A resolution condemning the Government of the People's Republic of China for engaging in transnational repression.

Mr. President, on behalf of the two leaders, I ask the Chair to execute the order of August 8, 2026, with respect to H. Con. Res 89.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following Senators be permitted to speak: Kim for up to 8 minutes, Schiff for up to 8 minutes, Moreno for up to 20 minutes, Slotkin for up to 5 minutes, Merkley for up to 10 minutes, Murphy for up to 8 minutes, Baldwin for up to 5 minutes, Welch for up to 2 minutes, Kaine for up to 5 minutes, and Klobuchar for up to 5 minutes.

Mr. President, I rise today as Donald Trump continues to wage a war in Iran in our name, on our dime, but without our say--a war that is nearly 7 months old, a war that has cost Americans billions, a war that seemingly has no end in sight but that Congress has the authority to end.

The Senate has just returned to the Capitol after over a month back home, and in that time, Americans have continued to be loud and clear at townhalls, at protests, and in letters and phone calls to our offices. They are sick and tired of this reckless and expensive war. They are sick and tired of this war, and they expect us to do something about it.

This is a moment for us to step up and show the American people that we are listening and we are ready to take action.

Democrats have taken action. We have come to this Chamber 11 times, in the past 208 days, to try to bring this war to an end.

I have been encouraged to see some of my colleagues join from across the aisle to do the right thing and join us.

It is not just the right thing to do; it is the right thing to do right now. It is about standing up for our Constitution--that this war, which Donald Trump said would end in about a month, has lasted over six times as long; this war, which Donald Trump wouldn't even admit to being a war, has resulted in damage done to our national security and the spread of chaos across the Middle East and the world; and this war, which Donald Trump said was worth the cost, keeps costing the American people more and more.

So what has it cost us? It has cost us American lives. We have lost at least 19 servicemembers, brave men and women; over 750 injured. It has cost us economic security. Inflation is up--gas prices, just filling up the grocery carts as well.

These are costs that Donald Trump is bearing upon the American people. It is costing each and every one of our American families hard- earned taxpayer dollars.

A report last week by the Congressional Budget Office showed that the war has cost nearly $40 billion in the first 4 months alone.

It has cost us our readiness and our ability to keep Americans safe from global threats. These are the things that we are seeing that are making us weaker and why it is that we need to end this now.

So with this vote today, we can alleviate the cost of the war. I want to talk a little bit more about why alleviating this cost is so important to the people we represent, to our national security, and to our future.

When we hear from so many of our constituents, when I hear from a woman back home in New Jersey, she is talking about just the challenges that she is facing raising her family, about the challenges that she is seeing as gas prices continue to skyrocket, as mortgage rates are hitting higher and higher. She paused and she looked at me, she said-- all of this that is happening, the Iran war, all these different actions--she said: But what about us? What are we supposed to do?

And her question is one that all of us should be considering here in the Chamber. What about the American people? What are they getting out of this? Well, they are getting footed the bill. They are getting footed the sacrifice. They are the ones that are bearing this brunt.

When we have a third of Americans already unable to handle a $400 emergency, that is not theoretical, that is their life right now. We see it as we see estimates already of gas prices going up so much that it is--what?--over $115 billion more than American families have had to bear, nearly $900 per household more since the start of this war.

And over and over again, is this making us safer and more secure? Very clearly, no. And we see that just with the continued attacks, the continued violence, the spread of this now with Saudi Arabia, the Houthis. We are seeing this all over the place through the Middle East. I have worked in war zones; I have worked in the Middle East as a State Department officer, as a diplomat; and I have seen where this heads.

Chaos is not a negotiating tactic. Trump is simply in over his head here. The entire administration is in over their head, and, again, the American people are the ones bearing this cost.

As we talk about that cost to our future, the war has cost a lot of money. I have shared with you the costs at the gas pump. We see how much we have had to pay in the past for the previous wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. We do not want that going forward.

I literally just yesterday celebrated the birthday of one of my sons. I do not want him and his generation to bear the burdens of these reckless decisions made by Trump.

This is something we need to make sure we are pushing forward on. I think a lot about that woman in New Jersey that I mentioned. I wonder how she is holding up since I last talked to her, how she is bearing the cost of this war.

And when we recess here shortly, I want to be able to go back to her and tell her what I heard, tell her what I tried to do, tell her what we tried to do here in the Senate. I wanted to tell her that I did everything that I could so she could breathe a little easier, be able to support her family in the way that she wants, that we--Democrats and Republicans--were able to come together and recognize that the cost to the American people is too great and that we need to work together to stop this war.

So please, I ask my colleagues here at the Senate: Join me. Let's pass this resolution and do the right thing for the American people; do the right thing for our Constitution; do the right thing for our servicemembers in harm's way; do the right thing by ending this war.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I want to thank my colleagues Senator Warner and Senator Schatz for working with me and working on this project going forward.

I actually find this experience here being on the Senate floor right now really important because we are here because this is what the American people want. The American people want their elected leaders to be focused on the concerns and the threats that they worry about, that keep them up at night.

As mentioned by my colleague from Hawaii, I come to this Chamber as somebody who served in national security, someone who served under both Republican and Democratic Presidents, in war zones in Afghanistan to the Situation Room at the White House. This path of mine started just a little over 25 years ago when I saw from my own home State of New Jersey the threats that we faced on national security because of September 11.

I was not someone who thought I was going into national security until that day, but by 6 p.m. on September 11, I said that I am going to do and dedicate the rest of my life to doing everything I can to try to keep this country safe. Yes, that led to a lot of work in war zones and on counterterrorism, but it was always about this broader goal of, how do we ensure that safety?

I come at this now not just as someone who is concerned about national security but as a father of two little boys, one of whom just celebrated his 11th birthday yesterday. And as excited as I am about seeing these two little boys grow up, I will be honest with you, I worry about what kind of world they are growing up in, the level of anxiety that I have as I see the type of technology that will define their generation. It will define not just their jobs and their education but so much about their security. So I think about them because it is not just us here in this Chamber; we are here because we are trying to answer the call of the American people.

I just did a townhall the other week. Overwhelmingly, people are calling upon us, saying that they want urgency; they want this Chamber to move with the speed of urgency that they feel.

So what I appreciate here is that we are engaged in this effort right now to do one simple thing, which is meet the moment. That has a lot of implications, but one is just the fact that no Senator in this Chamber is going to have all the answers. There is not a single one of us that knows all the answers. Neither do all the tech leaders. They don't know all the answers either. But that cannot be an excuse for inaction; that, instead, we should channel that humility and that urgency to be able to move forward and recognize we do not have time to be able to design something that will handle the entirety of all the concerns we face when it comes to AI and this technology we are concerned about but just say: Look, we need to be able to move forward, to show some progress, to show some responsiveness to the concerns raised by the American people.

I think this legislation is that effort to try to come up with tangible things that will move the needle. It is not going to solve all the problems, but that is the point. It is about trying to build up that muscle memory in this Chamber that we need to find. It is a muscle memory that this Chamber has found in the past when it has confronted different national security challenges in the past. We need to find that yet again at a time of great division in this country but setting it aside for us to be able to, again, meet this moment.

So I am just grateful, again, for the leadership of Senator Warner, Senator Schatz, and other Senators that we are engaged with. This is an invitation to others to join this effort to stand up and say: Let's get something done. Let's not get totally bogged down in just the divisions that we see stalling progress on so many other fronts. The American people are demanding of us to act. Now is our time.

Madam President, I think we would all probably agree that we are living through in realtime the biggest technological transformation in generations.

I was lucky enough to be involved in the beginnings of the wireless industry. As an investor, I invested in companies in the internet. As significant as both of those are, they pale in comparison to what we are facing now with this transformation, and there is a lot of good that will come out of artificial intelligence. We all know that AI is already changing the way Americans work, the way businesses compete, the way scientists conduct our research, and, frankly, as to what our government should do to protect our country. Let me be clear at the outset, America has got to continue to lead this transformation.

I am down, today, with two of my colleagues--the Senator from Hawaii and the Senator from New Jersey--to say that we can't dawdle at this moment. Each of us has got a whole series of AI legislative items. I have got ideas about data centers, about kids' safety, about liability for AI agents, national security. Senator Rounds and I, for example, today, talked about a workforce transformation.

But we have been at a moment in time, over the last few weeks, where the AI companies themselves have acknowledged that they are creating tools and entities that they may not even be able to control. We have seen one company, OpenAI, launch a series of 3,000 AI agents that jumped over the security barriers, attacked a different company, Hugging Face, came back and tried to attack their own company--these AI agents together. The

remarkable thing is, these 3,000 agents talked to each other, communicated, tried to hide from humans, and literally left little bits of code on their paths so that subsequent groups of AI agents might come and discover those.

I have met, over the last couple of weeks, with business leaders from finance and from across corporate America who all say: What are you guys doing?

This is the issue of our time. Yes, I have got frustrations on data centers, but this is the issue of our time. This is going to be the biggest transformation of our lifetimes, and we don't have even de minimis safety protocols. We are completely relying on the good will of these large AI frontier tech companies to kind of do the right thing. That is irresponsible. You know, I am proud of the role I play in the national security domain. I have been chair or vice chair of the Intel Committee for the last decade.

Another company--not OpenAI. That was the Hugging Face incident. Anthropic created a new model called Mythos, and our head of cyber security--CYBERCOM--and the National Security Agency, General Rudd, said, basically, that Mythos is going to change warfare almost as much as drones. Luckily, we got a first look at that but only because the one company was willing to give that forward.

So we ought to have a time to have a fulsome debate about data centers, kids' safety, liability, and other issues, but right now--and we were going to do this today, but we are going to come back on Monday because the Senate has left. We are, kind of, the three of us--and we are talking to other colleagues on both sides of the aisle--saying: Let's strip back all of our personal ideas, and let's just put a marker down that potentially we could act on because we hear from some of the technology leaders that we might lose, you know, the ability to control some of these tools not in years or months, but some folks say--and I am not fully believing them--in weeks. I don't believe--I am not a ``doomer'' on AI--I don't think the robots are going to take over the world--but I do think, if we had an event where an AI tool went out and took over a hospital or took over a water system or shut down a power system--and Americans are already concerned about the rate of this technology change--they could shut down this innovation, and that would be the worst for our country. We need to lead this in terms of some of our competitors like China.

So what we are going to be proposing is, I think, as simple as possible. Before any AI model coming out of these frontier labs is released to the public, it ought to be tested to make sure it is safe. A lot of these big companies also do some self-testing, but they do it in what is called a sandbox, where they are supposed to protect it. Well, we have seen that some of these sandboxes are pretty sloppy. We ought to create basic cyber security standards for that sandbox. When you start at the very beginning of how an AI model is developed, we ought to make sure that company has some basic safety protocol in place. Then, God forbid, if there is an incident, there ought to be an incident reporting so we know what is happening because the difference is, in past innovation, you could have a mistake, but it might--the amount of damage that could happen would be fairly limited. Potentially, this could be so much greater, and we literally are having the companies themselves say: Help us.

Now, Lord knows we have got to make sure this is not an effort to simply ensconce the four or five biggest companies. We have got to make sure smaller tech--VC--has a place on this safety panel, but we need national security.

We need our top scientists. We propose NIST. We are open on how to do it better, but it needs to be a public-private relationship that has a safety board. We wouldn't climb on an airplane or you wouldn't get in a car or you wouldn't get a new financial product without some regulatory oversight. With something that is as big as this, we should not miss the moment. God forbid, you know, we go away for our campaign season, and in the interim, something happens, and we have no safety in place. I spent a career in technology before I got involved in politics, but I never felt a moment like this. So I hope that we will act.

With that, Madam President, I yield the floor to my friend from Hawaii.

Madam President, I will wrap it up here. I have been in Virginia talking about this for a while. We have a lot of data centers, which is of some concern. But, boy oh boy, there was a seismic change starting as the companies themselves started to say: Holy heck. And just think about that. Mythos came out in March. National security and others said: This is going to change warfare. The OpenAI Hugging Face incident happened in July. That was 3,000 agents working together. In August, OpenAI got 10,000 agents to work together. It was on a different problem; they solved a math problem. But the idea is that there is kind of an exponential increase in sophistication, as these agents work together to cover their tracks, that, as Senator Schatz said, potentially could move beyond human control.

If we just say ``Well, that is still hypothetical,'' let me give you two last comments.

Just today, we found that actually a model had already been released from OpenAI that attacked the Australian healthcare system. If it attacked our system, I think we would be pretty upset.

Even more compelling--some of us have written a letter to both the folks on the intel side and on the defense side--there was a ship from China sailing towards the Middle East, and we got very close to bombing that ship because the AI tool and the intel said there might be weapons on that. Thank goodness that at some point, somebody did a little more checking, and we didn't do that, but we were close to a geopolitical event that could have been catastrophic.

These tools are already built into our systems, and clearly, you know, the way our military executed on Maduro--you may not agree with the greatness of it, but it was brilliant. But we don't have safety protocols.

So we are not asking for the world. Let's do the testing early. Let's make sure that you have a safety standard in all of these companies. Let's make sure we do the sandbox right, report on the incident.

We could discuss, you know, who is on that panel. It needs to be mandatory. It needs to have government. It needs to have national security. And Lord knows we need to have researchers, scientists. All of these individuals are asking for this. Who are we to turn that down?

I am going to go back to where we started. This will be the most significant technology innovation in our lifetimes. It will make wireless and the internet and the cloud small in comparison. There could be enormous positives coming out of this. There are also going to be disruptions. But if we don't do this in a safe manner, then shame on us.

Again, I come back. You wouldn't climb on an airplane that hadn't been checked. We are just saying let's do those basic safety checks.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, I wanted to add one last thing. I want to acknowledge the great work that Senator Klobuchar and Leader Thune are doing on this and Senator Cantwell and Senator Cruz. There are a number of other Republican Members.

This has a sense of urgency. We need to come together. We could put everybody's name on it. But history will not judge us well if, God forbid, we have an incident and we put no protections in place, for our country and for this innovation.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to honor someone who has changed the lives of millions of Americans, though until this moment, they may have never heard her name: Kalina Thompson, my chief of staff, who is leaving our office at the end of the month, after more than a decade by my side.

Kalina and I did not meet as kids. We met when I was already a Congresswoman. But in a way, it still feels that we grew up together, as we learned from each other and leaned on one another from my early days in the House, finding out what it truly means to serve this great Nation, to lead, to not just get through long workdays in order to simply make it until tomorrow, but to make sure that tomorrow is even better than yesterday for the good of those coming up behind you.

Kalina is someone whose passion for public service is matched only by her compassion for others. And don't be fooled by her soft voice; when she believes in something she will fight harder than you can imagine to transform a pipedream into a reality, to do some good, to do right by a constituent who is desperate for someone, somewhere to lend them an ear or a hand.

You know, it is rare to find someone whose North Star so closely aligns with your own, but that is what I found in Kalina; a kindred public servant, a trusted sounding board, a truthteller who will call me out when I am wrong. She somehow stays unshakable, even in moments of chaos, and beyond it all, a fiercely loyal friend.

We were there for one another as we each became mothers, and we were there for one another as we worked day and night to make sure that other new moms would have an easier time than we did.

It is thanks in large part to Kalina that my FAM Act became law, helping ensure that nursing moms traveling through airports would have access to private, clean, and accessible breast-feeding rooms.

She recognized that we would never expect a traveler to eat lunch in an airport bathroom stall. Yet, for so many new moms, they had no choice but to breast-feed in one. She saw a wrong, and she righted it.

It took 5 years, but in doing so, whether they know it or not, she bettered the lives of countless women across this country. So every time you are heading to your airport gate and see one of those breast- feeding pods, think of and thank Kalina. I know I do. That is just who she is.

She is someone who so thoroughly and thoughtfully thinks of others that sometimes she does forget to think about herself.

So it doesn't matter that folks in question are halfway down the block or halfway across the world, if she hears of someone in need, she will go sleepless until she exhausts every avenue of service.

I have watched her sacrifice time with her own family to do everything possible to help families escape war-torn countries in the Middle East. She has made calls to fellow moms across the globe just to let them know they are not alone, that we are fighting for them, that we would never stop fighting for them.

She has redefined the word ``compassion'' with every call she made, every ounce of hard work she put in, every time she went the extra mile for a stranger thousands of miles away.

Kalina is also a leader who has taken the lessons she has learned along her own career journey, and she used them not just for herself but for all of those climbing the ladder rungs of success behind her.

As legislative director, then as deputy chief of staff, and now as chief of staff, she has made sure that the women in our office always-- always--know and fight for their worth.

Now, because of her, there is a whole generation of female staffers that believe in themselves more fully, and Congress is a better place because of it, because of Kalina.

I could go on and on about the constituents Kalina has helped, the bills she has helped to pass, the lives she has changed, the lives that she has saved, starting with her own work fighting to pass the Affordable Care Act; but let me just tell one more story.

As Democrats, we like to say that we are the party of middle-class families, which is true. But Kalina took it upon herself to make sure our office didn't just offer the standard family Senate policies for staffers, when it came to things like FMLA or parental leave. No, she wanted to set a new bar for congressional offices.

She said to me: If we want our constituents to truly believe that we would fight for their families, then we have to fight for the families of those who come to work for us every day as well.

And it wasn't simple. At first, it seemed like it would be too big of a resource hit to actually go through with the plan she was proposing. Could our budget afford it? Could our workforce afford it?

It would have been easy to just scrap the idea, to backtrack, to stick with the status quo. But Kalina refused, arguing that if we want to actually live up to our policy ideas, to our political party's ideals, it starts with us in our own backyard.

And you know what? She was right. So we became the first office in either the House or Senate to grant 16 weeks of paid leave to new parents. And then we extended our family leave policy. We made sure that we didn't just talk the talk as Democrats, but that we also walked the walk as employers. And because of her, staffers have been able to go care for their fathers battling cancer; because of her, new moms have had the time necessary to look after themselves and their little ones in those precious all-important first few months after birth. Because of Kalina, no one in our office has had to make the impossible choice between earning the paycheck that puts food on their table and being there for an ailing mom, sister, child, or spouse.

Try as hard as she might, Kalina could not singlehandedly change family leave policy for the entire country. But this was a proof point, making it clear that it is possible for an office to be there for its staffers and do its work without missing a beat, because it actually benefited our office in the long

run to provide those 16 weeks of leave, as staff members have served longer than they otherwise would have, sticking with us for long tenures, knowing that we will be there for them when it matters most during their toughest, most trying times.

And I will say, she and I don't agree on everything. There are some differences that have divided even our office right down the middle. For instance, Kalina and our former legislative director Steph would literally sit in our office in those cubes in Cannon and horrify the rest of us by happily digging into a giant mason jar of sauerkraut, eating sauerkraut right out of that jar, for instance.

But on nearly everything else, I just feel beyond fortunate to have found a partner so courageous in everything that she takes on, from learning English in America after moving from Bulgaria as a little girl to her ``Love Story'' karaoke performances to going head to head with the Senate Rules Committees to help me change our Chamber's bylaws to let parents take newborns onto the Senate floor.

No challenge has been too daunting for her and no task too small. She simply cares. It is who she is, and it is why I am endlessly grateful to have been able to have her by my side for so long through so much.

Let me finish by saying thank you to Kalina, of course, but also her family--Sandy, Wills, and Sofie--for lending your wife, your mom to us for those countless late nights and weekends.

Kalina, I will miss you more than I could ever say, but just know how proud all of us are of you and how lucky I feel that I got to watch you grow into the force for good that you are today.

Bon voyage, my friend. I know you are going to continue to do good for the rest of the world.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, ever since the USS Abraham Lincoln was commissioned in the waning days of the Cold War, it has been known for many things. After a volcano erupted in the Philippines in 1991, the Lincoln led the largest peacetime evacuation of United States military personnel and their families. A baby was even born on board during the evacuation and named Abraham Lincoln.

In 1993, the Lincoln became the first carrier in the Pacific fleet to integrate female aviators. But today, as a result of the President's war with Iran, the Lincoln has achieved another distinction, one it neither sought nor wished to claim. And that is for more than 300 days, over 5,000 sailors and marines aboard the Lincoln were at sea, without visits to their family or their loved ones, without visits to friends apart from fellow servicemembers.

In fact, the Lincoln set a modern-day record for consecutive days at sea without a port visit and a record away from its home port of San Diego. And even now, just recently, after stopping in Thailand for its first regular port call in nearly 9 months, hull rusted, paint peeling, the Lincoln and its crew were still a long way from home. As the President's senseless war has dragged on, it has taken a heavier toll on the lives and well-being of our servicemembers and their families, many of whom are in California.

So how does the Commander in Chief respond when asked last month if carriers like the Lincoln had been deployed too long? Donald Trump said, and this is a direct quote:

No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.

Not nearly long enough?

It was long enough that our sailors had been working 12- to 16-hour shifts, at times facing the danger of enemy missiles. It was long enough that they were forced to ration food and water, shortages that have reportedly caused severe weight loss and health impacts.

It was long enough that crew members have had severe mental health crises, which created significant distress for their families as well to the point where some servicemembers sought to jump off the carrier into the sea. It was

long enough that servicemembers had to deal with black mold that drips, as one servicemember described ``onto your face, shoulders, arms, or head while standing in line for a meal or even walking out of the shower.''

Doug, a constituent from California, wrote a letter to me expressing his deep concerns over his son's service on the Lincoln. His son had to be medically evacuated from the ship after suffering a collapsed lung, which Doug believes was connected to malnutrition and overexertion.

The crew went about 4 weeks without hot water or laundry.

They were on rations for 2 to 3 months while working 12- to

16-hour days.

During that time his family spent thousands of dollars sending him food, but only about half of it arrived.

Doug went on:

After time in the ICU, he returned home to us as a shell of

the son who had left. He is 6'5 and left weighing 210 pounds,

and he returned closer to 180 pounds. He resembled a starved

prisoner of war.

What he told me as a father and veteran turns my stomach and must be brought to light.

Another constituent of mine, Annabelle from San Diego, shared her story about her husband attempting to jump overboard from the Lincoln during his deployment. ``He is scared'' she said. ``He thinks he will get a dishonorable discharge.'' And just because he was burned out, his 13-year career was ruined just like that.

That is not fair. That is not right. That is not what he should be worrying about right now. But this is what Annabelle and her three kids are now living with.

Shelby, a high schooler whose mom is deployed on the Lincoln, spoke about how hard it is to start her senior year without her mom. She asked ``Will she be back before homecoming? my birthday? Christmas?''

I have no idea, and that is all that I think about.

This week, we learned from the Acting Secretary of the Navy that eight U.S. Navy personnel assigned to the Lincoln's carrier strike group attempted suicide during the prolonged time at sea.

The Navy also confirmed that one sailor went overboard from the ship this summer, while another attempted to go overboard. After months of denials, the Defense Department confirmed what has been reported for months, and that is deteriorating mental health aboard the Lincoln and multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard.

These are just some of the alarming, dangerous, and shameful conditions our sailors and marines have endured aboard the Lincoln and also what our families are going through while Pete Hegseth posts workout videos and Donald Trump renames lakes and pores over blueprints for the gilded ballroom.

For Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies, events in black tie; for our servicemembers aboard the Lincoln, showers and meals with black mold. Could there be a clearer encapsulation of this administration's misplaced priorities?

So the American people were told that the war would be over very soon. That was March 9--10 days after the war started. Now the United States is more than 6 months into this disastrous war. Months of negotiations to end the conflict have failed, but the President promises us that the war will soon come to an end after the election.

And what have we achieved in this war that has cost the lives of 19 U.S. servicemembers? Prices at the pump and grocery checkout have skyrocketed. Diesel prices, fertilizer prices are crushing farmers while resultant food prices are crushing the rest of America. Utility and medical bills are out of control. Everyone but the President and his buddies are painfully aware that we are experiencing an affordability crisis in America while the President says ``not long enough.''

In the closing days of the Mexican-American War, our 16th President, whose name the Lincoln proudly carries, was a freshman here in Congress. He wrote to his law partner:

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making

power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the

following reasons--

Lincoln wrote--

Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their

people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the

good of the people was the object. This, our convention

understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly

oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution

that no one man should hold the power of bringing this

oppression upon us.

But your view--

Lincoln wrote--

destroys the whole matter, and places our President where

Kings have always stood.

We need to take Lincoln's words to heart. This Congress is not a royal court to do the bidding and bow and scrape before an all-powerful sovereign. We are a coequal branch of government, and 250 years into this experiment in self-governance, we should show Lincoln's resolve.

Will we continue to place the President where Kings have stood, or will we say at long last, ``enough''?

Will we make it clear that this war, illegal from the start, has gone on too long?

Will we insist on the removal and return of our troops?

I pray that we will, and I urge support on this resolution.

Mr. President, I am going to yield my time to my colleague from Michigan to start first--5 minutes.

Mr. President, I would like to acknowledge my colleague from Michigan for working so well together on this bill. We don't agree on a lot. We do agree 100 percent that Ohio State has a better football team.

But, look, I think, for the people watching, Americans ultimately--whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent, you just want a government that works for you. You want a government that functions, that isn't chaotic, that is actually laser- targeted on not only fixing problems but avoiding problems. This is a huge problem that is coming up.

If you were to go back in a time machine about 26 years, in this Chamber, they passed a bill called the China Normalization Act. The idea was that if we could normalize relations with China, China would enter the World Trade Organization, and it would be absolutely phenomenal for the United States because we would get a place to make things really inexpensively. But what has happened over 25 years, 26 years is that China has built a massive military machine.

We go into meeting after meeting, and whether it is election integrity and the assault on that, whether it is the assault on our critical infrastructure, whether it is the fact that they have blatantly stolen our intellectual property--you were the Ambassador to Japan. You dealt with this every day, with the Japanese saying: Look, the threats from China are real; they are ever present.

If we only could have avoided that vote 26 years ago. I can tell you that what we are talking about here today is even more existential.

As my colleague from Michigan mentioned, it was the auto industry uniquely that built the middle class in this country.

I believe that in a future time, a future Congress, we are going to unite, Republicans and Democrats, around one simple concept: that our job here collectively is to make certain that an American citizen can graduate from high school and get a good enough paying job that they can afford a home, afford to get married, afford to start a family, be able to live in a safe community, and most importantly, retire with dignity. It seems to me that is actually the essence of the American dream. But these jobs are few and far between. They are hard to get. The auto industry can do that.

Let me show just a little chart here for my colleagues. It shows just how important the auto industry is to America--963,000 factory jobs, direct factory jobs.

In your State, I don't have to tell you--I can only imagine how many auto plants you have visited, whether it is Nissan in Smyrna, GM in Spring Hill, or Volkswagen in Chattanooga. You have autos all over your State. These are really, really good jobs. The people who work in those factories meet the definition I just said. We have to make certain, as policymakers, that we do everything possible to make certain those jobs are protected.

If you look at the entire auto industry, when you look at the supply chain--because there are a lot of pieces and parts that go into a car. It is the second largest purchase somebody will make after their home. Mr. President, 2.4 million good, high-paying jobs--these are not minimum-wage jobs; these are family-sustaining wages--and 11 million jobs when you think about the effects. In Chattanooga, TN, the fact that Volkswagen is there, you have all kinds of businesses that exist because of the employment there, because of those wages that allow people to buy homes, spend money.

Now, what is the counter? What is the threat here? What are we really doing? China understands this, I think, better than we do, honestly-- the importance of building their middle class--so what they have done over the last two decades is targeted the auto industry, not to compete in the auto industry but to conquer the auto industry, to create what I have dubbed ``automotive fentanyl'' where they create these predators that go out and don't just compete--because General Motors, Ford, Toyota--you name it--can compete with any car company on Earth. They can't compete with a country that is hell-bent on total conquest.

They now make almost four times as many cars as we do here in America. They export almost as many cars as we make here in America. While their domestic market is dropping, they are producing ever more cars. They need to feed that beast. They need to feed that machine. So what do they do? They go into countries like Germany where, when you are born, the first words from your parents are ``You have to buy a German car.'' Thirty-four percent of hybrids sold in Germany last month were Chinese--in a country that is culturally inclined to buy German vehicles. You look at countries like Ecuador. Fifty-seven percent of the new cars sold in Ecuador are Chinese vehicles. Mexico and Canada are starting to go there. All over the world, you are starting to see this total domination.

In the case of Germany again, Volkswagen Group, which is partially owned by a government entity in Germany, for the first time in their history had to lay off 150,000 workers. Why? Because they can't compete with the nation of China that is hell-bent on destroying their industries.

This is the reality of what we are talking about--$1.2 trillion in GDP. This is what is at stake.

So I will conclude with this. It is really hard to pass legislation. We know that. Our Founders wanted it that way. They wanted to make certain that two Senators from every State, big or small, would have to come together to figure out how to get to a compromise. That requires enormous effort. Introducing bills that will never pass--that is easy. We keep the clerks very busy with papers for bills that will never pass. This is a bill that has almost 100 out of 100 Senators on board. People have totally different ideological points of view, but on this, we have united, which is we cannot allow this threat to happen.

I am confident and hopeful that I can come back to you, Mr. President, next week with my colleague from Michigan and that we can pass the Connected Vehicle Security Act and that when the House comes back on November 8, that the House take up an identical version of this bill that Congressman Moolenaar and Congresswoman Dingell have been working on and that we can get this bill in the hands of the President.

I know that he feels the same way I do, which is that we are not going to let these cars into our market; we are going to make certain that we defend the U.S. auto industry.

So thank you again to my colleague for the hard work. Thank you to all of my colleagues in the U.S. Senate that have provided input and have gotten us to the point where we have a phenomenal piece of legislation. I am very, very hopeful that we will absolutely get this done next week.

I yield the floor.