Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the 100th anniversary of the Ohr Shalom Synagogue in San Diego, CA.

The synagogue first opened its doors on May 14, 1926, and has served the Jewish Community in San Diego for 100 years. It was originally known as the Temple Beth Israel before being acquired by Ohr Shalom Synagogue in 2002.

The building was designed by the notable architect William H. Wheeler and its architecture is a Mediterranean-Byzantine Revival style. Over the years, Ohr Shalom Synagogue's renovations have enhanced the original architecture by following the Secretary of the Interior's standards for historical designation, and it has improved accessibility by complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act. In addition, the synagogue was recognized in the San Diego Architectural Foundation's 100 iconic sites list and welcomed community members during the

Architectural Foundation's 2019 Open House.

Ohr Shalom holds prayer services offering daily Minyan, observes weekly Parashat, and provides candlelight ceremonies for the community. Moreover, the Synagogue's commitment to the broader community is exemplified by its monthly food distributions to San Diegans in need of assistance.

I ask all Members to join me in the rededication celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Ohr Shalom Synagogue in San Diego, CA, on May 3, 2026.

Mr. President, last Friday, public reports indicated that more than 2,500 marines stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County were now on their way to the Trump war in the Middle East, the Trump- Iran war.

This is the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard the USS Portland, the USS Comstock, and the USS Boxer. Their voyage joins the amphibious assault force aboard the USS Tripoli, which also called San Diego home until last year.

With great uncertainty, Californians are now being called upon to be the potential tip of the next spear in this war. The Marines' recruiting slogan, going back to their founding in 1775, is ``First to Fight,'' and they continue to live up to that slogan and that ethos. They have been boots on the beaches of islands in the Pacific, the trenches of Europe, in the mountains of Afghanistan, in the sands of Iraq, in Syria, Africa, and theaters of American war everywhere, and for centuries. And that is just it--they are boots on the ground in times of war.

So as thousands of men and women have been called up to mobilize around the world, what solace can we offer their families about what awaits them? What can we tell them about this so-called excursion, as the President refers to it, or, as he called it today--reluctant to use the word ``war'' all of a sudden, he called it a military operation.

Well, this weekend marks 1 month that our Nation has been at war with Iran, and already we have lost one American servicemember nearly every 2 days of the conflict.

On the second day of the war, that servicemember was CW3 Robert Marzan from Sacramento, CA. He was killed in Kuwait by an Iranian strike. His memory has burned brightly in the hearts of those who knew him, and since his death, we have seen tributes pour in.

One said:

Rob was probably one of the best humans I've ever met. I

know that if I called him today, if he was still here, he

would drop what he was doing and help me.

Another said that Chief Warrant Officer Marzan and his family ``served as the surrogate family for a lot of soldiers'' for their unit based in Des Moines.

In the true American spirit, these stories have been shared widely as communities have come together to raise money to help fly those who knew him home to California for his funeral later this month. That is a solidarity that Americans know in time of war.

But the people who led us into this war did so without the consent of the American people and without the authorization of this Congress. The Commander in Chief, who called it war in his first public comments about the strikes in Iran, now engages in semantics while thousands more servicemembers ship out, halfway around the world.

We were also told that this war would end soon, but now the President's extended deadline puts us on track for at least a month of conflict, with more fighting in the future if Iran refuses to yield. There is no deadline that anyone at this point can rely upon.

At least one Republican Senator is overtly calling for boots on the ground, saying:

We did Iwo Jima, we can do this.

I just remind Members that the cost of Iwo Jima was high--6,821 dead, 19,217 wounded.

We have seen the timelines, the rationales, and even the baseline facts of this conflict change by the day or even multiple times during the same press conference. The goalposts have moved from regime change and imminent threat to long-term freedom for the Iranian people and then back to preventing them from building out a nuclear program that was supposedly obliterated in a military operation only 9 months earlier.

We can be fairly sure that before this war is over--perhaps even before this week is over--the goalposts will move again. That is why last week we stood here and forced the Senate to again go on record. We cannot become ``Lucy with the football,'' constantly convinced that the latest market-calming post by the President in the morning will mean we will not have sent new marines off to the conflict zone that evening.

Last week, I stood here and reminded my colleagues of the words of President Eisenhower, the architect of one of our Nation's greatest military victories over a murderous regime.

He said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every

rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from

those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are

not clothed.

It is a reminder to all of us that Americans pay not just in the loss of our servicemembers and the pain that overwhelms their families but in the hardships and poverty that we will no longer be able to address here at home, the illness that will go untreated, the school that will go unopened, the road that will go unpaved, the senior that will go unfed--as we drop the cost equivalent of 10 new hospitals a day on Iran.

The Pentagon is proposing a $200 billion supplemental to fund this war. Do you know what that means for your family? That means that the cost for your family is $1,400. That is just the starting cost for this supplemental funding bill--$1,400 for your family. That is not including all the more you are paying at the pump and for everything else; that is just the cost that is being proposed for your family.

Well, tonight, I stand here to remind my colleagues not just of Eisenhower but of another Republican President, Herbert Hoover.

Hoover said:

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight

and die.

The youth who are put at risk like the 2,500 marines sailing from San Diego as we speak; the youth like the thousands of others already sleeping in bunks aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and the Gerald Ford.

In this case, older men have not even given them the decency of a declaration of war. Instead, we have quietly walked up to the redline that I know so many hold in their hearts when it comes to American military power being used abroad.

We are on the cusp of American boots on the ground. And as the goalposts have continued to shift and as we in this Congress have continued to abdicate our responsibility, I ask my colleagues: Will that still be your redline or will the President be allowed to put American Special Forces in harm's way for a war that Congress has not authorized, that has not been debated, that has not even held a single open hearing to discuss; a war whose true purpose has been kept hidden from most Americans; a war that by Saturday will have gone on for an entire month without the support of the majority of the American people and without the approval of the only part of government to whom the Framers gave the power to approve military force: the Congress?

One month of war. And for what? A new Supreme Leader? A new hardliner with a new appetite for revenge? A new windfall for Russia made possible by American sanctions relief? A new skyrocketing price of gas? A new rising

toll on servicemembers and their families?

It is time to put a stop to this war before its costs rise further still. It is time for the Congress of the United States to do its job.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Booker for his extraordinary leadership on this War Powers Resolution.

Some of my colleagues may not know this, but I was raised in a divided household. My father was a lifelong Democrat. My mother a Republican. And there were any number of Republican elected officials who appealed to both of my parents, who embodied the spirit of America and the promise of this great Republic.

One of them was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yes, some in my family liked him so much they helped campaign for him, like my grandfather Harry Glovsky. I have a photograph in my office of my Pa Harry--who was a Republican County chair--walking side by side with Ike at a campaign rally.

It makes me wonder what Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and the man who brought peace to Europe, would have to say right now, to see our military might, our military personnel, used in a war of choice against a country with a terrible regime but which was not attacking us and posed no imminent threat to the American people; to see a President like we have today, unwilling, even when asked, to comment on those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of this country; a President who ignores or worse, belittles, a reporter who asks about them or whether more troops are going to be deployed to the region.

What would he think of a Congress, empowered by our Framers to have the sole power to make war or refuse to do so, relegated to an afterthought in conflict after conflict after conflict?

Eisenhower was a singular voice in our Nation. He was a military leader who advocated strongly against the use of military power when it was not needed, when there were alternatives, someone who acknowledged the enormous cost and the lost opportunity to the country that comes with excessive spending on armaments.

He is famous in his farewell address for a warning of the encroaching influence of the military industrial complex, and we should turn to that speech now to remind ourselves of where we are in this moment as we find ourselves at war once again.

Eisenhower said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every

rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from

those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are

not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is

spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its

scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick

school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power

plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two

fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of

concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million

bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new

homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the

road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at

all, in any true sense.

Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging

from a cross of iron.

``A theft from those who hunger and are not fed,'' that is what he said.

And I ask my colleagues 70 years later: Has anything changed? We have taken $170 billion in food aid away from people who hunger and are not fed, and we are feeding that money into a military operation that is costing the country billions every week.

Are we not seeing the money for a hospital--or 10 hospitals-- squandered halfway around the world rather than spent here at home?

President Eisenhower understood the basic tradeoffs that we face when we go to war. And here is the thing: The American people are not afraid of sacrifice. In a just cause, we can marshal the strength of our people to take on any challenge, overcome any threat, defend ourselves against any foe--in a just cause. But has the case been made that this was a just cause? a necessary cause?

Have we even had a debate on the subject or a public hearing or, God forbid, a vote? Have we said, on behalf of the schoolchildren who will go hungry, that we are comfortable taking their meals and spending them instead on missiles? Have we agreed, as we send our sons and daughters on ships to the Strait of Hormuz, that we are willing to risk their lives, that we are ready to pay the costs at the pump and on the grocery shelf, that this is a sacrifice we are ready to make for the greater good?

We have not. No, we have not agreed because we have ducked and dodged and bobbed and weaved our way around this terrible decision, not wanting to debate the war, not wanting to even call it war because when we do, we acknowledge our own failure as an institution as the Congress to take up the matter; as if bombs falling day after day for weeks on end could be labeled as anything else but ``war''--a war whose risks, like closing the Strait of Hormuz or Iran's attacks on its neighbors or the staying power of the clerical regime, were known and ignored by the President, a President whose hubris has now cost our Nation dearly.

What would Ike have thought? What would Ike have done? I suspect he would conclude this war was not worth its costs in casualties and lost opportunities.

But if he concluded otherwise, I suspect he would have leveled with the American people about the purpose, the goals, the risks, and sought to rally us to the cause. He would have asked for the support of Congress even as he rallied the support of the Nation had it been a just cause, had it been a necessary fight, had our Nation been under attack or imminent threat of attack.

Today, we are in a war that the public has not backed, that the Congress has not approved, and for which the President has not made a case; a war of regime change in which the regime has not changed; a war to stop an imminent threat which did not exist; a war in which the President tells us we don't need allies, then pleads for the help of those allies to open the Strait, and when they do not comply, tells us we don't need them after all; a war in which we mistakenly bombed a girls' school in Iran, in which our President told us Iran bombed its own school, and which the administration was forced to acknowledge that simply wasn't true; a war in which the President calls for the people of Iran to rise up, that this is the best chance they will ever get, and then tells us they will be mowed down if they do.

The Congress does not exist to merely implement the President's will in war or peace. It does not exist to serve as his echo chamber or dutifully stand and applaud when he addresses the joint session. The Framers did not draft such an exquisite framework in which ambition was made to counter ambition, in which the power to declare war and fund war was held in one branch so as to resist the bellicose interest and instincts of the head of another branch. They did not draft such a perfect Constitution with the idea that it would all be a nullity, that Congress should simply abdicate, surrender its constitutional responsibility.

The Founders had higher hopes for us. They had dreams for us to realize. They wagered their lives and sacred honor that we would rise to the occasion, that we possessed sufficient virtue to be self- governing, that we as a people did not need to be ruled by a despot.

Were they wrong? Were they wrong? At long last, were our Founders wrong? After weeks of war and billions spent and 13 servicemembers killed and 200 injured, is it still not too late to discharge our responsibility as our Founders intended, as the American people have every right to expect?

This resolution gives us a chance to do that. Let us take it.

I urge an ``aye'' vote on the War Powers Resolution.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, the author George Orwell wrote about a dystopian future in which the party in power spoke in doublespeak, a language in which up meant down and down meant up, good meant bad, and nothing was as it seemed.

In the language of Orwellian doublespeak, to save something meant to destroy it, which brings me to the so-called SAVE America Act.

This legislation will not save anything about America, but it will destroy something precious about this country. It is not meant to empower people to determine the direction of the Nation but to deprive them of that power; not to encourage citizen participation in government but to discourage it; not to heal a nation that is badly divided but to cause further division, disunion, and democratic decay-- because this is perhaps one of the most cravenly political efforts undertaken by Congress in a generation.

The President knows that his policies are deeply unpopular. He knows that his war of choice with Iran is deeply unpopular. He understands that he has betrayed the promises he made to the American people to bring down costs and improve the quality of their lives. He knows that the voters are prepared to hold him accountable in the midterms and vote his party out of power.

But rather than address his many policy failures, he wishes, instead, to prevent people from voting. It is as cynical a device as it is destructive of the foundation of our democracy--the right to vote.

Our Nation is facing a series of challenges that are touching every facet of people's lives. They are paying more at the pump. They are paying more on groceries. They are paying more to heat their home, and this summer, they will pay more to cool it. This is all from a President that has gone from promising to break inflation on day one to now saying, ``If prices rise, they rise.'' Imagine that. If prices rise, they rise.

But that is not all. If the cost of oil goes up, he declares, that is good because it means we make more money.

Well, maybe he does. Maybe, the oil industry friends do. But the American people who are paying through the nose at gas stations all across the country are not making more money. They are spending it on gas at the pump, and they cannot afford it.

This war of choice is costing America billions. More importantly, 13 brave servicemembers have lost their lives in a new foreign war we were promised would never be started.

Now, we have heard a whole host of rationalizations for this war, explanations for this war. None of them add up. At one point, the President said that we had to go to war with Iran because Iran was 2 weeks away from having a nuclear bomb.

Well, beside the fact that there is no intelligence suggesting even remotely that that is true, the President himself said, only 9 months ago, that we had obliterated Iran's nuclear capability.

Well, it can't be both. The President was either telling the truth 9 months ago or he wasn't; or he is telling the truth now or he isn't. But it can't be both. And, of course, everything we know about Iran's nuclear program indicates they are not 2 weeks away from having a nuclear bomb.

So it was also said by the Secretary of State: We are at war with Iran because Israel was going to go to war with Iran, and we knew that Iran would retaliate against us; and, therefore, we had to go to war with Iran.

But the President disputes that rationale for the war. The President says, basically, that his Secretary of State is wrong, that he forced Israel's hand.

OK, so what is the President's rationale then for this war? Well, we all see that the President and the Secretary say it was necessary to destroy Iran's missile capability because those missiles could soon hit the United States of America, except that isn't remotely true either. The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that it would not be 9 years before Iran would have that kind of capability. It would take 9 years for that country to develop missiles capable of hitting the United States.

So there was no imminent missile threat to the United States. There was no immediate nuclear threat.

That leaves regime change. The President has said that he wants Iranians to rise up and challenge the regime. At the same time, it is being publicly reported that he was warned that that would be extremely unlikely; that is, that the Iranian people would have the power to overturn this entrenched, murderous, terrorist-sponsoring regime; that this would not be Venezuela; that you couldn't simply take out the No. 1 mullah and expect to replace him with the No. 2 mullah that would do the United States' bidding; that that was not foreseeable, not likely, not probable.

Instead, the President was warned this could lead to an even more hard-line regime. And now, we don't have the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We have Mojtaba Khamenei, who is supposed to be potentially even worse.

So this is not about regime change. It is not about the missile program. It is not about the nuclear program. It is not because of Israel.

So what is it that led us into war? What is it that justifies the risk to the lives of our servicemembers? What is it that justifies the tragic reality that 200 of our servicemembers have already been injured in this conflict?

We are left to wonder. We haven't had a single public hearing about this. We have not had the opportunity to put any of these administration figures under oath to explain why we are at war; why the President betrayed his promise to keep us out of foreign war, to keep us out of regime-change wars, to keep us out of another Middle East war; why our servicemembers are bearing the brunt of this; why American consumers are bearing the brunt of this.

There are public reports that General Caine warned the President that Iran might attack our allies in the region, but the President expressed a surprise that this has happened. There is public reporting that the general also warned the President that Iran might seek to close the Strait of Hormuz. And Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, and, as a result, we are all paying for that in skyrocketing prices at the pump.

All of this was all too eminently foreseeable. But here we are. Global oil markets and global shipping are seeing the seismic waves of Trump's war in Iran--a war without strategy, a war with different aims depending on the day, a war that some can't even bring themselves to call war because the moment they do--as the President calls it war, as the Secretary of War calls it war--but the moment that we in this Chamber call it war, we are acknowledging our own failure to live up to our institutional responsibility that this is the body with the power to declare war, not the President.

The Founders did something remarkable, at the time, when they entrusted that power to Congress--not the President, not the executive branch--because they feared a President who would grow too fond of war. And this is exactly what has happened.

Our allies are not standing with us, a predictable outcome since we have not stood with them. The President says that China and Japan and all these other countries are going to join us in ushering ships into the Strait of Hormuz, but none of those countries are volunteering to do that.

We are seeing the time-tested proposition of regime-change wars: You break it, and you own it.

If you travel across California, as I have, you will hear not just about the sticker shock at the grocery store or the gas pump--and grocery prices are going to go up because fertilizer also transits through the Strait of Hormuz. The tariff policies are killing farmers, and the result is we are paying more at the grocery store.

But it is not just the grocery store. It is not just the gas station. You will hear about how there are no homes that average families can afford to buy, no apartments that teachers can afford or first responders. You will hear about the fire or the storm or the flood that turned the community upside down, like the fires we had in Los Angeles, when, a year later, they are still waiting for the Federal help that was promised them to rebuild.

You will hear about the community that is losing its only hospital or having trouble keeping its OB/GYN or recruiting an OB/GYN, its labor and delivery open because of drastic cuts to healthcare. And instead of investing in those critical parts of our community, we are spending $1 billion a day with this war in Iran.

If you listen closer, you hear a mother ready to enter the golden years of her retirement, worried that her 401(k) won't be enough to get her through, if she is even lucky enough to have a 401(k); or a father in the prime of his working years but worried that Social Security may not be there when he is finally ready to retire; a parent raising a toddler, unable to return to work because the cost of childcare would erase whatever income they would make; a business owner unable to keep up with tariffs that have changed their input costs a dozen times the last 2 months; a farmer finally ready to give in and sell the farm to a big conglomerate after generations of tilling the land because trade wars and immigration raids have made farming impossible; a college student about to earn their degree seeing their world turned upside down by technological revolution and AI, wondering if their years of hard work and exams will amount to anything resembling a career; a high school student seeing a world on fire and wondering if their lives will be anything like what their parents enjoyed, if they can ever afford a home or to retire or have access to healthcare or raise a family or have a job that will sustain them, whether they can still live in a democracy even, or something less, something more sinister, something where Big Brother is watching and listening, where what they say can cost them their job or their future. I have heard a great many examples of these fears. My constituents have shared their deep concerns with me.

Linda from Moreno Valley wrote:

Dear Senator Schiff, I'm a retired teacher and having to

make ends meet by picking up work here and there. 69 years

old and for the first time in my life my family did not

celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays 2025! Why?

I am hurting and don't have the money! Groceries, food

prices are not down!

Gas prices are not down!

I could not pay the high drug price for prescription mid-

month, so I went without. I fix a broken-down car every other

month because I can't afford a new or used one right now.

Trump's tariffs have hurt me, and I don't foresee them as

doing any good to us in the next three years. Somehow I just

don't feel Great! Just sad.

From Leah in Modesto:

While billions are being spent on foreign conflict, many

Americans here at home are struggling. I live in California

and paid $7.95/gal for gas today.

Economic inequality is another urgent issue. Current tax

policies continue to benefit the ultra-wealthy while everyday

Americans are left behind.

Working families need relief, opportunity and a system that

feels fair and offers 20-somethings hope for a reasonable

future, not one that widens the gap between the top and

everyone else.

My 29-year-old daughter is in college, while still working

40 hours/week to survive and is actually thinking about not

having children for fear of the inability to provide. That is

not the future she wants.

From Sarah in Los Angeles, I heard:

I am writing as a constituent who is struggling under the

burden of federal student loan payments that are no longer

affordable.

Despite working full time in a helping profession, my

monthly loan payment has increased to a level that threatens

my ability to meet basic living expenses such as housing,

healthcare, and utilities.

This is not a matter of poor planning or lack of

responsibility, it is the result of a system that has become

financially unsustainable for many working adults.

I urge you to use your position to push for policies that

recognize the real cost of living and the long term impact of

student debt on mental health, economic participation, and

community stability.

Well, Sarah, if we weren't spending a billion dollars a day in Iran, that is a billion dollars a day we could be spending to buy down your student debt, to help other kids go to college and be able to afford it or go through training programs to train themselves for this brave new world of technology and AI that we are entering.

From Valerie in Redwood City, she writes:

I am writing because my [Gas] bill has doubled.

[My gas company] indicates that it has gone down that is

not the case at all.

I am not able to retire because my bill has increased. I'm

over 70 and a preschool teacher. I live in a condo and cannot

afford solar panels. I don't turn on the heaters often I use

heating pads on the floor. Thank you kindly for your help in

this matter.

From Kiersten in Sausalito, I heard:

My husband is a first responder and law enforcement officer

with the National Park Service and has served for 18 years.

He currently works in the Bay area, where income is

adjusted for cost of living, but the childcare subsidy is

not.

Our household gross income is $185,000, with my husband

earning $105,000 of that.

Reliable childcare in Marin County costs well over $3,000

per month, and that figure does not include the basic

expenses required to live here, such as housing, food, and

other necessities. The average cost of a house in our area is

over $1 million.

If I were to leave my job and stay home full time, we would

not be able to afford comprehensive family healthcare through

his government plan while also covering our basic living

expenses. As it stands now, I am essentially working to cover

health care for myself and our child, with the remainder of

my income going toward childcare.

I would like to see efforts made to modernize and

regionalize childcare subsidies so that families serving the

federal government can realistically afford to live and work

in the communities they serve.

From Sasha in Sacramento, Sasha writes:

Rent takes more than 43% of my net pay and my biggest fear

is that my pets will become sick or injured when I can't

afford their medical bills.

My grocery bill went up 33% from 2024 to 2025 and that was

with me making changes to cut out expensive foods like fish

and red meat.

As a registered voter, I am asking you to focus your

attention to fix the economic freefall we are in.

These are the sentiments, these are the anxieties I hear every day at townhalls, in constituent meetings, in college dining halls, and dining room tables, in email after email, letter after letter, and call after call. Our mailboxes are full. People are scared. They are worried. They feel the kinds of anxiety that leaves them awake at night, turning over the numbers in their head and wondering if they will ever truly make ends meet.

We could confront these challenges. We could turn to any one of our legislative committees and take up these issues. We could bring up any number of bills that would lower costs, make our communities safer, bring home our troops from a war that the American people never asked for, but instead, the majority has seen fit to say in the face of all of these challenges that instead of solving them, they will simply take away people's right to vote because the American people are paying attention.

They have noticed that prices have not gone down on day one as the President promised. They have noticed gas prices climbing higher and higher. They have noticed Republicans saying that this is a sacrifice they should be comfortable making.

They have seen their groceries, their gas, their utility bills, their appliances, all rocked by mercurial trade policies and on-again, off- again tariffs. They know this Republican Congress' signature accomplishment--the largest healthcare funding cut in history and billions of dollars in food aid slashed to fund a tax cut for wealthy people and large corporations--has only made matters worse.

And you know what? I know you have noticed it too. You have noticed these broken promises, and you have noticed that the American people are pissed. And they are ready to exercise that frustration at the ballot box to send a clear message.

But the response of the majority is to try to make it harder to vote. Now that it is their jobs on the line, they are finally trying to make it harder to get fired by doing away with your right to vote.

That is the SAVE America Act for you. It should be called the ``Save Our Political Hides Act'' because that is exactly what it is, a bill to supercharge the purging of voter rolls; a bill to give the Department of Homeland Security the power to decide who stays registered to vote and who gets kicked off; a bill to kill online voter registration; a bill to kill voter registration drives, to take away your ability to register to vote at the DMV or by mail; a bill that will reject every common form of identification, even your driver's license, if you want to register to vote: a servicemember showing their military ID? Nope. That is not good enough if it isn't showing proof of citizenship.

If you are one of the millions of people who changed their names, their last names when they got married, sorry, it is going to be twice as hard for you to get your ballot. Online registration, registration by mail, registering at the DMV, voter registration drives, all these methods of signing up to vote would be illegal under this bill.

Four years ago, less than 6 percent of Americans registered to vote in person--less than 6 percent. Imagine living in rural California, now forced to drive hours away for even the chance to make your voice heard in November. A family vacation will now be used to get to the county clerk's office just to get a ballot, not to mention if you can't afford to take the time off work or if you are not able to get behind the wheel.

But let's say you make it to the county clerk's office, the Republican majority has sworn up and down that all they want for you is to show a driver's license to register to vote, but guess what. A driver's license won't be enough anymore.

If the SAVE America Act passes, neither driver's license or a military ID or a Tribal ID, none of that will be enough to register to vote. And what about that REAL ID, the upgraded license that the Federal Government has been urging Americans to get for the past several years? Nope. That is not good enough either. If that doesn't show proof of citizenship, that is not good enough either.

One in every two Americans don't have the passport needed to register to vote, and millions more won't have another one of the required methods either. Americans born here, voting here all their lives, denied their ability to exercise their constitutional right by this bill.

Let's say you are just like Melania Knauss. You are a naturalized citizen and wanting to vote this November. You may even want to vote for the Republicans on your ballot. Well, now you discover you are like 69 million other women who have changed their name when they got married, which means that Melania Trump will now have to not only bring her proof of citizenship but also her marriage license to prove she is eligible to vote.

And so in this Republican SAVE America Act world, to even try to register for your constitutional right to vote, you might have to pay $165 to get a passport, take the hours it will require of you to get to the clerk's office, the wages you will miss by getting there, the gas you will have to buy at a much higher rate now, and, inevitably, the bureaucracy will make you come back once or twice.

But let's assume you get all the way through the process of registering to vote in Trump's new federalized election system. Now, you face the prospect of actually casting your ballot. You go to the White House website right now, it will tell you they plan to use this bill as a basis to ban mail-in voting. That is not hyperbole; whitehouse.gov/saveAmerica, read it: ``No mail-in ballots.''

That means 47 million voters from the last election would have to find a new way to vote. And it is not just voters in California, which has gone out of its way to ensure your constitutional right is not an impossible one to exercise, nearly 3 million Floridians voted by mail. And that is not just Democrats. About one in five Republicans cast their ballot by mail in 2024--no longer, if the President gets his way.

Why make it so hard for Americans to exercise a constitutional right? Because Donald Trump has admitted the true aims of this bill. If the SAVE America Act becomes law, he says the Republican Party will ``never lose a race in 50 years.''

This is what this bill is designed to do. It is designed to lock in a Republican majority for half a century by locking you out of the polling place. Former--or soon-to-be-former Secretary Kristi Noem said that we need to make sure the ``right people'' are voting.

Well, who are the right people? The right people, I guess, are people they expect to vote for the President's party.

It used to be in this country both parties sought to increase voter turnout, that we both recognized it as an unmitigated good that more Americans were participating in elections. Not anymore.

This is nothing less than a deliberate campaign to undermine confidence in our elections.

The Speaker says we have a major voter fraud problem. He cites as his

evidence three Republican House candidates in California who he says were ahead on election day, but as absentee ballots came in, they fell further and further behind. He can't prove it, but to him, it stands to reason there must be fraud.

He knows better than that. That is just a pure falsehood. This is a deliberate campaign to undermine confidence in our elections. The seizing of ballot boxes in Georgia are meant to undermine confidence in our elections. The subpoenaing of records in Maricopa County are meant to undermine our confidence in elections. All the false talk about massive voter fraud is a complete fiction even according to the conservative Heritage Foundation--a complete fiction--and they would use this fiction to take away the legitimate franchise of millions of Americans.

Look, we have serious challenges in this country. We have a war that the American people don't want and don't support. We have the cost of basic necessities increasing all the time. We have a challenge we didn't face in the great recession or even the Great Depression. The problem today is not that people are out of work, although unemployment is rising. The problem today is that people are working, and they still can barely afford to get by.

That is the central challenge facing our country, and I think, until we grapple with that challenge, our democracy will be on fragile ground. When people see the quality of life their parents enjoyed as something better than what they have and when they look at their futures and they find it in doubt for their kids, all too many will entertain any demagogue who comes along and promises they alone can fix it.

But the answer cannot be to simply take away people's right to vote. We need to address that challenge to make the economy work for Americans again. Anyone working hard in this country should be able to provide for themselves and their families. That is what we should be focused on. That is what the President promised to do. Taking away their right to vote and turning us into some kind of--if not an autocracy, something less than a democracy, that is not the answer.

So I urge my colleagues to vote against this ``Save our Political Heinies Act'' and vote in favor of our democracy, to vote to expand the franchise to more and more Americans, not take it away because of the failure of the President's policies.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, just over a year ago, Los Angeles County fell victim to the worst natural disaster in my lifetime. The Eaton and Palisade fires were unthinkable tragedies--lives taken; livelihoods incinerated; old photographs, family heirlooms, childhood homes gone forever; the homes of more constituents, friends, staff gone, along with the place where my wife and I got married; whole blocks of neighborhoods razed with indiscriminate and random destruction.

In the year since, alongside Senator Padilla, I have worked to help the families impacted by these fires in every way I can. I visited recovery efforts in the earliest days of the fires, meeting with survivors and lending a hand where I could to help families grieving what these fires took from them.

My team and I have facilitated Federal, State, and local connections for these communities, trying to ensure they have the resources they need to recover. I have introduced legislation to help families better protect their

homes in the future and to bring down insurance rates.

But so much work remains. It has been more than a year since the fires, and Congress has yet to move forward on much needed Federal disaster aid for L.A. County. We have urged the President to act. We have called on Congress to act--just as we have with fires, hurricanes, and floods of the past in States red and blue--to pass a supplemental that gives us a fighting chance at building stronger than before.

Yet, for the first time, disaster relief is being apportioned not on the basis of need but on the basis of political affiliation, as if these fires discriminate between homes that voted for the President and those that did not. We have called on the President and this Congress to drop discrimination against California or other States based on no more than its political leanings, and we continue that call today.

But the lack of disaster aid for California and other States is not the only place where this Congress is failing to meet the needs of the American people. Right now, the very Federal Agency we call upon to facilitate disaster recovery, FEMA, is shut down. The Agency whose job it is to provide financial assistance to families and aid the recovery process until houses can be rebuilt and families can move back into their homes has no money from Congress to operate. As a result, this critical Agency, already understaffed, has an even more diminished capacity to help do these critical jobs.

This has gone on for weeks and is unacceptable, and that is what we are here today to change. With this legislation, we can reopen FEMA today. We can give paychecks to the people whose job it is to get Los Angeles and communities across the country back on their feet. We can remove unnecessary slowdowns in the approval processes, in recovery applications, because of the lack of staffing. We can put ourselves on a pathway to finally passing a disaster aid package.

Now, this is not the first time we have tried to reopen FEMA. Senate Democrats have tried to call up and pass legislation to open this Agency multiple times in recent weeks, but we have been told no. And why? Because my colleagues across the aisle continue to insist that this Agency and others--like TSA, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Coast Guard--cannot reopen until we pass another multibillion-dollar infusion of resources for ICE and CBP.

Senate Democrats have been clear: not another dime for these immigration enforcement Agencies until we see real reforms, until they take off the masks and put on the body cams, until they are held to the same standard as the neighborhood cop on the beat, until their standard of ``no judicial warrant, no problem'' is torn out of the training manual. That is not too much to ask.

In the aftermath of Americans watching DHS storming city apartment buildings like they were behind enemy lines or ICE dragging citizens from their homes or CBP gunning down Americans in cold blood in the street, this cannot be too much to ask. We are seeing families torn apart, citizens detained without medical care, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, children detained because of the color of their skin or the language they speak or where they work. We have seen DHS spending $140 million on assault weapons, Glocks, and tasers and countless more on building massive new detention centers.

So we are insisting on reform. We reject the false choice the majority would give us that we cannot reform ICE until we agree to give ICE billions more. These cannot be the only two choices.

Let's pass this commonsense bill and reopen FEMA today. Let's get disaster recovery efforts moving forward. We can do both. We can help Californians in need and others across the country.

So, Mr. President, as in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, on behalf of Senator Padilla and myself, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the bill at the desk to make continuing appropriations for the Federal Emergency Management pay and operations in the event of a Federal Government shutdown and for other purposes; that the bill be considered read three times and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, we are at war once again. George W. Bush had his Iraq war, and Donald Trump now has his Iran war.

Make no mistake, with the massive deployment of American military forces, with the massive amounts of ordnance that are being used, with the tragic loss of six lives--six servicemembers of the United States-- we are at war.

We are at war, having had no national debate of whether we should enter into war. We are at war, having had no authorization by Congress--a power explicitly given by our Founders to the Congress to declare war. The Founders understood that the executive branch, acting alone, would grow too fond of war. We are seeing that fear materialize before our eyes with a President who now has used military force repeatedly against different countries with different rationales.

Why should we care whether there is a vote in Congress on war? Why should we care whether there is a debate in the country over war?

We should care because, if we vest the sole power to make war in the President of the United States--the sole decision to bring a country into war with the President of the United States--there is no check on the use of that authority; there is no check on the abuse of that authority; there is no meaningful way to constrain a President from getting involved in adventurism around the world that causes our country an enormous price to pay in lives lost, in treasure lost.

Now, you might say: Well, what about these other uses of military force by others in the past? Well, of course, with the Iraq war, there was a vote on authorization. With the Afghanistan war, there was a vote on authorization. But what about these other uses? Doesn't a President have a right to use force to defend the country from imminent attack?

The answer is yes. If there is an imminent threat of attack, the President has the authority. But if it goes beyond anything imminent, he must come to Congress for an authorization.

So what was the imminent threat here? Well, the short answer is, there was none. But the administration has given several shifting rationales--several incompatible arguments--of why they believe there was an imminent threat.

Let's look at Secretary Rubio, last week, who said that the Iranians were headed in the pathway to, one day, being able to develop weapons that could reach the continental United States.

Well, a threat to reach the United States, one day in the future, is the very antithesis of ``imminent.''

Donald Trump said, on Monday, that the regime had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America.

By ``soon,'' the best estimates are that it would take years. That is certainly not imminent.

Secretary Rubio, on Monday, had this to say:

There absolutely was an imminent threat . . . We knew that

there was going to be an Israeli action.

He said:

We knew that that would precipitate an attack against

American forces, and we knew that if we didn't preemptively

go after them before they launched those attacks, we would

suffer higher casualties . . . We knew that if Iran was

attacked, even by someone else, they would immediately come

after us and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow

before we responded.

So, on Monday, Rubio says, because Israel was going to attack, we had to preemptively attack.

But on Tuesday, the President contradicted his own Secretary of State and said: ``We were having negotiations with these lunatics''--meaning the Iranians. ``It was my opinion that they''--meaning Iran--``were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn't do it. . . . If anything''--the President said--``I might have forced Israel's hand, but Israel was ready.''

So the President says, no, the imminence didn't come from Israel, and that he may have, in fact, forced Israel's hand.

On Tuesday, Hegseth took sides with the President and not Marco Rubio, saying that Trump's explanation was ``100 percent correct.''

OK, so the imminent threat didn't come from anything that Israel was planning to do. It didn't come from missiles that could hit the United States that were years away.

What was the other imminent rationale that the administration used?

Well, on February 21, Steven Witkoff said that Iran is ``probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb making material.''

Of course, that contradicts what the President said last June, with the first Iran war, in which he said and reiterated, just this past Saturday, that ``we obliterated the regime's nuclear program.''

Well, either we obliterated it or we didn't; and if we obliterated it, it is obviously not an imminent threat.

On Monday, Secretary Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon that the Islamic Republic was building sophisticated missiles and other conventional weapons to shield its plans for a nuclear bomb.

Iran had a conventional gun to our head as they tried to

lie their way to a nuclear bomb.

Again, there was no evidence that Iran was on the cusp of a missile that could hit the United States, no evidence that Iran was building the mechanism of a bomb, and no evidence of imminence.

What about regime change? Is that somehow a rationale for war at all, let alone war without an authorization by the American people and Congress?

Donald Trump, in 2016, had this to say about regime change. He said:

We must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and

regime change.

Earlier in 2025, Donald Trump said:

Regime change takes chaos and, ideally, we don't want to

see so much chaos.

But, on Saturday, Donald Trump said:

When we are finished, take over your government.

He said this to the Iranian people.

It will be yours to take. . . . Take back your country.

On Monday, Secretary Rubio said:

We would love to see this regime be replaced.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump said ``someone from within'' the Iranian regime might be the best choice to take over.

But regime change is not an argument that we face as an imminent threat.

Finally, the last rationale of the administration's was on Saturday, when the President posted on Truth Social that ``Iran tried to interfere in [the] 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with [the] United States.''

On Sunday, he cited Iran's effort to assassinate him as a key factor in ordering the operation that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. ``I got him before he got me,'' Trump told ABC News. ``I got him first.''

So this was, I guess, the final rationale. He is the one to get the Iranians before they got him.

So here we are with this shifting series of incoherent rationales-- none of them amounting to imminence, none of them posing a direct and imminent threat to the United States. Now we are at war again, where we have tragically lost the lives of American servicemembers, where we are sinking billions and billions of dollars again into a foreign war without a time constraint, without a plan. This comes at great cost to the American people, most particularly to our military families.

But we are about to get a request for a supplemental appropriation, probably in the tens of billions of dollars, to backfill all the munitions we are using today. That is tens of billions of dollars that will not go into your healthcare. That is tens of billions of dollars that will not go to reducing the cost of your housing or your groceries. That is tens of billions of dollars that will not go into investing in America. That is tens of billions of dollars that we are literally blowing up over Iran when we face no imminent threat.

Folks, we have already, essentially, walked away from our most important power, and that is the congressional power of the purse. The President rescinds funds, and he impounds funds, and we put up no murmur of protest. We have walked away from that most important power in the Constitution that the Founders gave us.

The other most important power they gave us is the power to declare war. There is no argument that this is anything less than war. This resolution is about stopping that war, but it is also about reasserting Congress' vital role as a check on the Executive and on the abuse of the authority to bring a nation to war.

This is about whether the American people, through their elected representatives, will have a say when their sons and daughters are put in harm's way, when the resources of this country are diverted away from their communities and toward the building of bombs and weapons and engagement in another potentially endless foreign war.

I thank Senator Kaine for this resolution, and I am proud to work with him on this. I urge all of my colleagues to support it.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, we are at war once again--this time with Iran. It is a war that the President declared, incidentally, almost accidentally when he talked about the prospect of casualties among our brave servicemembers being a possible outcome--an outcome that has already, all too tragically, come to pass with the deaths of six of our troops and the grave injuries of others.

The massive size of the deployment also makes clear this is war in a real sense, in a constitutional sense--the scale of the bombing, the danger to not only our forces in the region but to all of our regional partners, the Iranian retaliation through the Persian Gulf, the closing of the Straits of Hormuz, the bombing of our bases, the bombing of ships--Iranian ships and those of our allies. As for the length of the deployment, the President says it could be weeks--at least a month or more. He is unwilling to rule out the threat of boots on the ground-- American boots on the ground. The President says he may go there.

All of this inescapably points to the fact that we are at war. We are at war once again. Once again, we are at war without an imminent threat of attack on the United States.

The President said the Iranian nuclear capability had been obliterated. That was false, but there was no evidence presented by the President that the Iranians were making a mad dash to develop the bomb, no evidence that the centrifuges were spinning out weapons-grade uranium, no evidence they were close to developing the mechanism of a bomb--none.

Despite the President's bizarre claim they were 2 weeks away from having a bomb, there is no evidence to support such a baseless, intelligence-free claim, nor is there evidence that the Iranians had developed a missile capability that could hit the United States--none. To suggest such things brings painfully to mind the false claims and the overhype of intelligence that got us into the war in Iraq.

Have we learned nothing?

We are at war once again. We are at war once again without congressional authorization. The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to declare war. That power was placed in our hands by our Founders, not by accident but by design. They feared an Executive grown too fond of warmaking. And given that now this is at least the third broad use of military force by this President, I believe the Founders' worst fears have come to pass. He is too fond of going to war to gain the oil assets of one country and to engage in the regime change of another.

Have we given up any semblance of allegiance to that part of our Constitution--the war power--even as we appear to have surrendered our other great power--the power of the purse?

Are we now a mere constitutional afterthought--not a paper tiger-- indeed, not a tiger at all--unable to constrain a runaway Executive, unwilling to even demand a vote on an authorization to use force when our troops are getting killed, uncomprehending of the long-term damage we do to our system of checks and balances, of the license we are giving a future President to do as they please, to make war as they will, and be confident that Congress will not make a peep of the license we give to other powers around the world to use force, not diplomacy, in Ukraine, Taiwan, or elsewhere?

We are at war once again. We are at war once again over regime change. We have killed the Ayatollah Khamenei. Good riddance. He was a brutal dictator who slaughtered his own people and sponsored terrorism around the region for decades that claimed American lives and threatened to wipe Israel off the map. Good riddance. Our military attack killed him and over 40 other leaders of the regime. This may have only rid the world of part of the regime, but make no mistake, this war is about regime change.

The President has urged Iranians to rise up and take control of their country. He has told them that this may be the last chance they have to do so. He has bragged that no other President has given them this opportunity.

Pete Hegseth may try to deny it, but this is what regime change is all about. And regime change is messy. Don't take my word for it. Take his, the President's--this President's--who says that regime-change wars unleash chaos. Yes, they do, and that is what this war has unleashed.

And what of the brave Iranian people, who have been urged to rise up against their rulers to bring down armed IRGC goons without having the arms themselves to do so? If they do--if they rise up--are we prepared to support them? If they are mowed down, will we come to their rescue or will we simply mourn their passing?

What is the plan? What are the contingencies? Why has the President left our country and the Iranian people in the dark? Could it be because there is no plan, and there is only hope?

Have we learned nothing from Afghanistan? Have we learned nothing from Iraq and elsewhere that it is difficult, costly, dangerous, time- consuming, and deadly to try to change a country, to try to change a culture, to build a new nation in our image or any other, and that it is impossible to do so through the dropping of bombs, the firing of missiles, even long-term occupation?

My fellow Americans, we are at war once again, and I join my fellow cosponsors of this War Powers Resolution, once again, to urge your support; to demand that this President, if he believes the threat is imminent, that war is justified, that the deaths of our troops are justified, that the expenditure of billions--not on the American people, not on their healthcare, their groceries, or their housing--is worth the cost, to come before this Congress, this Senate, the American people, and make the case for a war authorization; to make the case now before other servicemembers are killed or, if not, to cease and desist from further hostilities.

I urge a ``yea'' vote.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I request 30 minutes to address the Senate.

Mr. President, tonight, just down the hall, the President will stand before Congress and the American people. He will paint a picture of strength, prosperity, and national renewal. He will claim credit for successes he did not achieve and deny responsibility for crises that he created. He will tell us that America has never been greater, but the American people deserve the truth. And the truth is that over the past year, we have not moved closer to forming a more perfect Union. Tragically, it is quite the opposite. Our disunion has only grown.

Our Founders understood something when they chose the words ``a more perfect Union.'' They didn't contemplate achieving perfection. They envisioned something more realistic, more achievable--the pursuit of a more perfect Union, a constant effort to push the country forward, a grinding, slow and sometimes painful process. They recognized that America is not a finished product but a beautiful, ongoing experiment in self-governance that requires hard work and constant perseverance.

For 250 years, through wars and depressions, through slavery and Jim Crow, through periods of bitter division and hard-won reconciliation, Americans have honored our Founders' intention and moved the Nation forward. We have stumbled; we have fallen short; and at times, we have failed to live up to our promise. But we have always eventually bent the arc of our own national story towards justice, towards fairness, and towards a more perfect Union.

And yet from the moment he inflicted himself on our public life, Donald Trump has done everything possible to reverse that progress. By design, it appears, by virtue of the product of some defect of character perhaps, but in every way he can and every moment he can, he has sought to divide us. Today, in fewer words than the President will use tonight, I want to talk about some of the ways that President Trump has not only failed to advance our Union, but done so much to bring about our disunion.

Now, I have served in the Capitol for over two decades, and I have visited the capitols of our friends and some of our adversaries across the world. I have seen firsthand that, notwithstanding our possession of the strongest and most courageous military in the world, America's greatest strategic asset is not the might of our arms or size of our aircraft carriers; it is the strength of the alliances we have around the world.

The web of partnerships we built after World War II, NATO, our Pacific alliances, our hemispheric relationships, they are force multipliers. They help us keep the peace. They are the reason that a nation of 340 million people can project power and values across a globe of more than 8 billion. Yet, tragically, President Trump has systematically taken apart the advantage these allies give us. He has insulted the leaders of Canada, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom--our closest democratic allies--not to mention countries like Denmark.

He has questioned whether America would defend NATO members under article V, the collective defense provision that has kept most of Europe peaceful for 75 years. He has treated longstanding security commitments as protection rackets, demanding payment as if our allies were vassal states rather than partners. And he has done all this while praising Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other dictators. The result? Our allies don't trust us, and our most powerful adversaries don't fear us, and that makes America less safe.

When the next crisis comes--and it will come, and it may even be precipitated by this President--we will find ourselves isolated in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. This weakens and endangers our Union. But the power of our Union isn't just about the

strength of our military or our ties abroad. It is also

about the strength of our intellect here at home.

I find myself thinking about an exchange from the television series on Chernobyl. A scientist tells a Soviet bureaucrat:

Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or

later, that debt is paid.

This administration has run up a debt to the truth that will take generations to repay.

Over the last several years, the President of the United States suggested people inject bleach to cure COVID, that windmills cause cancer, that climate change is a hoax invented by China, that Tylenol use in pregnancy causes autism--the list goes on and on. And over this past year, we have seen systematic attacks on scientists at CDC, at NOAA, the EPA, and the NIH--career professionals driven from public service for the crime of publishing findings the President doesn't like, DOGE'd for speaking truth to power, for respecting facts and science, or simply--seemingly and perversely in this cruelest of administrations--fired for the apparent fun of it.

We have seen university researchers lose Federal funding, not because their work lacks merit, but because their conclusions contradict preferred political narratives.

We have seen attacks on vaccines and changes to our public health system that have caused needless outbreaks of disease. This President has most assuredly not made America great again, but he has managed to make measles great again. And when experts gently try to correct these falsehoods, they are attacked, doxed, and threatened. This is part of a deliberate cultivation of ignorance as a political strategy.

When you undermine expertise, when you treat all opinions as equally valid regardless of evidence, when you replace scientists with sycophants, you make people vulnerable to con artists and demagogues. You make democracy itself impossible because democracy requires an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing truth from lies.

The debt to the truth will come due. And when it does, our country will pay an enormous price.

Mr. President, just more than a year ago, Los Angeles County faced one of the most destructive disasters in the Nation's history. Entire neighborhoods torched and torn apart by wildfires, the magnitude of which we haven't seen on suburban streets of the Southland. The loss of loved ones, of homes, of businesses, the precious memories--all gone in mere moments--still weigh heavy upon us.

Since then, I have talked to survivors of those fires who have gone on to rebuild, or tried to, only to see their insurance coverage dropped. With worsening drought and prolonged dry seasons, insurance companies are refusing to cover the same homes and businesses they covered just a few years ago. They are seeing what we are seeing; that this may not be the last of these tragedies in our hills in our lifetimes. This is the climate crisis in human terms, and this administration's response has been to make it catastrophically worse.

President Trump has rolled back fuel efficiency standards, withdrawn from international climate agreements, opened pristine Federal lands to more drilling, and--as we saw last week's repeal of what is known as the endangerment finding--gutted the EPA's authority to regulate carbon emissions.

A New York Times headline last month actually read ``E.P.A. to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution.'' It sounds like parody but, sadly, these destructive efforts are real. All of this while summers grow hotter, some winters grow colder, wildfires rage, hurricanes intensify, and insurance markets collapse. The President calls this energy dominance, but dominance over what? the laws of physics? the carbon cycle?

Here is what has actually happened: We are sacrificing long-term prosperity for short-term profit. We are driving up costs for American families through higher insurance premiums, higher food prices, and higher disaster recovery expenses.

We are ceding global leadership in clean energy and technology--the defining economic opportunity of the 21st century--to China and to Europe. And we are doing it all while pretending that the house isn't on fire. Angelenos know better, so do millions of Americans living through droughts, floods, and heat waves that would have been impossible a generation ago. The climate doesn't care about your politics. The debt comes due whether you believe it or not.

Our change in climate is not the only threat our communities face in Donald Trump's America. In the aftermath of January 6, 2021, there was a brief moment when Americans of all political persuasions condemned political violence. The attack on the Capitol was so brazen, so shocking, that even some of the President's allies momentarily found their moral bearings and said ``count me out.'' That moment has clearly passed.

We now have a President who has pardoned January 6 rioters, calling them patriots, and brought them into his administration, including one caught shouting ``kill them'' at police officers that day.

We have an administration that treats White nationalist extremism as a core competency in the hiring process and an administration that focuses Federal law enforcement resources, not on violent offenders but on prosecuting political opponents, unleashing masked ICE agents on innocent people, and deporting children and grandmothers.

At the same time, we have seen the gutting of public health infrastructure that was built over decades to protect Americans from pandemics. We have seen emergency preparedness budgets slashed and the people who ran them driven out of government.

The message is clear: If you are a violent extremist who supports the President, you get a pardon, but if you are a public health official who takes your job seriously, you get a pink slip.

This makes Americans less safe from terrorism, from disease, from domestic threats that don't care about party affiliation. Security and attacks against police officers aren't partisan issues--at least they shouldn't be. But when the President treats loyalty as more important than competence, when he treats protection as something selectively offered to supporters rather than universally provided to the people, he fundamentally misunderstands the first duty of government. And the need to protect the public is certainly not the only thing he misunderstands.

From the birth of our Nation, our Founders were obsessed with preventing tyranny and the emergence of another King, another despot. They created checks and balances, separation of powers, an independent judiciary. They understood that the greatest threat to liberty wasn't foreign invasion; it was the concentration of power in the hands of one person or faction.

This President has systematically dismantled these safeguards in his second term. The Justice Department is supposed to be independent, pursuing justice without fear or favor, but under this administration, it has become an instrument of Presidential revenge, a sword and shield for the President launching investigations of critics and dropping cases against allies.

His Justice Department--and I say ``his'' because it no longer represents the public or justice but is run by his former criminal defense lawyers and represents only his personal interests--sought to indict two of my Senate colleagues for stating the plain truth that members of the military may refuse an illegal order. Indeed, they have a duty to do so. Their oath, after all, is to the Constitution, not to the person of the President.

It is difficult to overstate what an abuse of power the pursuit of that indictment represents. The effort to jail one's opposition is a hallmark of dictatorship, not democracy.

Career civil servants from all across the Federal Government--people who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations with professionalism and integrity--are being purged for insufficient loyalty to the person of the President. Inspectors general who uncover wrongdoing and expose corruption are fired; whistleblowers, intimidated. We are witnessing the conversion of the Federal Government from a public trust into a personal fiefdom.

Here is the thing that should terrify every American regardless of party: Once these norms are broken, they are immensely difficult to restore. Once you establish that a President can use the Justice Department to punish enemies, every future President will face that temptation--pressure, even. Once you establish that civil servants must demonstrate personal loyalty rather than professional competence, you have replaced the rule of law with the rule of one.

The Founders warned us about this. Their pursuit of a more perfect Union was dependent upon a calculated departure from consolidated power. Now we are living the fears of our Founders and seeing that threat expand rapidly.

With the President's weaponization of our institutions comes a parallel and equally disturbing trend. America has always had a secret weapon in global competition. We attract the best and the brightest from around the world. Nobel Prize winners, startup founders, groundbreaking researchers--they come here because America offers something unique: freedom, funding, and the belief in science. The ultimate intellectual melting pot. That is being attacked on a daily basis.

This administration has slashed funding for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy's research programs. It has attacked universities as ``indoctrination centers.'' It has made it harder for foreign students to get visas or stay after graduation and start a business.

I have spoken with researchers at Caltech, UCLA, Stanford--you name it--world-class institutions in my State. They tell me the same story: Graduate students from abroad are choosing to study in Europe or Canada, even China. Postdocs are leaving. Even American-born scientists are considering opportunities elsewhere because they can't count on research funding, because they are tired of political attacks, because they don't want to work in an environment where basic facts are treated with partisan hostility. America is now, for the first time, losing the race for talent, and in a knowledge economy, talent is everything.

China isn't attacking its scientists. Europe isn't defunding its research universities. They are doing the opposite because they understand what this administration apparently doesn't: The future belongs to nations that invest in intellectual and creative talent, not to the nations that drive it away.

When the next breakthrough treatments, the next transformative technologies, the next generation of innovation comes from Shanghai or Berlin instead of San Francisco or Boston, we will know why and who is responsible.

In 1783, George Washington wrote:

For if Men are to be precluded from offering their

Sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious

and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration

of Mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech

may be taken away, and, dumb and silent we may be led, like

sheep, to the Slaughter.

Washington understood that the rule of law, the principle that no one--not even the President--is above the law is fundamentally what separates democracy from despotism.

President Trump has spent his whole career evading the rule of law. He has refused to comply with congressional subpoenas. He has ignored court orders. He has pardoned coconspirators and dangled pardons in brazen attempts at witness tampering. He has attacked judges who rule against him as ``biased'' or ``partisan.'' He has called for the prosecution of political opponents without evidence. He has treated the justice system not as a neutral arbiter but as a weapon to be captured and wielded. And, increasingly, he is succeeding.

We have seen this partisan and dangerous Supreme Court grant Presidents sweeping immunity from prosecution. We have seen judges appointed based on loyalty rather than jurisprudence. We have seen the normalization of conduct that in any previous administration would have been utterly disqualifying.

After 2\1/2\ centuries of American life, we came to believe that the rule of law was so well entrenched in this country as to be sacrosanct, beyond reproach or repeal. We were wrong. It depends on norms; on shame, even; on the willingness of people in power to accept limits on that power. When those restraints disappear, when corruption becomes routine and impunity becomes expected, the Republic is in deep danger.

The health of our democracy is at risk, but so, too, is the health of our Nation.

Let me tell you about a constituent of mine. Her name is Catherine. She wrote to me last November. She shared that she is a retired teacher, but earlier in her career, when she was working, she had trouble getting health insurance because she had a preexisting condition that made insurance unobtainable for her until we passed the Affordable Care Act. The ACA changed that. It literally saved her life.

Now the President is trying to dismantle the ACA again. The ``Big Ugly Bill'' repealed its tax credits and took a trillion dollars from Medicaid to give the rich in this country a tax cut. He has systematically attacked the healthcare system Americans rely on to give more tax breaks for corporations, and all the while he has driven up costs so that he can claim the system is broken and then privatize it. It is not hard to see.

The pattern with this administration is to promise relief but deliver crisis, promise lower costs but drive them up, promise to protect people then cut their care. But those broken promises will also mean shattered families, deeper uncertainty, and an America that is sicker and poorer.

This is what is happening to Catherine right now. She is on a fixed income--roughly $45,000 a year--with a house payment and two kids in college. Because of the ``Big Ugly Bill's'' failure to extend the ACA tax credit, her premiums have gone up $800 a month this year-- nearly $10,000 over the course of the year--almost a quarter of her annual income. She has relied on the good will of her neighbors and of her local hospital, but her words still ring in my ear:

I am not going to make do. I don't know what I'm going to

do.

In Trump's America, the economy of opportunity is only for those on the inside--the billionaires and big corporations that can afford to donate to Donald Trump's ballroom, buy his meme coins, or pay a million dollars to stand at his side while he takes the oath of office or celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Nation. And the rest? Let them eat the cost of mounting tariffs.

Remember when Trump said his tariff wars were going to be easy to win? Well, how is that working out for us? Tariffs, which are taxes on American consumers, not on foreign countries, have driven up the cost of everything, from groceries to electronics. Retaliatory tariffs from other countries have devastated American farmers and manufacturers. And he is fighting a Court decision that should force him to pay those taxes back to the people. Business investment has stalled because no one knows what the rules will be from one month to the next. The President promised to bring down inflation. Instead, his tariffs have made it worse.

Of course, it is not just the tariffs. Tax cuts to the rich people and corporations have exploded the deficit. Regulatory rollbacks have boosted corporate profits but created long-term risks. And attacks on the Federal Reserve's independence have undermined the Nation's economy and driven prices even higher.

Trump promised to bring back manufacturing jobs. We have lost them. He promised to bring down inflation. It has gone up. He promised to reduce the trade deficit. It has reached a record high.

Americans literally cannot afford 3 more years of this, which brings me to the heart of the matter, the No. 1 way President Trump has worsened the state of our Union. He has taken a diverse, complicated, and sometimes fractious country--which has always been diverse, complicated, and sometimes fractious--and instead of trying to unite it, he has done more than anyone else in our history to break it apart. He governs through fear and scapegoating. Immigrants are ``invaders.'' Vulnerable kids are a ``lie.'' Political opponents are ``enemies from within.'' The media is ``fake news.'' Anyone who disagrees with him is a traitor.

Think about what this has meant for all of us, what it has meant for you. There are family members who are no longer speaking to one another, friendships that have ended. Communities are turning inward or turning on each other. The basic trust that allows democracy to function--the assumption that even when we disagree, we share certain values and commitments--is coming apart.

I have been in public service long enough to remember when Democrats and Republicans could team up with each other without suffering political attack, when we could disagree without questioning each other's patriotism or humanity, when we could make progress on matters big and small. That world has grown very small indeed, in no small part because of this President.

The great tragedy, of course, is that America has real challenges that require real solutions. The cost of everyday life, housing and healthcare, education and energy costs, infrastructure and the imminent challenges of the climate crisis--these are hard problems. Reasonable people can disagree about how to solve them, but we can't solve them or prepare for the problems of the future if we can't talk to each other. We can't solve them if we treat politics as warfare rather than negotiation. We can't solve them if the President of the United States purports to love America but spends all of his time attacking Americans.

``A house divided against itself cannot stand.'' Lincoln said that. It was true then; it is true now.

So, tonight, President Trump will deliver his State of the Union Address. He will claim that America is strong, prosperous, and united, but, sadly, he has made us weaker abroad, more divided at home, less trusted, less prosperous, less safe, and less free than when he took office. The state of our Union now is not strong, thanks to him. It is fragile--deeply, deeply fragile.

But we cannot forget that fragility is not the same thing as frailty. We have been broken before and found ways to mend ourselves. We have lost our way before and found somehow the courage to chart a new course. We have forgotten our highest ideals before and yet always eventually remembered who we are.

We cannot think of ``a more perfect Union'' as a destination. ``A more perfect Union'' is a direction. It is the

choice we make generation after generation to see each other not as enemies but as friends, as partners in the boldest experiment in democracy the world has ever known. It is the work of building longer bridges instead of higher walls between parties, between communities, between the America we are and the America we could be. It is the recognition that our Nation's diversity isn't our weakness; it is the very source of our strength, our creativity, our resilience.

``A more perfect Union'' means families who don't go bankrupt because someone got sick. It means kids who can breathe clean air and inherit a livable planet. It means immigrants being welcomed for their contributions, not vilified for their origins. It means learning from our history and charting a more equitable course for the future. It means justice that applies equally to the powerful and the powerless. It means scientists free to pursue truth without fear. It means alliances that multiply our influence instead of isolation that diminishes it. It means an America where disagreement doesn't mean demonization, where debate doesn't mean destruction, where we can be fierce advocates for our beliefs while still recognizing the humanity in those who disagree.

None of that is easy, and if the last 10 years of American life are any evidence, none of that is guaranteed. The Constitution gives us the tools, but we have to do the job. The Founders lit the flame, but we have to keep it burning. They started the work, and we must continue it.

Tonight, the President will try to convince you that everything is fine. I am asking you to trust your own eyes, to trust your own experience, to trust the evidence, and then I am asking you to trust something else: your own power--the power to organize, to vote, to speak truth, to run for office, to hold leaders accountable; the power to look at what we have lost and decide we are going to fight with everything we have to get it back.

Because a more perfect Union doesn't depend on any one person or President, as much as he may want it to. It depends on teachers who refuse to teach lies. It depends on students who refuse to abandon their dreams. It depends on journalists who refuse to stop asking questions, on scientists who refuse to abandon facts, on neighbors who refuse to turn against each other, on Americans who refuse to accept that this is as good as it gets. It depends on you, on me--every single one of us.

The work is hard. The progress is slow. The discouragement is real. But so is the possibility. So is the promise. So is the extraordinary, improbable, beautiful experiment that is America if we have the courage to believe in it again and the determination to make it real. The pursuit of a more perfect Union has to continue. It must, and it continues with us.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the centennial of the Stockton Symphony in Stockton, CA.

Founded in 1926 by Italian immigrant Manlio Silva, the Stockton Symphony is the third-oldest continuously operating professional orchestra in the State of California. In May of 1926, Mr. Silva assembled 20 local musicians to perform for the Stockton Musical Club, laying the foundation for a cherished and enduring cultural institution. Mr. Silva initially supported the symphony out of his own pocket, guided by a deep belief in the potential of music to enrich community life.

Over the past century, the symphony has grown from a 20-member community ensemble into a professional orchestra of metropolitan stature, drawing musical talent from across the globe. They have elevated artistic excellence in the region, expanded innovative educational programs, and achieved national recognition through high- profile composer residencies and critically acclaimed world premieres.

Throughout its history, the symphony has remained dedicated to Mr. Silva's mission of inspiring joy and building community through the power of music. Today's performers carry on his tradition of excellence as they electrify audiences and shape a vibrant and inclusive culture in the Central Valley.

As the Stockton Symphony celebrates its 100th anniversary, I commend the musicians, staff, and community whose commitment ensure its enduring success. I ask all Members to join me in honoring the centennial of the Stockton Symphony on July 1, 2026, and in recognizing a century of artistic excellence, community service, and cultural enrichment in California's Central Valley.

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the centennial of the Stockton Symphony in Stockton, CA.

Founded in 1926 by Italian immigrant Manlio Silva, the Stockton Symphony is the third-oldest continuously operating professional orchestra in the State of California. In May of 1926, Mr. Silva assembled 20 local musicians to perform for the Stockton Musical Club, laying the foundation for a cherished and enduring cultural institution. Mr. Silva initially supported the symphony out of his own pocket, guided by a deep belief in the potential of music to enrich community life.

Over the past century, the Symphony has grown from a 20-member community ensemble into a professional orchestra of metropolitan stature, drawing musical talent from across the globe. They have elevated artistic excellence in the region, expanded innovative educational programs, and

achieved national recognition through high-profile composer residencies and critically acclaimed world premieres.

Throughout its history, the symphony has remained dedicated to Mr. Silva's mission of inspiring joy and building community through the power of music. Today's performers carry on his tradition of excellence as they electrify audiences and shape a vibrant and inclusive culture in the Central Valley.

As the Stockton Symphony celebrates its 100th anniversary, I commend the musicians, staff, and community whose commitment ensure its enduring success. I ask all Members to join me in honoring the centennial of the Stockton Symphony on February 27, 2026 and in recognizing a century of artistic excellence, community service, and cultural enrichment in California's Central Valley.

Mr. President, in just 1 year and 1 week--that is, 373 days--Donald Trump and his administration have changed what it means to walk down the street in America.

Three hundred and seventy-four days ago, an American citizen did not need to worry about carrying a passport or worry that they would be pinned to the ground for being unable to prove that their hometown was, in fact, the only home they have ever known.

Three hundred and seventy-four days ago, immigrant families didn't need to call on their neighbors or rely on the help of Good Samaritans to grocery shop for them, to take their kids to school, to have access to what we value in life--all because they are afraid to open their door.

Three hundred and seventy-four days ago, standing up for your First Amendment rights, your Fourth Amendment rights, even your Second Amendment rights was not in itself a provocation in the eyes of the Federal Government.

But in so little time, so much has changed. In this America, we see masked agents hiding their faces from the world and even hiding their identification, terrorizing communities across the Nation, smashing car windows and dragging mothers and fathers from their vehicles in front of their kids--in front of their kids--often taking those kids and separating them from their parents, breaking down doors, and detaining citizens and noncitizens alike.

As for warrants? No. Apparently, DHS lawyers now claim you don't need a judicial warrant to break through the door of a U.S. citizen and haul them out in their underwear in the dead of winter, only to later release them without charge, without apology, only with newfound terror courtesy of the U.S. Federal Government.

Agents with just 47 days of training are sweeping through American cities; agents with barely over a month of training--just 47 days. And why 47? Because it is a nod to the vanity of the 47th President rather than allocated to the need to be instructed on how to, say, use, or avoid using deadly force.

Agents with less training than a teenager getting their driver's license are now badgering, beating, and even killing Americans on our streets in the name of the President while his chosen enforcers smugly walk through American cities cosplaying their favorite uniforms from the 1930s and 1940s.

DHS is now building databases of Americans, detaining and even disappearing people off of corners in Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Nashville, Los Angeles, and far too many communities across the Nation.

The Trump administration demanded that Republicans deliver a $170 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for these misbegotten efforts, taking that money away from your healthcare and taking that money away from food for hungry families to spend on weapons for enforcement agents and billions on detention centers to imprison people who are undocumented but who have committed no crimes and have no criminal records at all.

This is the America that Donald Trump has created, but it is not the America that we will accept. We will not accept the labeling of Renee Good--a mother of three, a loving and caring member of her community, caught on camera showing compassion to Federal agents even as she protested them--we will not accept that she was killed and then later falsely designated a ``domestic terrorist.''

We will not accept that Alex Pretti--a 37-year-old Veterans' Administration ICU nurse--exercising his constitutional rights and stooping to help a woman who had been pushed to the ground, can be labeled as an ``assassin'' merely hours after being shot in the back in cold blood nearly a dozen times.

These were not labels given by some arrogant agent in the field. This was not some bad apple using this terminology amongst otherwise upstanding immigration officials. No. These labels were applied by the highest ranking officials of this operation in President Trump's White House--the Cabinet Secretary overseeing these raids, Kristi Noem; the architect of this campaign of fear and mass arrest and detention, the ``racist in chief'' Stephen Miller.

This impunity that we see on our streets, this violence--it comes from the top; gaslighting amplified by the Vice President and the President himself.

This brazen denial of rights and facts is in the water at DHS headquarters, and it is increasingly clear that this has become the culture of ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

That is why I am standing here this week to say clearly: not another dime for this kind of lawless immigration regime. We will not add to the slush fund that Republicans gave Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino last year to fulfill Stephen Miller's dystopian vision of America. We require real reforms, in statute--not promises of change, not Executive actions worth less than the paper they are printed on.

Look out on the streets of Minneapolis, where two American citizens have been gunned down in as many weeks, where tear gas flies through the air and doors fly off their hinges under the banner of this administration. In those streets stand Agencies backed by billions of dollars still to be spent--billions that can arm them, billions that can detain and oppress.

This is an America in regression, where the color of your skin could be the only pretext for getting pulled over, detained, or worse--a reality that has persisted for Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and others notwithstanding the progress made in my lifetime.

As a child of the generation that shone a light on and helped pass laws to end such racist tactics, for most of my life, we have made strides to ensure that we moved past that America. But now we are returning to an America that I do not recognize, nor is this an America that I can accept.

We have the power in this body to do something about it, and until we do, my vote will reflect my complete and utter rejection of this lawless and cruel regime. This cannot become the status quo. This cannot become the new normal for America, for Alex Pretti and Renee Good, for the Californians detained without cause and without convictions, like those suffering in detentions facilities like California City whom I met, along with Alex Padilla, last week.

For all of them--for their dignity, for their children, for their families, for their friends, for their safety--and for this country, we must act.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this year our Nation will celebrate its 250th birthday--250 years in which our country has built on the foundation that is our Constitution.

The Framers could not conceive exactly what the future would bring, but they did anticipate a great deal, in significant part because they could count on some of the immutable characteristics of human nature, of institutions, of communities--like the attraction of the accumulation of power--and how, unless that gravitational force is counterbalanced, one institution or one man can come to dominate the life of a country.

One power in particular concerned our Founders, and that was the power to make war. They had seen and been the victims of a monarch who used the power of war against them. So they made the radical decision-- so contrary to all the precedent at the time--not to invest such a vital attribute of state sovereignty in the Executive but to grant the power to declare war to Congress.

In April 1798, a future President, James Madison, wrote to another future President, Thomas Jefferson, underscoring the danger and the decision. He said:

The constitution supposes, what the History of all

Governments demonstrates, is that the Executive is the branch

of power most interested in war and most prone to it. . . .

It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of

war in the Legislature.

``[M]ost prone to it''--words written more than 200 years ago and so fitting for today, when in but his first year in office, the President used military power in Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, and most significantly, in Venezuela.

After months of escalating military action against boats in the Southern Caribbean, after amassing a massive military armada on the doorstep of a foreign nation, the administration dispatched American servicemembers to invade and arrest the corrupt leader of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro--military action that we were repeatedly told would never come to pass, by a President who promised to avoid starting new foreign wars, engaging in nation building, or conducting regime change operations.

This operation was not about narcotics, nor was it about democracy, nor was it about oil. The military occupation in Venezuela captured the country's corrupt dictator but has left the corrupt drug-running regime in place instead of turning over the reins of governance to that country's legitimately elected leadership of Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez. And now our President has committed to running Venezuela for years in order to exploit its oil resources.

Today, we have the opportunity to exercise the power bestowed on us by our Framers to authorize the use of force--or decline to do so--but to reassert some constraint on an Executive grown too fond of the use of military power.

We took the first step last week when a bipartisan majority of this body voted to set before the Senate a War Powers Resolution on Venezuela. That was a strong bipartisan signal that this Chamber was unwilling to let the war powers of this body atrophy to the point where they are no more substantial than air.

Now we are on the precipice of that debate--whether we should again risk the lives of our servicemembers to procure access to another nation's oil--and the American people should see us weighing that cost.

The President has threatened the possibility of additional strikes in Venezuela if Venezuela does not ``behave.'' And by ``behave,'' I think we have to acknowledge that the behavior the President expects is for that country to share access to its oil wealth with American oil companies. Many of those companies are dubious about investing in Venezuela. Some believe it would take years or more than a decade to make that profitable.

Whether it makes good business sense to them is their decision, but whether we use the military might of the United States of America to safeguard their investment is our decision, and I say it is not worth risking the lives of our troops.

There are some deeply important questions as to the use of American military power that are implicated in this debate--questions that deserve answers.

Will we see years of American gunships parked off of Venezuela as part of some new, amorphous ``Donroe Doctrine''? How do we expect to run another country of more than 20 million people? Will U.S. forces be used to protect oil infrastructure in Venezuela? Will our President continue to stand by the illegitimate regime that Maduro's capture has left in place or will we support the outcome of the last election in which Maduro's opposition was triumphant? Are we better off spending our Nation's time and taxes on Venezuela or should we spend them at home to bring down costs and address the affordability crisis?

Our servicemembers and their families deserve answers to these questions before we ask any servicemember to put their life on the line. Let us make sure they get those answers. Let us have this debate. Let us move beyond a parliamentary point of order designed to hide from the American people the cost of our military involvement in Venezuela, the continuing cost of it. Let's have the fulsome debate that deserves because at the center of this debate is a question of whether we want to risk our servicemembers' lives in order to secure the oil resources of another country.

I do not believe it is worth doing so, but let those who believe that it is worth the risk and the danger to our servicemembers and their families--let them come to the Senate floor and make that argument. Let us have this debate. Let us not hide behind some parliamentary maneuver to even avoid a conversation here.

There hasn't been a single hearing in committee, an open hearing, on this subject, not a fulsome debate over the use of our military power. Let us do so now.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, for months, the Trump administration claimed that its campaign of blowing up boats in the Caribbean was about stopping drugs like deadly fentanyl coming to the United States-- never mind that fentanyl doesn't really come from Venezuela; it comes from precursors made in China and is predominantly smuggled in through Mexico; never mind that there are well-established, well-practiced operations for interdicting the drugs and apprehending alleged drug traffickers, not killing them; never mind that we don't even have clarity on what was on these boats or who was on these boats and where they were headed. No. Even as the U.S. military amassed unprecedented military firepower off the coast of Caracas that included multiple warships, thousands of troops, and the largest aircraft carrier ever put to sea, the administration still claimed this was about drug boats.

You heard the administration say that time and time again to the public and to Congress until last weekend when the objective became clear: This was about Venezuela's oil, and if we could have that, we would leave the drug-running regime in place, albeit with its No. 2 corrupt leader instead of its No. 1, Nicolas Maduro.

The rightful leadership of Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado and her election surrogate Edmundo Gonzalez--the ones who won the last election there--would have no place, no role in the new government because this was no more about democracy than it was about drugs. It was about oil.

Just yesterday, the Secretary of Energy said that the United States intended to maintain significant control over Venezuela's oil industry, including by overseeing the sale of the country's production indefinitely--indefinitely--and Donald Trump has promised to use the revenue from these oil sales to create a fund that he would control. He is literally meeting with oil executives on Friday to try to divide up the spoils of this military campaign.

Now, some of my colleagues may believe that using the U.S. military to depose Nicolas Maduro and seize Venezuela's oil is well worth the risk to our troops and the danger of our becoming mired down in that country. I disagree, but if that were the case, let them seek an authorization from Congress to do so.

We have so many urgent problems that need addressing here at home with life being barely affordable for millions of Americans and the cost of living rising--with people struggling to cover the rent, with families barely able to afford the cost of groceries, to say nothing of the skyrocketing healthcare costs. But now, instead of putting Americans first, we are stepping into a foreign nation and promising to run it for the foreseeable future. An administration that had promised to end foreign wars has begun a new one. A President who had decried the use of force for regime change or to engage in nation building has just committed our country to both.

No doubt Russia and China see opportunity in this American about- face, with Russia to indict Ukrainian leaders and to seize them and with China to do the same in Taiwan. We are not only at risk of reestablishing the idea that might makes right and military conquest is acceptable in your sphere of influence, but there is the very real prospect of destabilizing a world order post-World War II that has made us safer and more prosperous.

Now, when it comes to Congress's role in checking this President, in asserting its war powers given to us by our Founders and the Framers of our Constitution, if we do not assert this power, we will lose it and not just to constrain this President but any President and for all time. The American people have said clearly and repeatedly they do not want us dragged into new foreign wars, especially wars of our own making, and we have the power to make good on that instruction. We are a coequal branch of government and the only branch endowed with the power of the purse and the power to declare war or to refuse to do so.

But if we do not assert these powers, if we don't stand up not just for our branch of government but for the American people, there is no telling and no stopping what comes next because the administration has made it clear that Venezuela is the opening salvo. Will it be Cuba next or Colombia or Mexico or Greenland, for crying out loud?

This is the moment when we need to stand up and exercise our powers as part of the government that is closest to the people to make it clear that no President can commit our military forces absent an attack on our country or imminent threat of an invasion without the approval of Congress and certainly not to help industry chase new profits or revenue in oil or minerals around the globe. We have a duty to our constituents, to our Constitution, and to posterity. Let us uphold it. Vote yes on the resolution.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.