S.Res. 244

Mr. President, let me describe what I think is going on here on the Senate floor. Today is an unusual and interesting day.

What we understood the plan was, was that the majority was going to move to the Congressional Review Act regarding the California clean air rule in an effort to overrule the Clean Air Act rule for the fossil fuel industry, which the majority so diligently serves.

The problem with that is that the Parliamentarian has ruled that the Congressional Review Act does not apply to the waiver that California gets, allowing it to do its own clean air standard. So they had a problem. The problem was that Democrats were going to make a point of order saying: Hey, you can't do that. We have argued this matter. We both went before the Parliamentarian. We made our case. We filed our pleadings. We got a decision. In our view, it was not even a close call of a decision. But that is in our view. And what you are really doing here is, for the fossil fuel industry, going nuclear, overruling the Senate Parliamentarian to accomplish a legislative task--to amend, basically, the Congressional Review Act--and then open the door for that to undo a 30-year tradition of California and other States like Rhode Island being able to operate under better clean air standards and the vehicle emissions standards than the Federal Government may be willing to accomplish.

So that is where we thought we were. Now, what is happening is that we have gone to a different CRA, this one having to do with hydrogen vehicles. The minority has 5 hours. There is a total of 10 hours, evenly divided. I suspect the majority is not going to use much of that time. But the minority has 5 hours to talk about what is going on.

We are now in the 5-hour debate period on the hydrogen vehicle CRA, as the majority moves toward making its play on the California clean air standard.

This is a slight bump in the road for them, but our understanding is that there is a new plan. The new plan is, at the conclusion of our 5 hours, to make a new point of order that allows them to do the California CRA effort and create a new way to get around the terms of the Congressional Review Act.

The predicament for them is that the Congressional Review Act, as a law--passed by the Senate, passed by the House, signed into law by the President--says: In the Senate, which is where we are, when a committee is discharged from further consideration of a joint resolution, which is where we are, all points of order against the joint resolution are waived.

They intend to create a Senate exception to that. We expect the Parliamentarian will say, when they offer this point of order, based on the statute, based on the law, well, that is not in order. Then they will go nuclear on this. They will bring everybody back to, by a simple majority vote of 51, overrule the Parliamentarian as to that new point of order.

The purpose is to create a point of order that allows a bypass of the Parliamentarian's decision--a very sound one, a clear one, in my view, based on precedent, law, history, tradition, all of it--that the CRA effort to undermine California's clean air standard does not work under Senate rules.

In a sense, this is like a double nuclear option. They are going to overrule the Parliamentarian to create a new point of order under the CRA that will amend, in effect, the CRA. It will make the law regarding this no longer effective because they will come in and overrule the Parliamentarian.

And, then, even though the Parliamentarian's ruling is that you can't use the CRA to go after the California waiver, they don't have to overrule that directly because they will have, by overruling the Parliamentarian, created this little end-around.

So I guess this is a demonstration of how many hoops the Senate majority is willing to jump through for their fossil fuel supports.

And it ends at the same point, which is the purpose of the exercise. It ends with the Parliamentarian being overruled, and it ends with an attack on California and other sovereign States' ability to require cleaner air and lower vehicle emissions in their States.

Now, why does that matter? Well, obviously, if you are the fossil fuel industry, one of the things you sell is gasoline, and one of the things that the California clean air and emissions standards do is to require the auto industry to make automobiles more efficient--maybe even make them hybrid, maybe even make them electric. And whether they are more efficient or hybrid or electric, it all ends in the same place for the fossil fuel industry, which is: We can't sell as much polluting gasoline, and we want to sell more gasoline, and we don't like clean air standards that get in the way of us selling as much gasoline as we want to.

So we are here through this complex parliamentary rigmarole to overrule the Parliamentarian to get around her ruling that the Congressional Review Act only covers rulemakings, not the California waiver and other things. One of the problems with that is that--you know, if you give a mouse a cookie--it doesn't stop here; it opens the Congressional Review Act, which was very specifically designed to address rulemakings within a period of time after the conclusion of the rulemaking. And this would allow essentially anything you could put into the Federal Register to be submitted to Congress for Congressional Review Act review, no matter when it was done. All you have to do is re-up it with a submission and send it in to Congress, the California waiver being an example of that in the sense that it has been around for about 30 years now.

So one of the Congressional Review Act's limitations was it had a brief time window in which you were allowed to come to Congress to disapprove a rule, and that time period is now blown to smithereens if they go through with this parliamentary scheme.

The second thing is, it had to be a rulemaking; that it added a process at the end of the Administrative Procedure Act rulemaking, when the rule was finally enacted into law as an Agency rule. You always had the ability to go to court and sue and say that the Administrative Procedure Act was violated, it is arbitrary and capricious, was a violation of the law or whatever. This gave it political extra opportunity, which was to jump straight to Congress and just ask us to disapprove it. You don't have to prove, then, that there is anything wrong with the rule; just, politically, we don't like it so we are going to jam it.

And so, when you expand beyond just APA rulemaking to essentially any Executive decision that can be dumped into the Federal Register to create a submission that can then be brought here, you have opened a massive, massive array of Executive actions to Congressional Review Act disapproval.

As my colleagues have said, it could be as simple as a lease, as simple as a permit, as simple as a license. Essentially, any Executive decision since the passage of the Congressional Review Act can now be brought here on a purely political basis and--boom--blown up.

If my colleagues on the other side don't think that we will use this if they do this, they have taken leave of their senses. Of course we will. They are about to create a new Senate in which the CRA can be used for an immense array of purposes, well beyond what the actual law says.

(Mr. SHEEHY assumed the Chair.)

They don't have to be doing this. Let's be clear. They do not have to be doing this. There are other ways to serve their fossil fuel industry friends in the industry's desire to attack the vehicle emissions standards, the clean air standards. There are a whole bunch of them. One, they could do it administratively.

In fact, in 2019, the Trump administration withdrew a previously granted Clean Air Act waiver. And to do that, it made findings per a Clean Air Act process--administrative findings per a Clean Air Act process--as to the three criteria established under the Clean Air Act that determine whether a waiver application gets granted or denied.

So they already tried that once. They know that that is an avenue. Why did they not want to do that? Well, for starters, it is amenable to challenge if it is done unlawfully, if it is done arbitrarily and capriciously--the magic words of administrative mischief. And you end up in a forum like a court where you have to defend your facts, unlike here where all you have to do is have a majority and ram it through. So they didn't want to do it administratively, but they could have, and they already tried in the last Trump administration.

What else could they have done? Well, this is California's Clean Air Act standard. They could have gone and negotiated with the sovereign State of California and the other sovereign States that have attached themselves to the cleaner standard of California, which includes Rhode Island. This could be done through a regular process of negotiation.

We just had the Administrator of the EPA in the committee this morning for a lively exchange, and he repeatedly talked about how interested EPA was in cooperative federalism; that the Federal Government has to be a real partner with sovereign States; that we shouldn't be lording it over the sovereign States; they have expertise and interests of their own and cooperative federalism means that the Federal Government and the State governments should work as partners to accomplish goals.

Well, that was pretty rich, while EPA is trying to roll a sovereign State that is the fourth biggest economy on the planet without any hint of negotiation or cooperative federalism or effort--because when you are negotiating, the other side gets a vote, too, and you have to come to an agreement. And it is much easier to come here and have your friends in the Senate do your bidding in the Senate without any standard other than: Do we have the votes?

But they could have done it that way. There is a totally clear path to negotiate with California--say: Hey, circumstances have changed in this way or that. We have new policy issues that we want to argue to you, and let's try to figure out if we can work this out.

Nope. Didn't even try.

The other way to do this would be to go back and actually change the Congressional Review Act, right? It is a statute so we can amend it. And we could go through the process of amendment and say: OK, we don't want the Congressional Review Act to be limited to rulemakings any longer. We want to open it up to more stuff. And we could have a conversation about what should and should not be included in an expanded gateway to the Congressional Review Act. The House would have its say. You would end up doing what we call around here regular order. And in the Senate the minority--because you would have to get through cloture, the minority would have a chance to make our points. And you could do an amendment using regular order. Again, they would have to listen to us, and they would have to pay attention to facts.

Now, all they have to pay attention to are interests--and the fossil fuel interest is their dominant interest--and votes, do they have the votes. And those make it easy to choose this way, to go nuclear in the Senate rather than do the work either of amending the Congressional Review Act by law or negotiating with a sovereign State in ordinary Federal-State cooperative federalism or pursue that Clean Air Act administrative process that they had begun back in Trump 1.

Again, the reason not to do all those three is you can't just roll everybody and do what the fossil fuel industry wants. So here we are. This is because

this is the shortcut. This is the thing that does what the fossil fuel industry wants.

And the price is going to be very, very high because, in my recollection, there has never been a legislative outcome in this body determined by overruling the Parliamentarian. We have gone back and forth on nominations, but on a legislative outcome which changes the Congressional Review Act and which allows an attack on a statutory waiver in the Clean Air Act for the State of California--those are legislative in their effect. And so, to me, that is not the right way that we should be going about this.

So there are a bunch of problems with what is going on here, but to understand the floor machinations we are about to go through--the overruling of the Parliamentarian to create an end-around so we don't have to overrule but can only violate the order of the Parliamentarian on the CRA--you really have to understand the baseline story here. And the baseline story here is that this is the fossil fuel industry in action. It may look like it is a majority and a minority in the Senate having an argument. No. It is the fossil fuel industry in action, trying to create a shortcut for itself so it can sell more gasoline and pollute more and ignore all the States that have joined with California to demand cleaner air for their constituents.

The fossil fuel industry essentially runs the Republican Party right now. The fossil fuel industry hates this clean air standard because it sells less gasoline in the States where the clean air standard is there. And it sells less gasoline in other States because it is hard to market both a clean vehicle and a dirty vehicle side by side. So to get to the enormous number of States that are with California on this and to sell into their markets, they have to make more efficient vehicles everywhere so that everybody enjoys the benefit of spending less on gasoline, getting better vehicle mileage, and having cleaner air.

So it actually works out pretty well for everybody except--except-- the fossil fuel industry, which, of course, wants to sell more gasoline, period and end of story. And what they have is a willing Senate majority that will basically do whatever it is that they want, and they have an executive branch that has been infiltrated by fossil fuel interests and is now essentially run by fossil fuel interests.

In my previous ``Time to Wake Up'' speeches, I have described--I am probably not going to get this perfectly right because I am going from memory here, but there is a kind of wasp that injects its larvae into another bug; and as the larval wasp begins to grow, it takes over the neural system, it takes over the command and control system of the other bug. So the other bug is still alive. It still looks like the other bug's shape and size and all of that. It doesn't look any different than a regular other bug, but it is being driven from inside by the larval wasp, which tells it to go do things that then create a place where the larval wasp can grow, can nest, can feed, whatever it needs to do.

It takes over the bug from the inside and takes over command and control, and steers it around. That, to me, is a pretty good analogy for what the fossil fuel industry is doing with the U.S. Government right now.

All of their front groups, all the machinery they created over the years to propagate the fraud of climate denial and to exert wild political influence all over the country, all of that just slots right into positions in government that are taken over by people who say, you know, that the concern about climate change is crud, climate change is a religion and not science.

They speak utter nonsense. It is like the worship of Baal back in Biblical times, bowing down to fossil fuel and doing whatever it is the great god Baal wants.

Well, things didn't work out too well for the priests of Baal, if you followed that analogy, but that is where we are. And what all of this overlooks is the coming storm.

When the President pretends that climate change is a hoax, he disables government's ability to prepare for a coming storm. When the executive branch sensors the use of the terms ``climate change,'' demands that they be struck from government documents, that prevents the executive branch from preparing for the coming storm.

When the executive branch--as we heard just today in the Environment and Public Works Committee--goes around and terminates grants based on a heresy hunt, where they are looking through the grants for language they don't like--like ``equity,'' there is a bad word; ``inclusion,'' can't have that; ``climate,'' definitely worth terminating a grant over that--they are destroying the programs that would help communities prepare for the coming storm because they have the word ``climate'' in them.

They even went so far in the executive branch as to have an Executive order on energy that refused to include either solar energy or wind energy in the definition of ``energy.'' Like, you can say what you want about whether you like solar or whether you like wind, but all you have to do is go to a solar facility or go to a wind facility, and you can see the electrons coming off of it.

The idea that that is not energy, that is not just a violation of law and common sense, that violates the dictionary. But that is how far the fossil fuel industry wasp will drive the Trump administration bug to ignore the coming storm.

What does the coming storm look like? Well, let me start.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to use a larger than usual graphic in order to show an old page from the New York Times.

Mr. President, now this is always good to remember because it wasn't always this way with President Trump. Here in 2009, there was a full-page ad in the New York Times. President Obama was getting ready to send a crew to Copenhagen for the COP, the climate change conference, and business leaders spoke up about that, saying, as business leaders, here is what we have to say:

[One,] if we fail to act now, it is scientifically

irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible

consequences for humanity and our planet.

Well, that is kind of the point here, and I will get into, in a moment, what some of those catastrophic and irreversible consequences look like.

And it goes on to demand that the Obama administration show leadership on climate change:

Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in

modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our

planet.

Signed by Donald J. Trump, chairman and President; Donald J. Trump, Jr., EVP; Eric F. Trump, EVP; Ivanka M. Trump, EVP; and the Trump organization.

So there have been times when the Trump family understood what climate change was all about, understood the catastrophic and irreversible consequences that were looming, and were willing to say so.

But in between came exposure to politics, exposure to the power of fossil fuel on the Republican side and the understanding that if you really want to make it in Republican politics, you have got to do whatever the fossil fuel industry wants, whenever the fossil fuel industry wants it. That means we are ignoring some pretty serious warnings.

One of the earliest warnings came from Freddie Mac. Freddie Mac is not a green organization. Freddie Mac is a huge mortgage company, a federally chartered giant mortgage company. And as a giant mortgage company, it has a very distinct interest in the mortgage market.

And what did the chief economist for Freddie Mac warn? He warned that climate change was making coastal properties uninsurable. Climate change was making coastal properties uninsurable, either because sea levels were rising and they would flood or because storms were worse and there would be more damage by hurricanes and massive rains or because, who knows, they would lose access to the fresh water in their wells because of the infiltration of salt water underground. There are all sorts of ways in which climate risk hits coastal properties.

So the chief economist said: Here is how that works. The climate risk disrupts the insurance industry as to certain properties--meaning, those properties also can't get a mortgage any longer.

Freddie Mac is a mortgage giant. It knows what is needed for a mortgage. What is needed for a mortgage is an insurance policy. No insurance policy, no mortgage.

So now you have got properties along the coast that are at risk, that can't get insurance and can't get a mortgage. What happens to the value of those properties? Well, it goes down, he predicted. He predicted a coastal property values crash as a result of that cascade from climate risk to uninsurability to no mortgages.

And the coastal properties values crash he predicted was going to be so severe that it would look like 2008--that mortgage meltdown--all over again, and he stands by that testimony. In fact, he came when I was chairman of the Budget Committee to reiterate it.

Something else has changed in the meantime, though. It is not just coastal property risk. Ask any of our Western colleagues about wildfire risk and about what is going on in areas that have wildfire risk that the insurance company can't figure out, can't predict; and, therefore, it backs away from.

We are seeing that all across the country. The coastal property values crash warning now has an evil sibling: the wildfire adjacent property values crash warning. And either one of them, or both, could create that cascade from uninsurability to unmortgageability to crash in property values to nationwide recession.

He is not alone. A little over a month ago, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Chairman Powell came and testified in the Banking Committee. What did Chairman Powell have to say? He said that in 10 to 15 years, it will be impossible to get insurance or a mortgage in entire regions of the United States; exactly that cascade--climate risk, uninsurability, can't get a mortgage, property values crash.

Here is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, also not green, just a guy who is interested in dealing with risk to the financial system, and he is saying: Here it comes, buckle up. We are going to see that in 10 to 15 years.

Well, if we are going to see that in 10 to 15 years, who is looking at that now? Investors are; insurance companies are. You can't wait 10 to 15 years for the effects of entire regions of the country that can't get mortgages to start to be felt. That is going to start to happen now, and, in fact, it is. Look at the high-risk areas in the country.

Here, we see things like--from our Budget Committee work--these are nonrenewal rates around the country. And you can see in high-risk areas--Florida or coastal, California for both coastal and wildfire, that nonrenewals are spiking up in areas of climate risk.

What is nonrenewal? A nonrenewal is when your insurance company says to you: You know, thanks for all the premium you paid all these years, but your piece of property has now become uninsurable. We can't manage that risk any longer. Therefore, you are fired. Go find another insurance company.

Well, that is a big mess.

Then we go onto First Street, which took some of this data and others and started predicting forward. This is where home values are headed because of climate change.

You can see in these darker red areas, you are looking at actual reductions in home value, right? Not your home is your castle and it is always going to be valuable but, actually, the value of it goes down.

Some of the marks go as much as 100-percent loss of value. Eighty percent is this color. Sixty percent is this color. And you can see it speckled throughout the country. Places where, in the time of a 30-year mortgage--in the time of a 30-year mortgage, you are going to see property values actually go down--the property values crash that was predicted by Freddie Mac and the loss of mortgage availability that was predicted by Chairman Powell.

Here is another one: Where do insurance premiums go in the next 30 years? Well, in a lot of places, like down in Florida, we have already seen double, triple, and quadruple. An average home insurance payment in Miami Dade County is $17,000 a year. You look down here at Miami, and it is in the dark zone where it is supposed to go up 300 percent. That is a quadrupling, just so you know.

So if you are at $17,000 now and you are going to quadruple in 30 years, that means you are going to end up--do the math. I am not doing it right now in my head, but let's say it is $70,000 a year, right? Quadrupling $17,000--$68,000 a year.

If you have a property that has a carrying cost for the buyer of $68,000 a year, how valuable is that property? What is the present value of that liability that comes with the property? It is a huge liability, and it knocks down the value of the property.

So that is why the home value evidence that First Street collected here relates to the insurance premium expense. You don't just lose the value of your house when your property isn't mortgageable any longer and you can't find anybody to buy it other than a cash buyer; you also lose the value of your house when the carrying cost of your home insurance becomes so great that nobody wants to buy into that annual $68,000 liability.

How much would you pay to have to write a $68,000 check every year? Not much. It would have to be a pretty darn nice house to cover that. And for a lot of people, that just erases the value of the home, which is why we get there.

So, First Street, their estimate was that climate change could erase $1.4 trillion in U.S. residential real estate value by 2055 due to these concerns that they put on the chart. And they are not alone. It is not just Freddie Mac; it is not just First Street Foundation; it is not just Fed Chair Powell.

Here is the Mortgage Bankers Association. You think that is a green group? Fat chance. But they do care about mortgages, and what they say in their report is:

Chronic physical risk associated with climate change--i.e.

the insurance risk--may exceed the capacity of insurance and

government assistance to sustain some areas.

That kind of tracks with Jay Powell saying there are going to be whole regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage any longer--even with government help, even with insurance, it just doesn't work any longer.

So when an advocacy group like that for the mortgage bankers is giving this warning, it might be worth paying attention to. It might be worth not just dismissing it: Oh, climate change is a hoax. None of us need to worry about that.

The Economist Magazine, also about as ungreen as it can be. And the Economist Magazine--this is a cover story. If you can't read it, it says: ``The next housing disaster,'' and it is a house on a piece of land that is being eroded by seas.

If the size of the risk suddenly sinks in and borrowers and

lenders alike realize the collateral underpinning so many

transactions--

Like those mortgages--

is not worth as much as they thought--

Because those prices have fallen as insurance rates climbed--

a wave of repricing will reverberate through financial

markets.

Here is the punch line:

Climate change, in short, could prompt the next global

property crash.

Another way they say it in the article is this:

At present, the risks of climate change are not properly

reflected in house prices. A study in Nature, a journal,

finds that if the expected losses from increased flooding

alone--

That is that coastal value crash risk; not the wildfire one, just flooding--

were taken into account, the value of American homes would

fall by from $121 billion to $237 billion.

Again aligning with what First Street predicted--changes in Americans' home values because of climate risk uninsurability and unmortgageability.

Mr. President, $121 billion to $237 billion is a pretty big hit on those homeowners whose properties have lost that value.

Globally, what they say is that we are looking at a $25 trillion hit to global real estate markets. The largest asset class on the planet is real estate, and it is looking at a $25 trillion hit. Yeah, let's ignore that and believe the fossil fuel-funded White House that says it is a hoax. That makes a lot of sense.

Obviously, if there is going to be a property values crash and if mortgages are going to be in the center of it, that is not great for the banking industry. Why? First of all, the banking industry makes a lot of money off of mortgages.

If a whole bunch of properties won't sustain a mortgage any longer, that shrinks the market, so there is less revenue to be had for the banking industry.

Also, if you have a mortgage on your books as a bank, the liability-- what the owner owes you on the mortgage--gets offset in your solvency determination by the value of the collateral that you hold against that liability. The collateral is the value of the home.

What happens to a bank in a region where the value of the home has fallen by half? What happens when the homeowner owes more money than the property is now worth? That hits the bank's loan-to-value ratio. That is a determinant of bank solvency.

So, guess what, this is not just me saying this; the International Financial Stability Board just did this report in January giving a warning to the global banking system: Look out. Buckle up. Climate risk is coming. Uninsurability is coming. Unmortgageability is coming. You need to plan to stay solvent through and survive that crisis.

So I will tell you, this is a very technical report done by very technical people. The Financial Stability Board is, again, not a green organization, but they do have an obligation to look forward and predict risk, and they are predicting this risk to the global banking system.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, during Trump 1, by the way, issued this report--``Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System''--saying that climate change poses systemic risk to the U.S. economy across multiple sectors ``simultaneously and within a short timeframe''--this is coming at us--undermining the U.S. financial system's ability to sustain the economy.

Let me read the opening sentence from the report, from the executive summary:

Climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the

U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the

American economy.

Precisely as the other experts argued.

Risk to insurance, to mortgage, to property values crash, to economic collapse.

On the next page, they say among findings of the report:

A central finding of this report is that climate change

could pose systemic risks to the U.S. financial system.

Let me say a word on systemic risks because it sounds like a pretty dull term. It is not like apocalyptic risk, catastrophic risk; it just says systemic risk. What does that mean? That means that the whole system takes a hit. That means that the damage is not contained to the sector where the damage is happening.

That is like 2008 all over again. We had that set of bad mortgages, but when that set of bad mortgages--when it became apparent that that was fake and phony and that there was not real value there, it didn't just harm the mortgage holders, it took down entire investment firms, and that crash cascaded out through the entire economy.

Those of us who were here in 2008--I can remember the financial agony of Rhode Islanders when that recession hit so hard and so suddenly. I can remember the people who were at the Treasury and at the Fed who were supposed to prop up our economy in a state of absolute, sweating panic about how this crash was going to wipe out the U.S. financial system. That is what systemic risk is. It means the whole thing goes down, the whole system.

So it sounds like a pretty mild term, but if you are familiar with economics, you know that is one of the scariest words in the economic lexicon.

What else have we here? We have Deloitte--not very green, either--a big consulting powerhouse. Here is what they say about continuing to fiddle around on climate change, pretend it is a hoax, censor the term, and act like idiots about a true coming risk with abundant warnings about the risk. They say that we have a range of outcomes. By 2070-- that was their target period--they said that if we can start getting climate right, if we can start addressing this problem before these systemic harms happen, then what is going to happen is the global GDP will increase by around $40 trillion; i.e., the world will be better off financially by $40 trillion by our making the right decisions to get climate change right. That is one outcome.

The other option is that we continue goofing off. We continue fiddling around and lying about climate change or believing the lies about climate change. We continue ignoring the evidence. We continue ignoring what we are seeing with our own eyes in the insurance industry in regions of the United States right now, already.

Go around Florida and talk about property insurance and tell me what you hear, because I am pretty sure I know because I have been there and heard it.

The other is a $180 trillion hit to global GDP, which means there is a $220 trillion swing that will come to pass in the lives of children now. The world can be $220 trillion poorer or $220 trillion richer depending on whether we continue to screw up responding to climate change, ignore it, and listen to the worst people in the world to listen to--the fossil fuel industry, which is wreathed in conflicts of interest on the subject, crawling with conflicts of interest, infested with conflicts of interest, and eager to shove those conflicts of interest into our politics with lies and dark money, secret influence. It is one of the fouler things that have been done, what has been done in our Congress by the fossil fuel industry.

If Deloitte is right, that $220 trillion swing is a hell of an outcome for people who will be alive then--all because we won't make good decisions now.

Potsdam Institute says that climate change losses by 2049 could hit $38 trillion and then get bigger after that.

So, again, we are dealing with a sooner window than 2070, but we are dealing with very, very, very big numbers--$25 trillion hit to the global real estate sector; $38 trillion hit from lost agricultural yields, labor productivity, and infrastructure; $220 trillion globally, depending on whether we get this right or continue to be fooled by those with the worst conflicts of interest.

Recently, Allianz, which, by the way, is the biggest insurance company in the world, a trillion-dollar company--two things about the insurance industry and Allianz in particular. The insurance industry needs to predict accurately in order to price its insurance correctly. So, first of all, they are making like trillion-dollar bets on what the future is going to look like. They are not just lying to make up stuff so that they can sell more gasoline next year in California and Rhode Island and other States; they have to look out.

When they do look out, not only do they have that huge bet that they are placing on what the world is going to look like, what risk they are insuring, they are actually under a fiduciary obligation. They can be sued by their shareholders and by their members if they are not doing proper due diligence and getting it right.

So when the insurance industry is doing signals like this, it is worth paying attention. The insurance industry is under a fiduciary obligation to get it right, the fossil fuel industry has a massive conflict of interest to tell us stuff that is wrong, and we are believing the fossil fuel industry? It is madness or it is politics or worse.

Well, here is what the Allianz board member wrote:

We are fast approaching temperature levels--1.5 degrees

[centigrade], 2 degrees [centigrade], 3 degrees

[centigrade]--where insurers will no longer be able to offer

coverage. . . . Entire regions are becoming uninsurable.

Sound familiar? Fed Chair Powell used almost the exact same language. They are seeing the same thing.

This is a systemic risk. Remember what I said about systemic risk? Here is a board member of the largest insurance company on the planet, with a trillion dollars at stake, saying that this is a systemic risk that threatens ``the very foundation of the financial sector''--just like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission report threatened, just like the International Financial Stability Board warned.

This is a systemic risk that threatens ``the very foundation of the financial sector.'' How? He continues. If insurance is no longer available, ``other financial services become unavailable'' too. A house that cannot be insured cannot be mortgaged.

This is the same deal that the chief economist of Freddie Mac was predicting. No bank will issue loans for uninsurable property.

Credit markets freeze. This is a climate-induced credit crunch.

He also points out in his article something that I hadn't paid attention to. I was looking at the ``insurance to mortgage to property values'' crash. But what he points out is that, if you go to the financial sector, big wheeler-dealers in the financial world do big deals and transactions, and very often those transactions depend on an insurance component to make the deal work. And in areas where the risk involved in that transaction is uninsurable, then the transaction can't happen any longer.

So it is not just mortgages and the mortgage market that are imperiled by this insurance risk. It is the whole swath of other financial transactions, which is why the title was ``An End to Capitalism.'' That is what we are dealing with.

There is a lot more that I could go through. Here is my current binder on the economic risks of climate change, which includes these articles and more. I have circulated it to Finance Committee members. I have circulated it to Budget Committee members. I have circulated it to Environment and Public Works Committee members. I don't think anybody really wants to read it because, in this place, the fossil fuel industry gets what it wants, whatever it wants, whenever it wants. And the fossil fuel industry does not want the Senate or the House paying any attention to these looming risks, to these storm warnings that are coming.

I have been through small insurance collapses in Rhode Island--two of them. One was a banking insurance--State-backed banking insurer--that failed just as I was coming in as a new Governor's legal counsel. And as we saw this beginning to fail, he asked me to handle the issue. So it was a handful of an issue, I will tell you, because we knew that the insurer was going to fail, and we knew that all of the insured banks would no longer be able to honor their accounts. And we knew that about a third of Rhode Islanders had money in those various banking institutions and that they would lose access to their funds until we sorted this out. And it happened the day that the new Governor was sworn in.

I can remember preparing the needed papers to take over the closed institution in an all-nighter in a law firm and, in the morning, running the papers up to the Governor's office through the cold weather of a Rhode Island January as the guns were firing, signaling the start of the new administration--the ceremonial guns of probably the Newport Artillery Company.

And on day one, we had to close all of these banking institutions, and I spent the next many months of my life trying to figure out how to get them back, get depositors repaid, and clean up the insurance system.

So I know that when Ernest Hemingway was asked, ``How did you go broke?'' he said, ``Gradually, and then all at once.'' That is how these insurance crises happen.

The Rhode Island Share and Deposit Indemnity Corporation went broke gradually and then all at once. It was just a matter of days from steady state status to complete calamity, and we had to dig our way back out of it.

The next one was workers' compensation insurance--that too, gradually and then all at once.

Like the California FAIR Plan, we had a backstop insurance entity that, if you couldn't get insurance in the regular market, you would go to the State entity, and then your risk would be farmed out to all of the other companies--which is fine if it is 2 or 3 or 4 percent of the market. But when that company starts to have a huge share of the market and huge losses, the insurance companies look around and say: Wow, we are going to own our share of those losses. I don't want to do business here any longer.

They came in, and in a matter of a day or two, every single workers' comp insurer in Rhode Island had said: We are out of here. We are done. We are closing.

And we had until the end of their policy to stand up a whole new workers' compensation system that paid for itself and was fair to workers.

Between those two things, I don't think I have ever worked so hard in my life. But we solved both of those problems.

Now, you may say: Well, that is just a little problem in a little State. Yes.

Many years ago, my father set up Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict in the Defense Department. He was the first SOLOC, as they called it. And one of the things that people in Special Operations really didn't like was being told that what they were doing was low intensity.

Mr. Whitehouse, when it is you that is being shot at, it is not low intensity. We have got to get rid of that name.

So small fights can be brutally intense fights, and these were small but brutally intense situations in Rhode Island. And the lesson to me is really clear: These things happen gradually and then all at once. And we are well into the gradual part of what climate change is doing to insurance markets, and the cascade from that into mortgage markets and into property values and into economic recession is now entirely predictable--indeed, predicted by essentially anyone who is, A, paying attention to this, and, B, not on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry.

So when we are messing around with Senate parliamentary procedures, when we are actually threatening--maybe cooler heads will prevail-- threatening to go nuclear, threatening to overrule a ruling of the Parliamentarian just to run a political errand for the fossil fuel industry to help it sell more gasoline, we are doing two really evil things at once: We are doing real damage to this institution that will be very hard to walk back from; and, two, we are indulging an industry with a massive special interest and a massive conflict of interest that is simply out to sell more gasoline and that wants us to ignore the risk that its emissions are creating in the world.

And we are now, in this building, so overwhelmed by that fossil fuel political influence infrastructure--all its dark money running through super PACs, all its lies being spouted out by phony front groups, all of the fake scientists making up stuff that isn't science but sounds good because it was cooked up on Madison Avenue to sound good. And now they have actually infiltrated the office of government, and they are running the U.S. Government from the inside with a view to making sure that nobody pays attention to the climate harm.

And I will close with a different point, which is that I have spent my time so far on the floor talking about how a corrupting industry has used its influence in Congress to steer us away from paying attention to a massive economic risk that numerous expert voices have warned us is in peril--and not just expert voices but many who are under a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders.

We had in the Budget Committee the CEO of Aon, which is one of the biggest insurance companies in the world. He is their U.S. CEO. He came in to testify and give that same warning. Over and over and over again, we are getting that warning about the economic peril that is looming, where we are now in it gradually, and we are waiting for ``all at once'' to happen.

And I talk about that as an economic matter because this is the ``House of Mammon,'' where the worship of the fossil fuel god Baal and money is the No. 1 thing that we do. So I am speaking in the terms that the Senate and the House most pay attention to, which is money--money.

But know that behind the economic peril is real natural disaster, is real tumult in the natural systems of the Earth that have allowed our species to develop for 20,000 years in a relatively safe harbor of limited atmospheric carbon, a healthy climate range, moderate storm activity, and a robust ecosystem around us where that security and that safety have allowed the ecosystem to flourish.

And it happens in a million small ways. One of my favorites was the red knot. There is a bird; it is called the red knot. It lands in Delaware every year, and lots of them land in Delaware every year, and they come to Delaware every year because the horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay come ashore to lay their eggs. So it is like social hour for horseshoe crabs, but it is also feeding frenzy for birds that like to eat the horseshoe crab eggs.

But here is the deal about the red knot. I bet you don't know where they come from to get to Delaware Bay for that moment when the horseshoe crabs are laying their eggs. They come from

Brazil. They have come from all the way down in Patagonia. They have flown up to Brazil, and then they go from Brazil over the water to Delaware Bay.

Imagine how long it takes to fly from Brazil to the east coast, to Delaware, in a jet plane. These little birds, they do it on their own. They are not big. They are about that big. And they fly all that way on their own.

It is such an arduous journey that their bodies actually metamorphose a bit during the journey to make it possible. It is one of the miracles of creation that this little bird can make that astonishing journey and have the physical changes to its body that take place during that trip make it possible for that little bird to make that journey.

And the reason that species makes it and survives is because, in God's great ecosystem, they have figured out that if they land at this time in this bay, the food will be there for them. And if we screw that up with fossil fuel emissions so that the schedule of the horseshoe crabs' egg laying goes off and those red knots come all the way from Brazil and there are no eggs there for them--they are too late; they are too early--that is how populations crash.

That is just one tiny example. That is one thread of this beautiful interlocking natural planet that we have, and there are a million more such threads that put the world together that we take for granted.

Behind the looming economic risk is a disruption of the Earth's natural systems that goes well beyond just economic harm.

It means that the creek where your grandfather taught you to fish and where you want to teach your granddaughter to fish isn't going to have the fish in it any longer. Can you put a price on that? No. It means that the water flowing out of the Himalayas--fought over between Pakistan and India forever--becomes less because there is dramatically less glacier in the Himalayas to provide the glacial flow down into those rivers.

And now you have a conflict between those countries over that most elemental need of humans--water. Can you put a price on that risk? Coastal homes all over the world are being lost to sea level rise.

After Superstorm Sandy, I walked the beaches near Matunuck, RI, and there was a man standing on the shore near his house. His house was tipped over because the storm had eroded the foundations of it, and he was looking at his house. They spent time going into it. It was tipping over. It was dangerous to go in, but they were getting out as much stuff as they could.

I asked him: Tell me the story of this house. It was a nice old house, been there a long time. He said: Well, I remember being here as a baby. It was my grandparents' house. They came here in the summers. It was beautiful. We had all this beach in front of us. We even had a lawn in front of us. The thing I want most in my life is to be able to pass this home on to my grandchildren; to have that family tradition, generation after generation after generation, to be able to come to this beautiful place and enjoy this beautiful shore and continue this glorious family tradition.

How do you put a price on that when that is taken away because we are too damned lazy and indolent to clean up the fossil fuel industry's mess when they won't do it?

My point is that as I focus on the economics of this--because that is what people care about in this place--there is a whole other set of costs to mankind and to our Earth that we will be forcing future generations to bear that have nothing to do with the almighty dollar but actually may be worse in terms of humankind and the human spirit.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, notwithstanding the distinguished majority leader's accusations of mendacity and hypocrisy and misrepresentation, the facts at heart here are quite simple: The waiver at issue is not a rule and was never a rule. Thirty years of precedent and practice at EPA and in this body prove that. So what the GAO did here was not unprecedented.

What was unprecedented was for the House to send over a document claiming falsely, according to the Parliamentarian, that the waiver is, in fact, a rule under the CRA. And to blame the GAO or the Parliamentarian for that is to mistake the referee for the player who committed the foul. The foul here is pretending that a waiver is a rule, and both the GAO and the Parliamentarian independently blew the whistle on that foul. Those are the facts.

Mr. President, while we are waiting for the next opportunity to move on the legislation to liberate small businesses from the tariffs of the Trump administration, I would just like to speak for a few minutes about the attempts by the Republican leadership to truncate the process by which California is able to have a waiver to increase the efficiency of the vehicles which are driven in California, but the same thing would be true across the rest of the Nation.

All I want to say is that, right now, China is investing $1 trillion this year in clean energy, low-carbon technologies--$1 trillion in 1 year. Japan has just announced they are investing $1 trillion in clean energy, low-carbon technologies.

So what we are debating here is going to absolutely allow for these other countries to catch up to us, and we will ultimately fall further and further behind, especially in the efficiency of the vehicles which we drive in this country. We might as well put a bow on an entire industry over the long term and just hand it over to countries around the world that are focusing on these technologies.

That is why this is a big mistake. We should not be allowing for a procedural trick to be played here that is unprecedented in the history of the Senate, to then have the underlying issue be really not debated the way it should in terms of the consequences for our Nation and for the planet in terms of the greenhouse gases, additionally, that are going to go up that will endanger our planet.

So I just wanted to make that comment. I will come back later in order to speak on it.

At this point, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today, I rise to advocate to my colleagues in the Senate for my Small Business Liberation Act, and I do so with Leader Schumer and Senator Hirono, who have each already spoken on this very important issue.

Here is what the bill would do: The bill would give relief from President Trump's disastrous, destructive, small business-killing tariffs that have been turning Main Street into ``Pain Street'' all over our country for the last 7 weeks.

I would also provide with my bill certainty to the constant whiplash and chaos that is President Trump's tariff policies by exempting small businesses from the baseline 10-percent tariffs and the tariffs that have been on a 90-day pause since April 9.

So let me just explain what I am talking about. On April 2, President Trump imposed a 10-percent tariff on pretty much the whole world. In other words, a 10-percent tax on anything coming into the country--10 percent.

He also imposed an additional--called reciprocal tariff--on April 2 as well. And those tariffs, for example, were an additional 20 percent on the EU or an additional--we will just say--32 percent on Fiji, for whatever reason.

So that was an incredible additional tax on top of the 10-percent tax, which he imposed on the same day.

So on April 9, the President said: Well, we will wait--we will wait 90 days on those additional tariffs; on the EU for 20 percent; the 32 percent for Fiji; the 24 percent additional for Japan--we will put that aside, but we are going to keep the 10 percent on.

Now, for a big company, maybe they can figure that out. They can ride that out, the 10 percent. However, if you are a small business in our country, and all of a sudden, there is a new 10-percent tax you have to pay on all of those goods which you are bringing into our country, and then there is a sword of Damocles sitting out there, as well, that there could be, in July--which is only 6 weeks away--an additional 20 percent if those products come in from Europe. You are going to have a chilling effect that is placed on your business decisions, without question.

They don't have the leeway to be able to make the kind of riskier decisions that, perhaps, a bigger business could to just ride through all of these tariffs. So all across every Main Street in our country, these small businesses are getting paralyzed by the Trump actions.

Again, we are going to start with this: There is a 10-percent tariff--tax--already in place right now, since April 2, on every good coming into our country. So this is a very dangerous place to put the small businesses of our country.

Even as the vast majority of small businesses are seeing massive tariff-induced cost hikes, this administration is offering exemptions-- exemptions--for billion-dollar corporations.

If you can get a dinner invitation to Mar-a-Lago, like the heads of Apple and Google, you can secure an exemption for your industry.

Now, in almost every instance, that is preceded by a big, big multimillion-dollar contribution to some entity that the Trump administration would like you to give that money to.

And then Apple is out; Google is out. They are not any longer affected by the tariffs. But no one on Main Street can afford to go to Mar-a-Lago to give the President $1 million. That probably exceeds the total worth of their business.

So that is the problem with where we are. And, by the way, it is also why the national chamber of commerce says that small businesses should get an exemption. It is not me. It is the national chamber of commerce that says that they should get an exemption.

And 97 percent of all companies that do business on an international basis are small businesses, and they constitute 30 percent of all trade. The national chamber of commerce is saying they should all be exempted. That is what my bill does. It says: Exempt those 97 percent of all businesses that constitute 30 percent of the trade from these tariffs--from the 10-percent tariff; from the upcoming, 6 weeks from now, upward of 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent more tariffs that are being imposed on countries around the world, while we are waiting for the President to negotiate bilateral agreements with each one of these entities.

Well, so far, after a month and a half, he is up to one agreement with the United Kingdom. That is it. He has got dozens and dozens to go and no time on the clock, and that is what small businesses are looking at. They are looking up at the clock. They are saying: How long can I last? I survive week to week. I survive month to month. I can't afford to be paying these tariffs or wondering if there is a new tariff which is coming in.

And all across our country, these numbers are unbelievable. In Massachusetts, we have 7 million people. We have 700,000 small businesses. Well, the same thing is true for the country. There are about 330 million Americans, and there are 33 million small businesses. There is a small business in America for every 10 people, and that person right now is looking up with fear that their future has a cloud over it.

And those small businesses, they account for two out of every three jobs added to our economy in the last 25 years. They are our engine of growth.

So I have heard from small businesses all across Massachusetts, all across our country, about how they are forcing those businesses to lay off employees, scale back benefits, or even shut their doors in some cases.

I spoke with Brandale Randolph, founder of the 1854 Cycling Company, an electric bike manufacturer based in Massachusetts, and here is what Brandale told me. He shared the story that his company finally-- finally--after years of work, recovered from the $45 million which they lost during COVID, only to now be forced to decide whether or not they can weather this new tariff disaster hanging over their head.

So they moved from COVID to tariffs--none of this having been in any way instigated by the small businesses of our country. They don't have anything to do with it. It just keeps coming into their lives. And the messages from 1854 and other small businesses across the country are clear: These tariffs are going to threaten to put them out of business.

Small businesses are not Democrat. They are not Republican. This should not be a partisan issue, and I am disappointed that President Trump continues to ignore the outrage and the opposition to his irrational and ill-advised tariff policy.

It is time for the Senate to stand up and exempt small businesses in our country. There is a trade war going on. We should allow small businesses not to be drafted into this war because they are the ones that will be the casualty.

So, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 1593, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Well, a small business is defined in the Small Business Administration definitions, and those would be the ones which we would exempt. And it can be different, depending upon the industry or its status, but, in general, what we are using is the definition used by the Small Business Administration.

First of all, I want to say that I appreciate the comments of the Senator from Ohio.

But here is the bottom line: This isn't just about China. The President hasn't targeted just China. He hasn't explained his ``just China'' strategy. He has imposed these tariffs all across the world-- all across the world, every country.

And yes, the legislation that we have, it doesn't touch the steel tariffs that are imposed. We don't touch those. They can stay in place. We don't touch them.

But here is the bottom line: You can't make silk for U.S. ties in the United States. You can't grow coffee in the United States. I could go on and on and on and on, about product after product that is sold in Main Street in America. Putting a 20-percent tariff on and, on top of that, an additional 20

percent, 30 percent, 40 percent, it is not going to do anything for the person on Main Street with the small business. It is just going to make it almost impossible for them to import those goods that they need to sell in their stores on every Main Street in America. That is what they are saying to us. And this 10-percent tariff is still going to stay on.

We are only 6 weeks from having the sword of Damocles of 20 percent more for the EU and countries from all around the world--Japan, Israel, you name it, India--it is just dozens and dozens of countries that aren't China. But there is no plan. The President is making it up as he goes along, and the people who are going to suffer are going to be the small business people.

If you import toys, and there are maybe 20 different countries from which you import your toys to put on the shelves of your stores on Main Street everywhere, and parents can go in to buy the presents for their child--I just think it is unrealistic. The President is saying: Well, maybe the kids can get by with 3 dolls instead of 30.

Well, that is not how it is going to work. The store is going out of business. The store has a certain predictable business model in terms of how much revenue they are going to have per year, based upon what they can import.

If the President had a plan, I would like to hear it. But I don't. I don't want to hear him talk about how he is ultimately going to get a deal with dozens of countries in 6 weeks. There is no likelihood of that happening. But a small business person can't take that risk.

So that is why, again, this short-term pain that the President keeps talking about for long-term gains, well, honestly, in the short run, these businesses are going--they are going under, the small businesses. And there may be some posthumous indication of the President's theory about these tariffs, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years from now. That won't really do these small businesses any good.

So let the big businesses fight it out, and don't allow the Googles and the Apples to buy their way out of it.

You know, in the Civil War, there was an old saying: It was ``a rich man's war but a poor man's fight''--meaning the rich man could buy his way out of the draft. Rich man's war; poor man's fight.

So big business war, but it is going to be fought by small businesses on Main Street, who are going to be the victims. Those are always the casualties. And they have been drafted into this battle of big businesses.

So, again, I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from Ohio. I think he is wrong. I think we should exempt small businesses and let them know that they are not going to be driven out of business by this still-unplanned guided missile heading right toward every Main Street in our country that is going to be destructive of the hard-earned success those small businesses have had.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today, I am here to defend clean air regulations that tackle the climate crisis, protect public health, and save drivers money at the pump.

For more than 50 years, California has had the legal authority under the Clean Air Act to adopt stricter emissions standards than the Federal baseline. For 50 years, both Democrat and Republican administrations have granted these Clean Air Act waivers that are essential for reducing toxic air pollution, protecting public health, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions that dangerously warm our planet. No Congress has ever dared to revoke these waivers--until now.

My Republican colleagues say this is about protecting consumer choice. Well, let me ask: Who is really choosing this? Not the parents. Not the residents near busy highways. Not the doctors and nurses. Not even the drivers.

It is the polluters. This dependence on fossil fuels allows Big Oil CEOs to turn drivers upside down at the pump and shake money out of their pockets.

The Republicans say ``all of the above.'' No. No. It is ``oil above all.'' We put 70 percent of the oil we consume into gasoline tanks. And with cleaner, smarter, more efficient technologies, we can reduce and reduce and reduce the amount of oil that we put into the vehicles which we drive. This terrifies the oil industry.

America is a technological giant. We have a capacity to invent new technologies. By the way, the Chinese are just on the HOV lane of new technologies for the vehicles which they are driving. They have invented a technology that allows for the charging of a battery in 5 minutes in a vehicle that people are driving.

That should be us. We should be the ones leading.

That is not what the Republicans are doing. Donald Trump is saying he wants to repeal the tax breaks for electric vehicles in our Nation, just take those tax breaks off the books. He wants to repeal the laws which incentivize the development of even better batteries in our country--batteries that, with one charge, will go further and further and further. Maybe we could compete with the Chinese. But Trump wants to take them off the books, and the Republicans are going along with that.

Maybe we could put more charging stations across the country to make it easier for people to drive all-electric vehicles. No. Trump is saying we want to take away all those tax breaks too. Let's just make it easy for the Chinese to take over the electric vehicle industry of the 21st century. Let's just hand it over to them on a silver platter.

We are only 5 percent of the world's population. The other 95 percent is going electric.

The other 95 percent is moving to the future. That is not going to be the United States. The Republicans are working here tonight in order to absolutely short-circuit this future that was ours.

You know, honestly, gas-guzzling cars aren't just bad for drivers, they are bad for every one of us. According to the American Lung Association, more than 131 million people live in counties with unhealthy levels of ozone and particulate pollution.

And what is the largest source of that pollution? It is vehicles. It is the cars and the trucks which we drive in our country. That is what sends up the pollution. That is what gets into the lungs of Americans.

And now my Republican colleagues are trying to rip away the safeguards that help to protect public health and to save our country money. By triggering the Congressional Review Act to repeal California's waivers, it would allow for 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon emissions; more than 1.5 million metric tons of nitrogen oxide, all going up into the air; 17,000 metric tons of fine particulate matter, the type of pollution that penetrates deep into your lungs, the lungs of your children, the lungs of your loved ones, and enters the bloodstream to wreak havoc on the body in the form of asthma, respiratory problems, cardiovascular diseases, and more--much, much, more--all spewed into the air.

And that is what they want. That is what they want.

After the Surgeon General in 1964 issued a warning about smoking, America went from 50 percent of the country smoking down to 18 percent. People started to wise up. They said: We don't want that stuff in our lungs, and we are going to tell our kids not to smoke because it is dangerous.

Your lungs--your lungs--are vulnerable if there is an inhalation of dangerous substances.

So what does it look like in real life? Well, it means more kids are going to suffer from asthma. It means grandma and grandpa dying earlier. It means more death and destruction from extreme weather events, such as the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricanes Helene and Milton. By the way, those three events caused $500 billion worth of damage--those three events, all related to climate change, all related to the warming of the atmosphere.

Just assume that the ceiling here on the Senate floor is capturing all of the heat all day long, and there is no air-conditioning down below. That is the greenhouse effect. It just gets warmer and warmer and warmer, which is why, by the way, the Senate used to adjourn in the beginning of May because it just got too hot in rooms like this before air-conditioning.

Well, there is no air-conditioning for the planet. You have to engage in a preventive strategy, lower the temperature right from the beginning, lower the thermostat right from the beginning.

Ultimately, it is just going to raise costs on everyday families. By blocking the California waivers, consumers would spend more than $89 billion in additional fuel costs through the year

2040. It is much less expensive to be charging a battery than to be putting that pump into the side of your car and watching that dollar sign just skyrocket as you are watching your hard-earned money go to Big Oil all across our Nation.

That is more money at Big Oil's gas pump and less money at your kitchen table. This comes at a time when Trump is waging war on clean cars, repeals to clean vehicle tax credits, attempts to flip a U-turn on fuel economy and EPA vehicle emissions standards.

In 2007, I worked on a bipartisan basis as the chairman of the committee over in the House to enact a provision in the energy law that increased our Nation's fuel economy standards for the first time in 32 years. We were actually going backward by 2007, and the rest of the world was zooming right past us.

It is one of the laws I passed which I am most proud of, and that is what led to the rulemaking that promulgated the higher fuel economy standards for our Nation. I am very proud of that law and the work I played over in the House authoring it.

And the industry, they were able to do it. They were still stuck at 27 miles a gallon. That was the law from 1975. It was 2007, 32 years later. They still couldn't figure out how to improve the efficiency of the vehicles which we drive.

Meanwhile, the Chinese and others, they were getting on the speedway. They were getting ready to catch up to us. And starting in 2009, the Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation built upon that law to negotiate a historic agreement with the State regulators, with the automakers, with labor unions, and the environmental community.

But now--now--Trump, Republicans, at the behest of the oil industry, are trying to do a U-turn on these standards and the benefits that they give to our consumers, to our families, to our planet.

It is not enough for Republicans to promote chaos and conflict in our economy for the sake of billionaires. They now want to create chaos and conflict as well.

By intentionally modifying the Senate rules that protect this institution at a moment when Donald Trump is actively undermining the checks and balances enshrined in our Constitution, that is a serious threat, not just to the Senate but to our country. It is a threat to the rule of law. It is a threat to our health, to our communities, and access to clean air. It is a threat to our planet.

With this action, my Republican colleagues are opening the door for future votes on the countless unlawful and unethical actions waiting to be carried out by the Trump administration. There will be no putting the genie back into the bottle.

It is going to unleash the President who says he is a stable genius to continue to perpetrate more of his unconscionable actions on the people of our country.

So let's not trigger this nuclear option. Let's not unleash a mushroom cloud of pollution on our communities. Let's not allow polluters to rewrite Senate precedent. Let's not steal the right of States to set high standards that result in children breathing cleaner air, not having their vulnerable lungs be sucking in these particulates, sucking in this unhealthy air that vehicles emit.

We have another direction in which we can head. We have a better vision for us. By the way, this is not rocket science. We are not asking anyone to go to Mars. We are just asking people to improve automotive technology. This is car mechanics. It is not a mission to the Moon.

So while I hear Trump bragging about his buddy Elon and a mission to Mars and all these satellites out in outer space and how he wants to have a Golden Dome over our Nation that is going to protect us from incoming Soviet missiles at 2 a.m. in the morning, and here is vision of a Golden Dome that is going to protect us.

Then, when you turn to him and say: Hey, can we improve the efficiency of the cars which we drive, Trump and his oil buddies said: What are you crazy? That is auto mechanics. That is too difficult for us to figure out.

Well, it is not too difficult for the Chinese. They are coming. They are coming. And country by country, it is going to say: ``Made in China.'' ``Made in China.''

Unfortunately, for too many of our domestic auto companies, they are using this as the excuse to just walk away. And maybe for the short run, it will be OK, but in the long run, that is not a business plan.

Maybe it makes it to their retirement as executives of the companies, maybe they make it a few more years, but the country--the country--is going to suffer.

You know, when you look at Fortune magazine or Forbes magazine and there is a picture of one or another businessperson on the cover, that is great. That is great for that individual. But when you look at the international magazines, you know what is on the cover, just a picture of China.

It is a country with a plan. It is a country with a vision. It is a country that is just speeding past us in terms of their capacity to deploy new technologies. That is what we are confronted with right now--a plan from our arch rival economically that we are going to ignore on behalf of the oil industry in our Nation.

They will reap the short-term profits for sure, but our country and the children in our country will reap whirlwinds economically as each year goes by because we are going to be left in China's technological dust.

So that is what we are voting on, and they are going to use a perversion of Senate rules to attempt to accomplish it at the behest of the oil industry, but the price--the price--not only for this institution and its rules but also the well-being of our economy, the health of our planet is going to be way too high to pay.

You can't preach temperance from a barstool. You can't tell the rest of the world they have to reduce greenhouse gases if the Senate continues to pass laws which allow for all of this dangerous pollution to go up in historically high quantities.

That is absolutely the wrong path for the next several generations of American children. You are endangering their lungs right now, and you are going to endanger their ability to have a job in the future.

We are going to wind up with China dominating the auto industry and the planet. That is what we are voting on tonight: Who is going to win in the long term?

By the way, the Republicans have a comprehensive plan to hand this entire industry over to the Chinese. They are going to do away with all the tax breaks for electric vehicles, do away with all the tax breaks for chargers. They are going to do away with all the tax breaks for battery storage technologies to be developed.

This is systematic. This is a plan that our country has to pull us out of the competition with the largest industry in the world, this automotive industry, tied to the oil industry--just an absolutely reckless, historic mistake.

And by the way, they are doing the same thing over in biotech. They want to cut NIH funding by 40 percent. That is finding the cure for Alzheimer's and cancer and diabetes and Parkinson's and every other disease.

You are saying to all the young, brilliant people in the country who are going to dedicate their lives to finding the cures for those diseases: Don't go there. There is no guarantee you are going to have a job next year or the year after or the year after. Again, another industry we are going to put a bow on it and hand it over to Beijing: Hope you enjoy this great present we are handing you--the technological leadership of the United States in biotech, in automotive technology, in battery technology, just handing it over.

So this is a pretty sad day in the history of the Senate, that there will be a compromise of our procedures--our rules--that have been sacred on behalf of the oil industry in our Nation. It is not the first. There is an ongoing systematic plot that Donald Trump came up to the Hill to say: Get my ``big, beautiful bill'' passed.

Well, he might see it as a ``big, beautiful bill,'' but this thing is one big economic disaster for our Nation.

And I will say it again. It is all to get the tax breaks for the billionaires, all of the tax breaks for the wealthiest people in our society.

So, please, Senate, please say no. Please allow us to retain our procedural prerogatives. And please, on this

larger issue of the planet and the leadership which the United States should be playing, please say no to these industries.

They are going to look back at this moment--children alive today--and they are going to just wonder, What were they thinking that every car is coming in from China into every country in the world, and eventually our barriers will come down, too, because we won't be able to compete.

It is just a sad commentary on the Senate today that they will acquiesce to such a pathetic concession made to the oil industry in our Nation. But it is the perfect example of the outsized influence that is now playing in our society.

When Trump promised them last April if they gave him a billion dollars, he would do away with all the clean energy technologies in our country, he is paying them off right now. There is no transition plan. There is no promise that maybe we will help the oil industry so they catch up to the Chinese Government.

Mr. President, no. They are going to cede the field, and ultimately it will be the next generations that pay the price.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at a time to be determined by the majority leader in consultation with the Democratic leader, the Senate proceed to the consideration of the following Senate resolutions in the order listed: S. Res. 242, S. Res. 243, S. Res. 244, and S. Res. 245; that there be up to 2 hours for debate on each resolution, individually; and that upon the use or yielding back of that time, the Senate vote on adoption of the resolutions, individually; and that if any of the resolutions are adopted, the preambles be agreed to and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, the purpose and effect of these resolutions, very simply, is to provide votes. That is what we do in the U.S. Senate--we vote. And on these votes, the Constitution is involved. The provision of the Constitution commonly known as the emoluments clause enables officials of the Federal Government--from a sergeant in the Air Force or some other military branch to the President of the United States--to accept payments or benefits from a foreign power or other foreign entity or individual but only if there is approval by the U.S. Senate and Congress.

We need to take those votes if the President of the United States is to accept any benefits or payments. And that is what is happening in plain sight, openly, for all to see.

Literally, tomorrow night, in the White House, individuals who have invested to the President's benefit in his meme coin and World Liberty Financial will have dinner with him in the White House. He has literally put a ``For Sale'' sign on the White House. But money in his pocket will come from some anonymous donors, some foreign investors, and others in violation of the emoluments clause, unless there is approval from the U.S. Congress. That is tomorrow night in the White House.

And today, the Trump administration formally accepted a $200 million Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the Government of Qatar. Now, that plane may be used as Air Force One while he is in office before it is transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation before the end of his term.

The Department of Defense has confirmed that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has ordered the Air Force to plan rapid modifications to upgrade the plane for use as Air Force One. They are no small modifications. The plane has to be stripped down virtually to its shell to ensure the installation of multiple top-secret systems. The work will take, potentially, years to complete. And the estimate to taxpayers--all of us American taxpayers--is about $1 billion.

That plane probably won't even be ready before the end of President Trump's term when the foundation--his foundation--takes ownership of it. It is a gift, in effect, to him from Qatar.

The Air Force is a passthrough entity. That is the arrogance of this step--corruption--but also a violation of the emoluments clause, unless there is approval from the U.S. Congress.

Majority leader Thune has said:

If and when the plane is no longer a hypothetical, I can

assure you there will be plenty of scrutiny of whatever that

arrangement might look like.

Well, it is no longer a hypothetical. Selling out American interests began the first days and hours of this administration in President Trump's second term. How did he celebrate his inauguration? Well, he launched a cryptocurrency scheme, a meme coin. The only purpose of it was to enrich the President. Unsurprisingly, by design, foreign governments, unscrupulous foreign individuals, and anonymous foreign nationals are competing with themselves--literally, there is a leaderboard--to line his pockets and make known how they are lining his pockets.

There is no reason for them to write him a letter or file with some government Agency. Face-to-face, he will be with them in the White House tomorrow evening. They are competing--and I mean literally competing--with each other for access, and he has put his office and the White House on the auction block.

Tomorrow evening, he will be hosting that dinner--personally hosting it for 220 holders of that meme coin. Wherever the dinner occurs, whether it is in the White House or someplace else, the effect is the same: to be selling access.

And after the dinner competition was announced--alongside a ``Special VIP White House Tour'' for the top 25 holders--President Trump cashed in. The price of that meme coin rose more than 50 percent after the announcement of that dinner. In total, President Trump and his sons and his business partners have now earned $350 million in sales and related fees from that scheme.

Come tomorrow evening, he will have pumped up the price. And sometimes the price goes down. He may have dumped part of his holding-- pump-and-dump--raise the price and then dump the stock. It is a classic Wall Street corrupt move that would normally go to the SEC. But, of course, there is no regulation.

Bidders aren't hiding the pay-for-play scheme either. The winner of Trump's contest--the grand winner--is Justin Sun, who faces a civil fraud case from the SEC over allegations of market manipulation and unregistered asset sales.

Since the election, Justin Sun has poured nearly $100 million into Trump's crypto ventures. And guess what. Trump's SEC--poof--it is not a legal term, by the way--poof--the SEC paused the litigation and now is in negotiations to settle that case. It is out in the open.

One shipping firm with operations in Mexico announced it has raised $20 million to purchase the Trump coins for the express purpose of influencing tariff policy in the United States of America.

When Donald Trump negotiates tariffs, is he protecting American consumers and small businesses? No, not so much. More likely, he is cutting deals for his crypto friends. That is the essence of selling public office, and it is corruption.

But put aside the criminal violations of law that may be involved because the U.S. Supreme Court has given him immunity for what he is doing in the White House, the emoluments clause forbids him from taking those payments--benefits--without coming to the U.S. Congress and seeking our consent and approval.

Foreign governments are paying President Trump through another one of his cryptocurrency ventures, in addition to the FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT meme coin. World Liberty Financial, on May 1--literally, this month-- World Liberty Financial announced an investment fund backed by the United Arab Emirates. The government of that country, using Trump's digital coins, is completing a $2 billion transaction that, once again, puts money in his pocket. From this deal, Donald Trump and his family stand to gain hundreds

of millions of dollars--apart from the $350 million I mentioned earlier--hundreds of millions more from this foreign government.

His sons are traveling around the world getting VIP treatment in Pakistan and elsewhere, using the President and the White House to strike deals for World Liberty Financial. We simply cannot accept this kind of practice as normal or legal. We can't abdicate our responsibility. We cannot seem to endorse or encourage this kind of corruption. That is the reason we have the emoluments clause. That is the reason the Founders wanted Congress to be involved whenever there is any benefit or payment to a member of the executive branch. Again, it applies not only to the President of the United States but all of the Federal officials, down to the rank and file.

Right now, the Senate is considering legislation to promote the growth of cryptocurrencies. This legislation has no ethical rules or conflict of interest provisions that would stop the President or his family from using the White House to enrich himself--none applying to the President. It fails to provide many basic consumer protections and national security rules. It invites Big Tech into our financial system.

We are considering this legislation at the very same time as Trump's crypto dinner will be happening literally within about 24 hours. Is there any wonder that the public's esteem for the U.S. Congress has sunk to the kinds of lows we are seeing right now? We are adding to the perception that Congress somehow is legitimizing or overlooking his behavior--in fact, looking the other way. That is not the message we ought to be sending at this moment in our history, and it is not legally right under the Constitution.

We ought to be voting on his emoluments, every one of these benefits. That is the reason I have separate resolutions--simply to preserve our own authority and power and our integrity and send a signal about the independence of this branch, the legislative branch.

Foreign governments have figured out a lot of ways to line Donald Trump's pockets. The Trump Organization--he is still the owner. It may be in trust. He maybe figured out some technical legal way to seem to insulate or isolate himself from it. But that organization is doing business deals with Saudi Arabia, with Qatar, and with Oman and Serbia.

LIV Golf, backed by the Saudi Arabian Government, hosted a tournament at Trump National Doral in April--April--of this year. The Trump Organization has signed $5.5 billion in real estate deals with a Qatari Government-owned firm, and it is going to build a new development on government-owned land in Serbia and Oman. The Trump Organization has already received $5 million from Oman. These are violations of the emoluments clause plainly, simply, in plain sight.

We have no excuse for failing to vote. We have no excuse for remaining silent. We have no excuse for ducking or dodging.

The foreign emoluments clause states:

[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under

them, shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept of any

present, Emolument, Office, or Title of any kind whatever,

from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Foreign states are clearly involved in these transactions.

The purpose of this clause is basic and unassailable, indisputable. It is to prevent undue foreign influence and foreign corruption.

The Founders knew about the dangers of a foreign government trying to influence our President or anyone under him. They knew about those powerful Kings in France and England. We had just liberated ourselves from England. We were a small, struggling country, and they were afraid that our executives would be influenced by those more powerful countries.

It was to ensure our government officials work for the American people and the Nation rather than their own financial self-interests or on behalf of any foreign government that the emoluments clause was adopted. But President Trump seemingly doesn't care about working for the American people; he cares about his own pocketbook. Not once has he come to Congress for consent on any of these deals. He hasn't even hinted at it. And he will continue pursuing these corrupt foreign deals until we, as Congress, have the gumption to act.

Today, I am introducing resolutions that condemn President Trump's violation of the foreign emoluments clause and demand the transfer to the U.S. Government of any gifts, benefits, or payments recovered or received from foreign governments or others through his illegal dealings.

I have asked for unanimous consent to schedule floor votes--I want floor votes--on each of these resolutions. I think the American people deserve to know where we stand, who is going to allow him to go forward with these deals, who is going to sacrifice the integrity and independence of this branch of government, and where every Senator stands on Donald Trump's self-enrichment schemes. We need to know whether the Senate is willing to stand up and show up against this corrupt self-dealing.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I want to thank my colleagues Senator Durbin and Senator Welch for being here today. I know my resolutions reflect unanimity on our side, and I believe sincerely the reservations and doubts on the other side as well. And I regret the objection to these resolutions because I think that my colleagues deserve a vote. We deserve a vote on both sides of the aisle.

This violation of the Constitution benefits nobody. Many of the votes we take here, there are differing interests, there are contrasting and sometimes conflicting points of view on the merits, on who benefits and who may be hurt. Here, there is only one beneficiary: Donald Trump and his family--maybe some of the foreign investors, maybe some of the others who have donated or contributed to his campaign and have invested in the meme coins or in World Liberty Financial stablecoin.

This plane should be built by an American company. It should be built so that President Trump can use it--or any other President--on time, on schedule. It is now already delayed. Boeing should be held accountable. And if it can't deliver it when the President needs it, somebody else ought to be required to build it.

So I am deeply disappointed we are not going to have these votes, at least right now. I am going to be coming back to the floor and asking for these votes on the emoluments clause because it is part of our job, it is part of our constitutional responsibility, and Donald Trump is violating the Constitution by accepting gifts in the plane, investments, and money in his pocket from his cryptocurrency ventures and other schemes that he is enabling in plain sight. This corruption should not be allowed to continue.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me first thank my colleague from Rhode Island. I don't know how many years he has been delivering this message on the floor, but he has become the spokesperson for a cause that we all should share and try to make certain we address the deterioration of this planet that we live on; that our kids, our grandkids, and their children have a fighting chance against elements that they can't personally control. It is up to our generation. And Senator Whitehouse comes to the floor and reminds us on a regular basis about our moral and economic and environmental responsibility.

I thank him for his statement today. I want to join him in that respect.

S.J. Res. 55

Mr. President, last month, the Senate Parliamentarian analyzed the GAO's opinion ruling that Senate Republicans cannot use the Congressional Review Act to overturn a waiver granted to California by the U.S. EPA to regulate its own vehicle emissions.

I remember a time in the House and, again, in the Senate when we had a hardy debate here over miles per gallon and what was reasonable. I remember the automobile industry saying that we shouldn't impose a standard that they could never live up to, never produce cars that meet that standard of the higher miles per gallon.

I remember that California stepped out ahead of the rest of the Nation and said: Let us prove we can do it. Our economy is so big, you can't miss it if we succeed or if we fail. And they succeeded. They proved that if you create the right incentives, technology will move in that direction, and it has, successfully, when it comes to miles per gallon.

Now Republicans have decided, with the new President, to attempt to block a California law requiring all new cars sold in the State by 2035 to be zero-emission vehicles. It is an ambitious goal. It is as ambitious as some of the MPG goals they set in earlier times.

That is right. Despite the claims of being the party of States' rights, Republicans want to end the State-level regulation in the State of California. And get this, Elon Musk--the unelected adviser to the President--previously wrote to the EPA in favor of California's waiver. Now he has joined the Republican majority to try to gut the rule.

The Parliamentarian's decision was not one of party loyalty. It followed decades of precedent showing California's Clean Air Act waivers are not subject to the Congressional Review Act.

Despite the Parliamentarian's decision, my Senate Republican colleagues want to override the GAO and Senate Parliamentarian to advance the fossil fuel agenda. It is ``burn, baby, burn; drill, baby, drill.''

Now, I understand using the CRA might be faster than Agency rulemaking or even considering legislation. Think about this. There was a time when we actually legislated on the floor of the U.S. Senate. I can vaguely remember, it was so long ago. Rather than deal with legislation, hearings, and public review, we are all about these shortcut methods, which in some cases are disastrous. In fact, President Trump, in his first term, took administrative action to rescind California's Clean Air Act waivers and can take that path again.

But what Republicans are pursuing today is a procedural nuclear option, a dramatic break from Senate precedent with profound consequences. Let me repeat. Should my Senate Republican colleagues overrule the Senate Parliamentarian, it will have a major long-term impact for the Senate and the legislative filibuster.

This move is unprecedented. The Senate has never overruled the Parliamentarian regarding the CRA or allowing a bill to pass by majority vote. Before, when the tables were turned and the Senate Democrats were in the majority, my Republican colleagues were singing a very different tune about never breaking from the Parliamentarian. Leader Thune, himself, acknowledged in January of this year that overruling the Parliamentarian is ``totally akin to killing the filibuster. We can't go there,'' Leader Thune said, ``People need to understand that.''

If Senate Republicans disregard the Parliamentarian's decision, they would set a new precedent in the Senate, eliminating longstanding guardrails and paving the way for future Senate majorities to overrule the Parliamentarian to achieve its partisan goals. I caution my Senate Republican colleagues from toeing this line and setting the wrong precedent.

As I said, time and time again, there cannot be one set of rules for the Republicans in the Senate and another set of rules for the Democrats. I hope my Republican colleagues will heed my

warning and make the right choice--the only choice: accept the GAO and Senate Parliamentarian's decision.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, it was my good fortune as a young man to work for a Senator from Illinois named Paul Douglas. He was known as Mr. Ethics in the U.S. Senate. He believed--and he shared that belief with me and all who worked with and for him--that the first obligation of a public official is to not betray the trust of the voters when it comes to self-dealing or making money out of public office.

He started me down the path in my early years in politics of making a complete disclosure--both my income tax return and net worth in detail, specific amounts--every year. I have done that for over 40 years. I believe he was right.

I remember Paul Simon, my predecessor in the U.S. Senate, used to say: People may not agree with my vote, but they know I didn't cast it to make a buck.

It is just that simple.

So what has happened at the highest level of the Government, the Office of President? Throughout our history, there have been examples of corruption which have been well documented. The Teapot Dome scandal comes to mind, and certainly the departures of previous Vice Presidents for wrongdoing have been well documented.

What we have going on in the White House now with the Trump administration is unprecedented not just in the amount of money involved going to the President and his family but also in the very real fact that the bottom line is that he is bold and states clearly: I have done it, and I defy you to do anything about it.

It is one of the reasons I am opposing the pending legislation on the floor on cryptocurrency. The President, as has been documented by my colleague from Connecticut, is making millions of dollars exploiting cryptocurrency, and he is inviting those who buy into his scheme--his profit-making scheme--to official gatherings and occasions at the White House. It is the most bald-faced demonstration of corruption we have ever seen in the Office of the Presidency. And this plane now--this $400 million airplane--says it all.

Mr. President, so that you understand, Pam Bondi is the Attorney General of the United States, duly appointed, and she has supposedly released a memo justifying the transfer of this airplane to the U.S. Government and then to Donald Trump personally as being acceptable--no objection. I am still looking for a copy of that public opinion. It should be public, if it hasn't been yet.

There has been reference made to the Constitution on this issue. In the Constitution, article I, section 9 is explicit:

[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under

them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of

any present, Emolument, Office, or Title of any kind

whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

How clear can you be? This President has no authority to accept this gift. And the notion that he would accept it, use it for the remainder of his Presidency, and then take personal title to the airplane is outrageous.

The fact of the matter is--those of us who have taken the time to check--it will cost the American taxpayers a fortune to take this gift from Qatar and to make it safe for any President to travel in it.

As one of my colleagues has said, if the Qataris said ``As a favor to the people of the United States, we are going to redesign and pay for the redesign of the Oval Office, the Situation Room, and the President's residence. We will do it on our dime,'' the American people would never fall for it. Why would we ever let them get that close to the decision making at the highest level in America? That is exactly what we are doing here if we accept this airplane. We have taken all those three functions of the President, added wings to the equation, and said the Constitution doesn't count.

Republicans have claimed for years that Joe Biden, during his administration and his time as Vice President, engaged in wrongdoing due to his family's business dealings. I am sure we remember congressional Republicans' endless investigations into President Biden's son and his past business dealings as a private citizen. But despite multiple investigations and a failed impeachment inquiry against President Biden, Republicans are largely silent and willing to disregard the overwhelming corruption of President Trump and his family as they pocket millions of dollars personally at the expense of the American people.

In the latest of a long line of shady dealings, President Trump is receiving a private jet as a gift from the royal family of Qatar and is claiming that it is simply a gift to the Defense Department.

This aircraft that we are talking about is sitting in San Antonio, TX. It would be retrofitted to act as Air Force One for the remainder of Trump's term in office before ownership is transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation.

The President claimed it would be ``stupid [to] say `No, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane.' '' However, what he doesn't say is that it will cost American taxpayers millions more to retrofit the plane to meet the President's security, communication, and intelligence needs.

Mr. President, what is stupid is retrofitting a very expensive plane from a foreign government, which constitutes a major counterintelligence risk, on the American taxpayers' dime when an American company is already manufacturing the next Air Force One.

The Constitution, as I have read, explicitly gives Congress the power to control whether any officer of the United States, including the President, may accept a gift from ``any King, Prince, or foreign State.'' This unprecedented gift clearly violates the Constitution and laws enacted by Congress to govern such gifts. Yet Attorney General Bondi reportedly concluded it would be ``legally permissible'' for President Trump to accept this gift. I am calling on the Attorney General today to release this opinion and report in its entirety to the U.S. Congress.

I am not surprised by it. This administration continues to abuse its power at the cost of the American people time and again, while Republicans in Congress stand by and allow it.

Mr. President, do you hear it? The silence? The silence of the President's party? The silence of the lambs?

Make no mistake, this is more than just a gift that benefits the President and not the American people. The President, we understand, it has been reported, has actively solicited this gift from Qatar. The question remains: In exchange for what?

President Trump's acceptance of such a substantial gift from a foreign government could disproportionately influence the foreign policies of this country--exactly why the Founding Fathers gave Congress the power to control these gifts under the Constitution. It is clear to our foreign partners and enemies that, under President Trump, America's policymaking is open to the highest bidder.

We also see President Trump and his family profiting off the promise of influenced domestic policy. Right before his second inauguration, President Trump launched a valueless cryptocurrency token marked not as an investment but as monetary support for Trump. First Lady Melania Trump also promoted her own meme coin shortly thereafter. This scheme allowed the President to pocket millions of dollars in direct payments with little or no public disclosure or oversight. He has never denied it. He has since fired the heads of the Agencies that investigate these crypto schemes.

Donald Trump, Jr., has founded a new private membership club in DC called Executive Branch with a $500,000 membership fee. The launch party, featuring several Cabinet and other administration officials, underscored Trump Junior's efforts to sell access.

That is what this administration does. It sees a barrier to cutting corners or any check on its corruption and gets rid of it. These actions were entirely predictable because Trump and his family also blatantly used the Presidency to enrich themselves by selling access and the chance to influence policy under his first administration.

I am saddened that our colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle apparently believe that silence is the best response to these outrages. It is the ``Silence of the Lambs.''

When will they stand up for the American people and say ``enough is enough,'' or do they believe American policy should be sold to whatever country is willing to place the highest bid?

If we are talking about a swamp in DC, sadly, this is a major part of it.

I yield the floor.

I announce that the Senator from New Mexico (Mr. Heinrich) is necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from New Mexico (Mr. Heinrich) and the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Hickenlooper) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from new Mexico (Mr. Heinrich) is necessarily absent.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague Senator Padilla for his eloquent speech on this subject.

Today, I want to talk about what is taking place in this Chamber, and I want to talk about it in two respects. I want to talk about what it will mean for the American people in terms of the air that we breathe and the water that we drink--that is the most important thing--but then I want to also talk about what it will mean for this institution, for the Senate; what it will mean for the filibuster; what it will mean for whether things can get passed on a simple majority vote at the behest of the oil industry or any other special interest or whether things in the future will continue to require 60 votes to get through this body.

Let's start with the first and most important thing: What does the repeal of California's clean air waiver--that is, its right to set its own standards for the air that we breathe--what does this mean for the people of California? What does this mean for the people of the United States?

This is downtown Los Angeles in 1955. Now, I don't remember 1955--I didn't come around until 1960--but I do remember air that looked a lot like this when I moved to Los Angeles. I remember days when there were smog alerts. We still have some of those. I remember when it was unhealthy air to breathe, and people were advised not to go outside if they didn't need to, and kids couldn't go out on recess because the air quality was so bad.

But this is what places in California, like Los Angeles and many places in the San Joaquin Valley, looked like just a few years ago--the San Joaquin Valley, where so much of the food in the Nation is grown. These areas have experienced the rapid rise of personal automobiles and expansion of our population--America's West, its suburbs and its cities.

On days like this, you just couldn't walk outside sometimes without hacking. If you had asthma or breathing problems, it was even more severe. And California families, through no fault of their own, were on the frontlines of a health risk unseen since the worst days of the Industrial Revolution pollution. The smog was so bad that in one instance, mass panic broke out in California because there was a belief that there was some kind of chemical weapons attack.

This was, in part, due to these amazing increases of population, but it was also our unique topography. The San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles, the Sierra Nevadas for the Central Valley, they trap fossil fuel emissions and keep smog clouds hanging over our cities where they may not hang over other parts of the Nation. So the San Gabriel Mountains, for those of us in L.A., but the Verdugos and other mountain ranges and the Sierra Nevadas have an impact on the Central Valley.

All that means is that 10 million Californians are living in areas that are under distinct and elevated threats from air pollution. And what that has meant historically is higher rates of respiratory issues like asthma and chronic lung disease. It has meant increased risk of heart disease, chronic headaches, immune system issues, and, most significantly, increased cancer risks.

That is multiplied by us living now on the frontlines of the climate crisis. We have devastating and year-round fire dangers that put millions of other pollutants into our air. So we need, deserve, and reserve the right, as Californians, to do something about our air.

In fact, this is why California became the first State in the Nation to regulate the emissions of automobiles back in 1966 because we understood then, as we do now, the risks that Californians face if we don't take action. Over the past 60 years, since our skies looked like this, California has led on this issue, and now, we are being targeted for it.

What will the cost of that be? By revoking California's right to protect its citizens from dirty air, we face not just dirtier air, but we also face a sicker society. The American Lung Association projected that our Nation moving to zero-emission vehicles in the next decade would generate more than $1 trillion in public health benefits and save more than 100,000 people from premature death.

So this is really the heart of the question for this body, and that is, What is more valuable to us? Is it the unfettered right to pollute the skies and make them look like this? Or do we want to save about $1 trillion in money we would have to spend otherwise on treating asthma and treating lung cancer and treating heart disease that is caused by air like this?

That electric vehicle requirement can save more than 100,000 people from premature death. So I guess we have to ask ourselves, How much is life worth? What would it be worth to us to be able to live a few years longer?

I suppose the answer to that question depends on, well, what kind of life is that? What kind of health are we in? But I would say a few more years is worth a lot. It is worth a lot. It is certainly worth more than contributions from the oil industry to be able to live a little longer, to be able to live a little healthier.

By targeting California--as this effort is doing--which comprises 11 percent of the Nation, and our goal of decarbonizing our transportation sector, we are selling poison seeds for the future--seeds that will grow to be more asthma and more sickness and more hospitalizations and more death. That is the bleak but blatant reality of what we are debating here today.

If the Republicans go nuclear to repeal California's clean air rules, that is what this will mean. It will mean shorter lives, poorer quality of life because of what we are breathing in the air, and ultimately, when they strike down clean water rules, what we are drinking in our water is going to be dirtier, and the American people are going to be more plagued by a whole variety of cancers.

Now, I mentioned the term ``going nuclear.'' What does that mean? This gets to the second point I want to make today, which is how the Republican majority intends to go about repealing California's ability to set the standards for its own air; that is, how does the Republican majority intend to foist its will on millions of people in other States? How are they determined to overturn States' rights? How are they determined that the Federal Government should tell a State: No, you can't protect your people from air pollution, not to that degree you can't, because we answer to a higher authority and that higher authority is called the oil industry? So how are they going to do it because in this body, for better or worse, it generally takes 60 votes to get things done. That is the filibuster. It requires 60 votes.

To repeal California's law, if you were to take that step, it would require 60 votes. Don't just take my word for it. We asked the Parliamentarian, who is the expert: Does this require 60 votes? Is this subject to the filibuster?

The answer is, yes, it does.

Well, you would think that would be the end of the story, but you can overrule the Parliamentarian, say the Parliamentarian is wrong, and then reduce the threshold to 50 votes.

Now, you might ask: How is that possible? Is the filibuster really that fragile that whenever it is ruled that you need 60 votes, you can simply overrule the Parliamentarian?

The answer is, yes, the rule is that fragile, which means that if Republicans move to go nuclear, to overturn the Parliamentarian, to do away with the filibuster, to do away with California's clean air, they will be setting a precedent that at any time and for any reason, for any State, for any rule, for any nonrule, for any waiver, for any license, for any grant--for any anything--a new majority can simply say: Well, we would like to vote on this with 50 votes. And if the Parliamentarian says it takes 60, you just vote to overturn the Parliamentarian.

So that is the import of what we are doing today, which is we are setting a precedent that the filibuster is essentially now meaningless, because if you can do away with the filibuster to do away with one State's clean air, well, you can pretty much do away with the filibuster for anything and everything.

So that is the momentous nature of what is happening today. The majority here may force Californians to breathe air like that again, and the majority here may decide they are getting rid of the filibuster.

Now, getting back to the underlying merits here, the American Lung Association found that our transition to cleaner air and zero-emission vehicles would result in 13 million fewer lost

workdays in the next 10 years. So what does that mean, 13 million? It means 13 million fewer times that you are so sick, you can't go to work. You get 13 million more days of health with these clean air rules. Think about that--13 million more healthy days for you, the American people, if we achieve our emissions goals.

Now, since my swearing-in 6 months ago to the Senate, I have had the privilege of visiting communities all over California, talking to Californians who are on the frontlines of this. Yes, some are environmental activists, and, yes, some work on science and climate issues, but there are others, too. They are the people who put food in your grocery stores. They are the people who spend so much of their days outside, breathing the only air available to them. They are the people who will be sicker--some of the people who will be sicker, work less, maybe die earlier, if we let the fossil fuel industry win this week; the people who spend hundreds of hours each month on their hands and knees, making sure that all the rest of us can have fresh berries and greens and other crops that California puts on your plate. I am, of course, talking about farmworkers. I invite any of my colleagues to consider what millions more pounds of smog in our air over the next decade will do to them.

Of course, it is not just farmworkers; it is all of us--all of us who spend time outdoors, all of us who can't help but be outdoors. All of us are going to be breathing in dirtier air, all of us are going to be suffering more sick days, and all of us are going to be plagued by more cancers if we repeal the rules that each State gets to set that has a waiver or wants to join California's healthier air rules. That will be the repercussion.

It used to be there was a bipartisan consensus in favor of cleaner air. It wasn't just Democrats. Richard Nixon, who founded the EPA, Pete Wilson, Ronald Reagan--they all understood the importance of the environment and clean air and clean water. They helped California take the environmental movement and make it mainstream. We got pollutants out of our air and out of our water and out of our communities.

Where is that party now? Where is the party that helped write the Clean Air Act? Where is the party that says Congress should not meddle in what one State is doing to govern itself?

What will happen when you lose the majority and Democrats have the opportunity to follow this precedent? What will happen to your State? We decide we don't like your State's rule on mifepristone or we don't like the fact that your State got a license to export liquid natural gas or we don't like a grant that your State got in transportation or we don't like some rule that benefits your State. Will you argue to us that ``oh, no, you can't overturn the Parliamentarian''? Will that be your argument? Because that fight will be over.

So I will remember where I am today. I will remember what we are doing today. I think we all would and will. I hope it is not the day that we made it easier to pollute California's skies. I hope it is not the date we made it easier to make water filled with more forever chemicals like PFAS. I hope it is not the day we decided that we could eliminate a State's right to control the quality of the air that their citizens breathe or the water they drink. And I hope it is not the day we decided that it was worth getting rid of the filibuster to satisfy the fossil fuel industry.

With that, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.