tradesmen, and farmers; men and women who worked with their hands, grew our food, built our homes, and drilled our fuel, whose labor powered our country, whose taxes sustained our government, and whose children served and sacrificed in our wars. They stand with this President because he stood with them when no one else would.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, as the American people can clearly see, President Trump's new tariffs have become a massive tax hike on consumers--a tax on the food we eat, a tax on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, every cup of coffee we have in the morning.

These rising costs are not just hurting consumers, actually; they are hurting American businesses and our workforce too. We are already seeing the impact. It is not a hypothetical.

I call your attention to my home State, the great State of California, home to two of the largest ports in the Nation in southern California alone, the neighboring Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, that truly power our Nation's economy.

It is not an exaggeration. The Port of Los Angeles, which is the largest port in the United States, expects imports to drop by 35 percent in just 2 weeks' time, as Trump's tariffs and his manufactured chaos bring global trade to a halt. The Port of Long Beach is expecting similar declines.

Take a minute to think about the magnitude of that drop in cargo volume. That decline, at the end of the day, will mean empty shelves and higher prices.

The over $300 billion in cargo coming through what we know as the San Pedro Bay port complex is tied to nearly 1 million jobs in the region alone and 2.7 million jobs across the country. That is nearly one job for every four containers.

When the richest President in history decides on his own, unlawfully, to haphazardly apply an across-the-board tax on goods--because that is what these tariffs are--the goods-moving industry is going to take a hit. It will mean fewer jobs for port workers, for truckers, and for communities across the country. It will mean more Americans out of work.

While the western port communities may be the first to feel the pain, it won't be long before the effects of these tariffs reach the east coast and the gulf coast.

As I mentioned, this isn't just bad news for American consumers who rely on imports. It is also bad news for U.S. farmers and businesses that rely on the export of goods to other countries.

Trump's tariffs are already damaging important supply chains in ways that will be difficult and very expensive to reverse. And, in the meantime, China and others are all too happy to fill in the void.

I just had a group of growers from California in my office, just yesterday, and they were sharing with me their very specific experiences--fears--that are playing out. You see, U.S. companies, not just agricultural companies, depend on markets in China and elsewhere in Asia, India, and Europe for sales, for profits that they can, in turn, invest in their own companies and hire more employees.

Now, when those markets are shut off to them and those countries respond to these unnecessary tariff wars provoked by President Trump, they don't stop consuming. Whether it is fruit, vegetables, electronics, or otherwise, they just find somewhere else to get it. When those other countries, those other markets, find a replacement for their supply, they are not going to give it up in 2 months, maybe, if Donald Trump wakes up in a better mood and sees the error of his ways when it comes to these tariffs--because there is that deadline, right? We are in a 90-day postponement of a lot of these tariffs, but we don't know what is coming on day 91.

Tariffs are imposed. Tariffs are not imposed. More significant tariffs are imposed. I hope it has nothing to do with his poll numbers because the American public will continue to feel more pain.

My point is this. Other markets and consumers abroad who have purchased from the United States are going to purchase elsewhere, and they are not going to revert immediately back, even if we get the President to make the right decision in the next couple of months.

Now, like I said, Americans are already feeling the pain. It is going to get worse. Just this morning, the Commerce Department reported our Nation's gross domestic product for the first quarter. The results: Our quarterly GDP declined by 0.3 percent. It wasn't a reduction in growth. It was a decline of 0.3 percent in his first 100 days alone.

Donald Trump's reckless policies actually shrank the American economy. Is that what he bragged about? Is that what he campaigned on? Is that what people voted for?

This shrinking of the economy, by the way, follows 3 years of robust growth of our economy under President Biden. I don't think our Republican colleagues will recognize that, but it is true. The numbers do not lie.

So 100 days of chaos, increased costs, and corruption are shrinking our economy. To my Republican colleagues: Are you hearing this? Are you listening? Are you prepared to act?

American businesses are going to be forced to take on some of these higher costs for materials, to cut back on production, to try to make ends meet, to delay investment. That is the opposite of what we need. We need more investment, not to delay or postpone investment because of tariff uncertainty. And, certainly, they are going to raise prices, because, again, when American companies have to import, it is American companies that pay the tariffs. It is not other countries, as the President

would like you to believe, and those costs get passed on to the consumer.

Meanwhile, the world is moving on without us, as I explained a minute ago.

So let's be clear about the stakes of what we are debating today: A vote against this resolution is a vote to maintain Trump's tariffs that are so clearly devastating our economy already. It will move us closer to a recession solely of Trump's doing. You can't blame it on anybody else. And it is a vote against the American worker, a vote against the American economy, a vote against American competitiveness. Is that what you want to go back and tell your constituents?

Colleagues, I urge you to listen to your constituents, to small businesses in our respective States, the State and local governments. It is not too late to turn back.

Support this resolution.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today with a number of my colleagues. I will speak for the next, probably, hour-plus on the topic of election integrity and the seemingly constant attacks on our election integrity by Donald Trump and our Republican colleagues.

I am joined by a number of my friends and colleagues in our remarks here for the next block. Senator Welch will be speaking next, our colleague from Vermont, and then Senator Blumenthal, Senator Merkley, Leader Schumer, Senator Klobuchar, and Senator Bennet. And it will be wrapped up with my partner in organizing this group of Senators, Senator Reed, who is not only the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee but is the ranking member of the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing funding for this space.

I rise today, with my colleagues, out of grave concern for the future of our democracy.

I currently serve as the ranking member of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. I also, as many of you know, am the former secretary of state for the State of California. So I have seen firsthand, not just through the last 4 years but for the last 8, 9 years, the growing threats to our democracy and the threats to the public confidence in our elections.

Sadly, the truth in the year 2025 is that it is not just foreign actors who are trying to undermine our elections and the people's confidence in the elections. It is also so many Republican officials here at home, not just in the Capitol but in statehouses across America--but, yes, even here in the Capitol.

I think of the old horror movie where the person on the phone would say that the call is coming from inside the house. In State legislatures, in the Capitol, and in the Oval Office, radical Republicans are working hard--actively working hard--to make it harder for eligible Americans to exercise their constitutional right to vote. We see it in the endless lies and conspiracy theories about massive voter fraud. We see it in the new barriers being erected that would make it harder for eligible Americans to simply register to vote. And we see it in the Trump administration's firing of the hard-working and dedicated security officials who are tasked with protecting our elections.

So, yes, over the next hour, with my Democratic colleagues, we will peel

back the curtain on the tactics being used to undermine our Federal elections, because our fundamental democracy is at stake.

In Rochester Hills, MI, Republican clerk Tina Barton worked hard to help administer and uphold a free and fair election in 2020. But for her dedication and hard work and professionalism, 1 week after the 2020 election, Tina received an anonymous phone call--not a phone call thanking her for her service but a phone call threatening her life. The voice on the other end threatened to come after her family, to hold a knife to her throat, and to kill her.

As shocking as threats like that may be, Tina represents just one-- one in every three election workers who has reported receiving threats, harassment, and abuse. So, for Tina and so many others, that harassment grew worse with every lie spread by the Trump campaign about a so- called stolen election, with threats against election officials continuing in subsequent elections.

There was no stolen election. That is a farce. But for those selfless election workers, Donald Trump hasn't even tried to lower the temperature of political rhetoric or combat the disinformation that leads to the threats and harassment. Instead, he has, actually, actively made it worse for those who are administering elections. Think of the election workers and all of the volunteers who work polling places to help our elections in our democracy thrive. He has made it worse for voters. He has fired Federal workers who combat election misinformation and disinformation.

Why would he and his administration and Republicans in Congress who support him want to make it easier for people to interfere with our elections?

I am at a loss. I am at a loss for an answer. What I do know is that, by failing to counter, by failing to elevate the truth, Republicans in Congress have become complicit as they just sit back instead of pushing back.

Believe it or not, there was a time, not that long ago, when even Republicans had the moral courage to speak out against Trump's attacks on our democracy.

I do think back a few years to my days as the California secretary of state when, during the first Trump administration, he created a commission to investigate these unfounded claims of ``voter fraud''-- without evidence, baseless claims--but for him, it was important enough to set up a commission to investigate and uncover the truth. The commission set out to collect sensitive, private voter information from every State, demanding that States hand over not just the names of every voter on the voter rolls but their dates of birth, their voting history, their Social Security information, and more.

It was a blatant power grab, long before Elon Musk started tapping into Federal servers, by the way. It was a blatant power grab which was responded to: 44 States, both Republican and Democratic, said no. Republican and Democratic elections officials throughout the country joined together to reject Donald Trump's demands under his first term. Even in Mississippi--hardly a woke, Democratic bastion, folks--even in Mississippi, then-Secretary of State and now-Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, was outraged. He was so offended by the power grab that he responded to the White House's request with ``Go jump in the Gulf of Mexico,'' saying, ``Mississippi is a great state to launch from.'' Good for him.

So you can imagine my disappointment when, fast-forward to this past March, Trump announced yet another anti-voter Executive order that would empower DOGE to access sensitive voter data--very reminiscent of the request from that first term but now on steroids.

And what did so many of our Republican colleagues here in the Senate and the House of Representatives say? Nothing.

But it is not just that the Republicans have gone silent, they have actually become Trump's enablers here in Congress by forgoing their responsibility to serve as a check and balance on the executive branch.

Any day now here in the Senate, we could see Republicans take up the SAVE Act--the measure that recently passed the House of Representatives, a bill that, I should say, scapegoats immigrants simply to justify new barriers to voter registration. Not only is that wrong, it is un-American. And, again, it is based on a lie.

I bring to this body my 6 years of experience administering elections not just in any State but the most populous State in the Nation, with the largest number and the most diverse number of voters in the Nation. I understand the complexities of both keeping our elections free and fair but also secure. And I am happy to take time to meet with any of you to walk you through the security measures that are in place to ensure the integrity of our elections.

I can tell you this, in case you didn't know already: It is already a crime for noncitizens to vote in our elections. To propose it as a new law is misleading. It is already against the law. And, by the way, it is also extremely, extremely rare.

But if our Republican colleagues were to have their way, American citizens--American citizens--would feel the impacts of the SAVE Act, from the Active-Duty servicemember who has to move for a new deployment and has to work so much harder than they should have to, to update their registration with the new address at the local elections office, which could be hours and hours from the base where they are assigned, to think of a married woman who chose to change her last name when she got married, and now the name listed on the birth certificate and the name on their ID no longer match. They will have some explaining to do and hurdles to jump over simply to register to vote.

These are just two small examples that impact millions and millions of Americans, should the SAVE Act pass.

And if you make it harder to register, guess what, you have made it harder for eligible citizens to vote. That would be the result of the SAVE Act.

Here in the Senate, I want people to know that together with my Senate Democratic colleagues, I will do whatever it takes to kill this bill, to stop it from passing, to keep it even from coming up, if we can, because we owe it to our constituents to fight every Executive order that undermines our democracy and to keep demanding answers on the firing of Federal workers entrusted with safeguarding our elections.

So over the course of the next hour, Senate Democrats will lay down a marker. We will stand strong against the rising tide of attacks on our democracy. And I will keep leading the fight to stop this cynical and dangerous bill and to stop Trump and Republicans' attempts to undermine our voting rights.

I yield the floor to my next colleague.

Mr. President, I want to support everything that my colleague, the ranking member of the Finance Committee, just said about these tariffs.

I want to make two points about the tariffs--one, the tariffs themselves, and then second, the congressional failure to assert its own authority on policies that it has the constitutional responsibility for when our failure results in economic pain and insecurity for the American people.

First of all, the tariffs. When the history of this decision is written, President Trump's imposition of these wild and reckless tariffs is going to be seen as one of the greatest economic blunders in a century. It is that bad.

What is happening in Vermont is happening in every State across this country. First of all, these tariffs are a tax. Second, they are paid for by consumers, by manufacturers, and by producers. Third, it is having a negative impact on trade and on our economy already. Today's information about the gross domestic product shrinkage is evidence in and of itself.

In Vermont, Trump's tariffs are estimated to cost Vermont households more than $1 billion. More than 18,000 Vermonters work in industries that are targeted by retaliatory tariffs, but virtually every Vermonter is going to be impacted by increased costs--inflation--as a result of the tariffs.

As an example, food, fuel, energy--all of these things are going to be impacted and really affect people in their day-to-day and month-to- month budgets.

We get a lot of our electricity, a lot of our home heating fuel, and a lot of our petroleum from Canada, especially in the northern part of our State. Those costs are going to be increased, especially with the expected retaliatory tariffs that are imposed on us by countries subject to the arbitrary action of President Trump.

Farmers are really hit hard. Most of our farmers in Vermont import their fertilizer from Canada. There is about a 25-percent increase that they are going to be paying. And these are farmers, as the Presiding Officer knows, that operate on the thinnest of margins in the most uncertain of activities, subject to weather and price fluctuations and so many other things that make our farmers courageous entrepreneurs. But why add 25 percent to the cost of fertilizer when that input cost is already so high? It is mind-boggling to think that this is a voluntary action by the President.

Canada, by the way, happens to be our biggest trading partner, and 34 States have Canada as their major trading partner. In these tariffs--in Canada, we are a 2.1 billion import partner with Canada--20 percent tariff. China--a lot of input from China that our manufacturers use--54 percent tariff, plus who knows how many more tariffs depending on the day and how President Trump feels when he wakes up. Trinidad and Tobago: 81 million, 10 percent tariff. Germany: 75 million. Mexico: 77 million.

Very frustratingly for all of us, the sweeping global tariff order unnecessarily increases prices and taxes on countries that have trade surpluses with America.

I recently heard from a Vermonter who imports coffee and has a niche business that has become extremely successful. The tariffs on Colombia have resulted in this: A container that cost $700 last month--that container now costs $13,000. How do you deal with that? A hit to the margin is--no business can absorb that.

Vermont is also home to one of two businesses in the world that produce these unique snow globes, and they have been in business for 25 years. It is a modest business, but it is one that was created by a Vermont entrepreneur, and it has been really successful. They are going to have to close their doors at the end of the summer with these increased tariffs, basically, on China.

A second point that I think is relevant to these tariffs is the arbitrariness of their implementation and the arbitrariness of how and who is affected. We have a situation where we supposedly have these tariffs on China. Apple Computer, quite understandably, was upset. It was going to increase the cost of iPhones. Well, no problem. Tim Cook was at the inauguration, sitting on the throne of honor, and he had the telephone number, made the call, and the tariffs on iPhones vanished.

You know that snow globe manufacturer that I mentioned from Vermont? She does not have Howard Lutnick's phone number. She does not have Scott Bessent's phone number. She does not have President Trump's phone number. She is out of luck.

So now, with these tariffs and the way they are being implemented without any congressional engagement whatsoever, we are turning our economy from one where it is based on a good product, really good service, where you compete in the marketplace and if your product is better and your service is better, you succeed, to an economy that is more based on access. Do you know Lutnick? Do you know Bessent? Do you know the President?

Oh, and by the way, if you contributed a couple million dollars to the inauguration, you probably do know them and they give out the phone number.

That is absolutely outrageous. People work hard. They produce a good product. They give good service. Shouldn't they be entitled to the reward for the labor that they have done; whereas, what we are seeing now is that if you are connected, you can be rewarded regardless of how good your product is or how lousy your service is. That is offensive-- and should be--to every single one of us here, and that is absolutely what is happening in the White House.

Another thing is there is a casual disregard for how hard it is for everyday families in the Presiding Officer's State and mine and in the ranking member's State to pay the bills because inflation has been here. Instead of arguing about who is at fault for that, let's solve the problem, not aggravate the problem. And these tariffs aggravate the problem. There is absolutely no denying that. This is just the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

Another element of this is, what is the purpose of these tariffs? President Trump won't give a clear answer. It is to make us rich. They will pay; we won't. It is to bring manufacturing back here. Or it is to punish folks that he deems unworthy. It depends on the day, and it depends on who is asking. So there is no coherent rationale connected to the imposition of this enormous economic pain and cost increase that is being imposed on American businesses and American consumers.

The other question here that is profoundly important for this institution--every single one of us is proud to be a Member of the U.S. Senate, and I think our pride is about our pride in the Constitution as citizens where, under the Constitution, this Congress plays a role as a coequal branch of government. And I think every single one of us here is wary of the accumulation of excessive power in any one person or in any one institution.

Congress has steadily over the years been ceding much of its responsibility and authority to the executive branch. There is no authority greater than the power to tax, and that is why, in the Constitution, the power to impose tariffs resides in the House of Representatives and the Senate. And shouldn't it be that way? Because in the imposition of the tax, there has to be a decision that--in asking our citizens, who we represent, to turn over hard-earned money to the government, we have to be able to justify the purpose for which those funds are being expended.

By allowing the President to take over, in effect, the taxing authority that occurs when the tariff is imposed, we have ceded that responsibility to him or that authority to him, and we have abandoned our responsibility to look our constituents in the eye if and when we say a tax should be imposed. None of us like to do that, but a government has to collect revenues for the common good. We have delegated that authority to the President, and it is wrong of us to do that.

So we can have different views about whether there should be a tariff or what the rate should be, but we have a collective responsibility to do everything we can to maintain the constitutional structure of three independent branches of government, each a counterweight to the other. That is not just an abstract concept; that is the wisdom that has served us well for well over 200 years, that those checks and balances give all our citizens an opportunity to have a seat at the table when major decisions about their lives and their futures are being made.

So that is why this decision that we are about to make is not just about the tariffs. It is not just about, in my view, how recklessly they are being applied and imposed. It is not just about how they infect our economy with corruption, where it is who you know rather than how hard you work that is going to get you ahead. It is about the basic structure of our constitutional order, and every single one of us has the responsibility to protect that because that is not about us. It is not about who we represent. It is about how our country can operate with a democratic system where every single person, through their representatives, has a seat at the table.

So I urge all of us to take a look at what our constitutional responsibility is. Whether we agree or not on so many different issues of vital concern to the future of this country, we each have a responsibility to act in a way that protects the constitutional system. That means that we exercise authority over tariffs; we don't give that away to an executive branch decision.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, first of all, I want to thank the senior Senator from California not just for his leadership on protecting the voting rights of all citizens in this country but for his work as the California Secretary of State, where he gained a nationwide reputation for running free and fair elections.

Senator Padilla, thank you so much for your work there, and thank you so much for your leadership here.

I want to stand here in solidarity with my colleagues to push back, oppose, denounce President Trump's March 25 Executive order, which claims to preserve the integrity of U.S. elections. It does no such thing. And, by the way, the idea that the President, who spent years denying the outcome of the election he lost gives him absolutely no credibility when he is speaking about his commitment to free and fair elections.

Like my colleagues--all of us--I am committed to safeguarding the security of our elections and working with anyone and everyone in the Chamber to advance that objective. All of us revere the right of citizens to make the decision about who their leaders are.

Unfortunately, many of our colleagues in the House, Republicans in the House, have fought to gut the election security grants our States depend on. I say that--usually, these are not partisan issues on voting, but it is turning into that. And we are seeing a one-sided, one-party approach, particularly out of the House, that goes to the

heart of our electoral process and the right of each of our citizens to make their decision and their vote be the one that counts.

At the same time, despite the political violence at home and rising tensions abroad, the Trump administration has taken an ax to CISA. As we know, that is the Agency that works to curb emerging cyber security threats. And that threat, those threats, are a threat to the election integrity that is so essential to the well-being of our democracy.

The Executive order makes an assumption that noncitizen voting is a problem. The assertion that noncitizens are voting is alarming. Fortunately, it is not true. Also, Federal law already bars noncitizens from voting in congressional and Presidential elections.

So this is not a question of whether there is some backdoor effort on the part of one party to allow noncitizens to vote. It can't be done. It is illegal now. This Executive order would not change that.

Study after study has also shown that the rate of noncitizen voting is incredibly small, almost too small to measure--roughly 0.0001 percent, according to a reliable estimate. Obviously, that error is so small that it is hard to measure and would not have any material impact on our elections.

If you don't believe me, ask folks over at the libertarian Cato Institute, a very conservative organization. They have labeled President Trump's claims about noncitizen voting as ``bogus''--their word, not mine.

The order of the President also raises significant constitutional issues. The Constitution entrusts our States--and in the case of certain core rules of conduct, Congress--with the authority to regulate elections, not the Executive.

The Executive order President Trump has signed flips that framework and purports to vest the President with expansive new powers that he does not have--not just him but any chief executive.

It attempts to enact through Executive fiat what the Trump administration seemingly believes it cannot achieve through the legislative process, through an act of Congress; namely, Senate consideration of the SAVE Act, many provisions of which are contained in the President's Executive order.

I ask my colleagues to join me in focusing our attention on the very real problems that confront our Nation and are pushing back against the Trump administration's usurpation of the Senate's constitutional prerogatives.

President Trump is attacking the right to vote with respect to dismantling of the Department of Justice organization of attorneys who are being punished for their efforts to protect that right to a vote. That organization within the Justice Department is being actively dismantled.

And the President has currently used the Department of Justice as a tool to enact his--my view--very extreme policy positions, and that includes the Civil Rights Division at the Department whose mission includes protecting the right to vote.

According to press reports, all career supervisors in the voting rights section have been reassigned to other positions completely outside their areas of expertise. In other words, it is about destroying the Civil Rights Division.

The Assistant Attorney General, Harmeet Dhillon, surely, at the direction of the White House, is punishing career attorneys. This is outrageous.

Also, reportedly, political appointees at the Department of Justice have ordered the dismissal of all active cases and the closing of all active investigations by this section.

Our Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice has a revered history for standing up for the rights of all citizens and their constitutional rights to be enforced and protected, and that brazen attack on the Civil Rights Division will leave it totally unable--as the President, apparently, prefers--to defend the democratic right of our citizens to vote.

I urge my colleagues to oppose the President's Executive order.

I yield the floor.