Floor Statements

OK.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, the human spirit abhors tyranny.

Since February, the world has witnessed examples of extraordinary courage. In Ukraine, we have watched ordinary men and women mount a defense of their homes and their homeland against overwhelming odds-- people never having handled firearms before who are getting training, getting arms, getting munitions, and joining together in the cause of defending their homes and their homeland. We know what it has cost them. Across the border, we have seen thousands and thousands of ordinary Russians challenge the suicidal thuggery of Vladimir Putin. We know what it has cost them too.

Today, I want to call our attention to the courage on display in a different part of the world. I want to look to Iran.

Two weeks ago yesterday, on September 13, Iran's so-called morality police arrested a young woman named Mahsa Amini. They detained her on the grounds that she was wearing her hijab improperly. She was bundled into a van, where eyewitnesses could hear the police beating her. A few hours later, she was delivered to a local hospital, where she was declared brain dead. The police shamelessly claimed that she had had a spontaneous heart attack.

Thousands upon thousands of Iranians have poured into the streets since. Protesters are calling for an end to the savagery that has made absurd arrests and vicious beatings a regular part of the rhythm of life in Tehran. They are demanding dignity for the millions and millions of people who have lost it under Tehran's maniac theocracy. This is no small thing, what they have done--the courage that is on display as they pour into the streets. Protests have erupted now in more than 80 cities and in all 31 of Iran's provinces. This is not a minor demonstration.

The mullahs are facing one of the most significant challenges to their rule since they seized it 43 years ago, in 1979. How has the regime responded? As expected--with more brutality, with more repression, and with more savagery. Human rights groups estimate that 76 people have been killed so far by the authorities.

Meanwhile, the crackdown has also included a shutting off of social media and the internet. They hope that a country and a world that can't see their thuggery won't notice it, will pretend it doesn't exist, won't know. Well, they know, and we know. The Iranians know how this regime operates. We know that these pathetic cowards have no regard for human dignity.

Who are they?

These bloodthirsty men are the goons who hang homosexuals from gallows, who protect child rapists, who deny women education. The regime is rotten to the core. The people who are suffering under it know, and we know. These men have told the world exactly who they are again and again and again.

In 2009, Iranians erupted at the grotesque human rights abuses perpetrated by then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In an election riddled with fraud, the world saw who he was again. During the Green Revolution, thousands of protesters, including key opposition leaders, were arrested and thrown in Iran's dungeon prisons. Many were tortured, and several dozen were killed. A 26-year-old woman, a student, was shot from a nearby rooftop by pro-government militia men. Her dying moments were recorded by cell phone video and were broadcast around the world.

We know who they are.

Ten years later--3 years ago, in 2019--massive nationwide protests erupted again. This time, it was following an announcement of massive, unsustainable hikes on gas prices. The protests and the violence that followed were the worst since 1979.

Hundreds of people took to the streets, and the government responded with a campaign of systemic savagery,

hoping to drive people back into their homes in order to hide the truth and to not admit to what this regime was and the ways that they failed. Protesters were shot from rooftops and helicopters by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Their troops opened fire on unarmed protesters who were attempting to block roadways and entrances. In one southwestern city, IRGC forces pursued several dozen, mostly young, unarmed protesters into a march outside the city and then began massacring them. Most reliable outside observers believe that about 1,500 protesters were killed.

In 2019, Tehran also conducted a near-total internet shutdown, plunging the country's 83 million people into information darkness for about 6 days. That practice, as we are seeing again right now, as we see this month, has become one more regular instrument of terror. These guys are scared of sunlight. They are scared of information. They are scared of the truth.

We know that the despots in Iran who brutalize their own people also export their terror tactics. Look at the last 2 months alone.

In July of last summer, 2021, a group of Iranian spies tried to kidnap Masih Alinejad--an Iranian-American journalist and human rights activist--at her home in New York. In July of this year, she was the target of an assassination attempt again at her home in our country.

We learned in August that a member of the IRGC had plotted to assassinate former National Security Advisor John Bolton on American soil.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Iran Envoy Brian Hook still require personal security details everywhere they go because Iran has put targets on their backs in our country.

It was also just last month that, inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa, an American man attacked and nearly killed novelist Salman Rushdie during an appearance in New York.

Then, in August, Vladimir Putin received his first shipment of Iranian drones--birds of a feather.

Inside its borders and beyond them, the regime in Tehran thinks nothing but bloody thoughts. They think no one has dignity who doesn't subscribe exactly to their theocratic views. It is long past time that American policy and the policies of our friends and allies recognize these blunt facts. We should tell the truth.

In 2009 and again in 2019, we had the opportunity to support and encourage protesters who were agitating against a regime that is their enemy and is ours, and in both cases, under administrations Democratic and Republican, we failed the test.

Last week, President Biden told the U.N. General Assembly:

Today, we stand with the brave citizens and the brave women

of Iran, who right now are demonstrating to secure their

basic rights.

It is a good start, but it is far from sufficient. It is far from the end.

Right now, America's policy toward Iran is hopelessly schizophrenic. We cannot stand on the side of Iranian protesters at the same time that we are trying to re-sign a nuclear deal with the same mullahs who would release billions of dollars back into their hands, help them shore up their power, and do nothing to prevent putting a catastrophic weapon into their genocidal hands. President Obama chased a flawed nuclear deal with Iran's terror state instead of more aggressively standing with the Iranian people. Today, the same hodgepodge of national security advisers is at it again.

Newly announced sanctions against the leaders of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the Army Ground Forces, and the pro- government militias are good, but we cannot stand on the side of the men and women of Iran who are in the streets at the same time we refuse to sanction the leaders who matter most. Ayatollah Khomeini and the circle of elites around him continue to escape serious consequence.

We shouldn't trick ourselves and should not delude ourselves into thinking that economic sanctions are a magic wand or that the mullahs themselves care very much about the economic pain that the people under their regime are suffering. We should not think that the mullahs care about elite opinion in Paris. We have to have a serious top-to-bottom evaluation of our Iran strategy, and a coherent policy must begin by telling the truth over and over and over again.

We cannot stand on the side of the people on the streets demanding dignity at the same time that we welcome Iran's President--someone personally responsible for show trials and mass executions and assassination attempts on our soil, in our country. We can't allow him to spout lies and propaganda on our same American soil as we did last week at the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Now is the time for a serious, coordinated policy that admits the threat that Iran poses, not just to its people and its neighbors but also to America, and to take seriously our commitment to the rights and freedoms of all 7.8 billion people across this globe created in God's image.

We can start by helping illuminate the government-imposed blackout so that Iranians can see what their government and its blackshirts are doing--more light, more information. We can expand and intensify the sanctions regime that has pushed Iran to the brink in the past, before we lost our nerve. We can amplify the voices of the Iranian protesters and stop providing platforms to the regime's propagandists. We can make sure that the voices of the Iranian people are heard by keeping the internet on while Tehran works to put the country back into the black box of despotism.

The courage of men and women on the streets of Iran today has not gone unnoticed. They have imagined the possibility of an Iranian future no longer under the thumb of Tehran's bloodthirsty dictators. We should be able to imagine that future too and to do more to make that a reality.

The Iranian people hate Tehran's blood-soaked tyrants. This is not a regime that has the consent of the governed. The American people are on freedom's side. The administration should drop the fantasy of another nuclear deal, walk away from the table, and turn the screws on these monsters by, first, telling the truth again and again.

We ought to do everything we can to celebrate the heroism of the Iranians in the streets and to expose Tehran's human rights abuses around the watching world. And the best way to do that is by making sure that the internet stays on in Iran--more light, more truth, more information.

Madam President, first, I would like to associate myself with the comments of the Senator from Oklahoma and thank him for all of the work he has done on this.

The Abraham Accords are really something to celebrate, something that we should be building on. And there is not a lot of good news right now on a whole bunch of scores, and this is worth celebrating. So commendations on your resolution.

Something we shouldn't be celebrating is inflation, and I wasn't invited, but it looks like there was one heck of a party this week at the White House.

In case folks missed it, President Biden, Majority Leader Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, and others gathered on the south lawn of the White House on Tuesday afternoon to clink champagne glasses and celebrate the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, passed along straight party lines last month. James Taylor even flew in for the festivities.

But at the same time that Washington politicians were patting themselves on the back, here is actual reality--not Orwellian rhetoric, not sort of made-up names for legislation to spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars--here is actual reality: Americans are getting slapped in the face with yet another month of bad news. Core inflation grew another six-tenths of a percent just in the month of August, defying even the most pessimistic estimations and analyses heading into those reporting numbers.

Both the Dow and the S&P had their worst day since the very arrival of COVID.

Consumer prices are now up 8.3 percent for the year, but it is worse than that for median-income households in America. Grocery prices are 13 percent more expensive this middle of September than they were the last middle of September.

How do you think about what 13 percent inflation looks like? Here is the way I explained it to my kids: You know, if a year ago today, you went to the grocery store checkout line and you had $100 in your pocket and you had a cart full of groceries and you paid your $100 for the $100 of groceries, if you showed up today at the checkout line at the grocery store with the exact same cart and the exact same hundred bucks, you would then have to awkwardly and in an embarrassed way, in front of the people behind you in line, say: I have to figure out how to take $13 of stuff off this checkout line because the $100 that I had last year that bought $100 of food only buys $87 of food right now. That is what 13 percent inflation means.

Even CNN had to admit that the White House's timing was awkward, calling the event ``a bizarre split-screen moment,'' with President Biden taking a victory lap with a so-called Inflation Reduction Act while in the real world, inflation was tanking markets. That was actually what was happening on Tuesday. On air, the CNN anchor suggested it ``feels a little hard to be celebratory.'' That is a kind of awkward, timid way to tell the truth.

Lots of Americans have become used to this split-screen reality where Washington says one thing, but reality is completely different. It often feels like officials in Washington are living alternate realities and then trying to convince the American people: You don't know what you are talking about. What you are actually experiencing at the checkout line when you had to put back $13 of groceries--it is not really true. The great news is, we have wine glasses in our hands; let's clink them together.

Washington, DC, is obviously in a bubble--and not for the first time. The same folks who threw that party are the types who order lots of their food from DoorDash and therefore might actually not know what the price of eggs, milk, and meat is. They are the kind of folks who see inflation as something that happens on paper, but seeing it on paper is different than feeling it.

DC sees many problems on paper but doesn't really connect with what the American people are living. DC saw the housing crisis of 2008, 2009 as something on paper, not as reality. Why? Well, because five of the seven richest counties in America are the five suburban counties of Northern Virginia and Maryland that ring Washington, DC. Think about that. Of 3,000 counties in America, 5 of the 7 richest ones are the places that surround the city.

So in 2008, 2009, when housing was collapsing everywhere, when lots of people were going bankrupt in the country, people in this city said: I don't know what the heck you are talking about. We have massive demand. Houses sell with escalation clauses.

There are way more buyers than there are sellers, so housing prices in Washington, DC, in Northern Virginia, and in suburban Maryland went up even as the country was living that collapse.

Opioids are a crisis that a lot of people in Washington, DC, know only on paper because they don't see it around the yuppified neighborhoods of Washington, DC.

Inflation is now that kind of crisis. It is a very real thing, and yet people in this city host white wine parties to talk about how great it is passing legislation that spent hundreds of billions of dollars more, accelerating inflation, and they decided they would name it the ``Inflation Reduction Act.''

Let's review a little bit of history about what we have learned about inflation over the last 15 months.

More than a year ago, last summer, when Americans were already feeling their prices creep higher, the President dismissed long-term worries about inflation with this quote:

There's nobody suggesting there's any unchecked inflation

on the way--no serious economist.

What?

That was an incredibly bizarre, dishonest statement, and everyone knew. When it was spoken and when speechwriters wrote it, they knew that that wasn't true.

Why did they know? Well, because inflation had gone from 1.4 to 5.5 percent in the 3 months before that statement was uttered.

Larry Summers, a longtime Democratic economist across multiple administrations and who is well respected by folks in academia and in government and in both parties, was screaming at the White House not just in private but in public that this was nonsense, that they were delusional about what was happening with inflation numbers. Yet our President said that there was nobody suggesting that unchecked inflation was on the way--no serious economist.

Here is what was actually happening in White House meeting rooms at that time. Half of the Obama economic team was coming in and telling the Biden economic team: Hey, you guys are going to get caught with your pants down. That isn't true. That spin isn't reality. Inflation is big, it is bad, and it is growing.

Yet the speechwriters said: Let's have the President go out to the podium and say there is no serious economist who believes inflation is coming.

That was in July of 2021.

In February of this year, when inflation had hit 7.8 percent, our President predicted that ``inflation ought to be able to start to taper off as we go through this year.'' He had predicted in December that inflation had already peaked. Every one of these comments was detached from reality, and the people writing the speeches knew they were detached from reality.

The President is obviously not the only offender. Last October, with high prices already eating away at families' savings accounts, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain applauded a tweet describing inflation and supply chain snarls as ``high-class problems.'' That is some white wine-drunk commentary for you. This is a middle-class American problem that families in all 50 States are suffering.

A week later, the White House Press Secretary shrugged off the same problem when asked about inflation as being ``the tragedy of the treadmill that's delayed.'' ``The tragedy of the treadmill that's delayed''--ouch.

Do these people know anyone in America who has ever had to put stuff back at the checkout line at the grocery store? Because that is what I have experienced and see at Walmart and Hy-Vee right now in Fremont,

Mr. President, Ukraine's struggle against Russia's invasion has reminded Americans that, sometimes, the world divides into good and evil and into heroes and villains. Not always. There are many fights that are not like that, and we just stupidly talk like it. Debates about marginal tax policy are not good versus evil or heroes versus villains; but, sometimes, fights are heroes versus villains.

Heroes are men and women who love their country and who love their freedom and who want to pass along freedom to the next generation, but they are also people who believe in freedom more broadly. Heroes are people who believe that we were created in the image of God and that everyone has unalienable rights: the rights to life, liberty, speech, religion, assembly, protest. These are pre-governmental rights. Governments don't give us these rights; we are endowed with these rights by nature and nature's Creator. Heroes recognize this not only about themselves and their own countrymen and -women but about everybody. Zelenskyy is such a hero.

The villains are tyrants. They are people who want to oppress others, who want to hold them down. They want to take freedom from their countrymen but also from their neighbors. They are people who seek power at the expense of the weak. Putin is such a villain.

But there is another villain in this drama, a villain who isn't getting nearly enough attention, and he is Chairman Xi, the dictator in China. His Chinese Communist Party has enabled him to do all sorts of oppressive things against men and women in his country. We know what is happening in Xinjiang--there is actually a genocide happening against the Uighurs in our time--but Xi is doing more than just oppressing people at home.

A hundred years from now, when the history of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is written, assuming that it isn't written as Chinese propaganda, I am confident that the public will have a much clearer understanding of the way that Xi and Putin have worked together and have worked together closely. We can't talk here about everything we know in the Intelligence Committee, but I am confident that, when the history is written, the American people and the people of the world will see Xi and Putin as having worked hand in hand, side by side.

Americans should understand this today: Chairman Xi is not indifferent about Ukraine. He is on Putin's side, and he has supported Putin's unprovoked war.

The situation in Ukraine reminds us of a pretty good rule for 21st century foreign policy, and it is this: The Chinese Communist Party is almost always on the wrong side of freedom and human dignity.

The CCP and the United States are in the middle of a global conflict of visions. It is important for us in this Chamber not to say ``the United States and China'' as if we mean 330 million Americans and 1.4 billion Chinese are locked in a battle; but the U.S. vision, the American idea, is in conflict with the vision of the Chinese Communist Party and the ways that they want to oppress not just their neighbors but their own citizens. The CCP and the U.S. are locked in a global conflict of visions, and that is true whether DC politicians want to admit it every day or not, and sometimes it seems convenient for folks not to admit it.

It is the free peoples of the world--NATO allies, Ukrainians, and other freedom lovers--who are fighting against a handful of totalitarian regimes--chiefly, Putin's Russia and Xi's Chinese Communist Party. These are the folks who are terrorizing not just their own people but their neighbors. This contest is a contest between liberty and tyranny. Not every fight is, but this one is; and you had damned well better believe that the tyrants are working together strategically and intentionally to undermine freedom.

So let's back up to February 4.

The Winter Olympics had just begun, and Vladimir Putin was in China to visit Chairman Xi. Together, they released what they called a ``joint statement'' announcing a new partnership with ``no limits.'' The Xi-Putin statement said there would be no limits in their partnership against the United States. They promised that they would work together to promote each other's economic and national security interests even as Putin was amassing forces on the border of Ukraine and preparing for his invasion. Xi was not unaware of what Putin was planning when he released and signed the ``no limits'' statement.

Here is why this is strange: Historically, Russia and China have not been friends. For centuries, these two countries have clashed with one another. During the Cold War, not even shared communist ideology could unite China and Russia for very long. The CCP studied the collapse of the Soviet Union to learn how to keep a communist regime afloat, and they have been very adept at using new technologies not to advance human freedom but to squash human freedom. Now, though, the historic rivals have found something they have in common. Both Putin and Xi hate the United States and hate, most fundamentally, our ideas of the dignity of every individual having been created in the image of God.

Let's do a little geography.

Russia and China share nearly 3,000 miles of common border. Russia is a giant. It has 11 time zones. Think about that. If you look at your globe of the world and spin it all the way around, you will get 24 time zones. Russia spans 11 of them. Russia is about 11 percent of the area of land on Earth. There are 5 countries that have about 6 percent: China is one; the U.S. is one; Canada is one--and India. So Russia has 11 percent, and 5 countries have about 6 percent. No other country has more than about 2 percent of the land mass of Earth.

The Russian-Chinese border has historically been complicated because they haven't gotten along, but as he planned to launch his wicked invasion of Ukraine, Putin needed to move troops and materiel all the way from the border with China in the East back into Europe in the West. And he couldn't do that--he couldn't leave this giant border unguarded--unless Chairman Xi said: We don't have any problems right now. And that is exactly what happened. Xi agreed that he would be on the same page with Putin as Putin took all of his troops and all of his materiel back from this historically contested border to use against the free people of Ukraine.

From the beginning of this crisis, Chairman Xi has been in lockstep with Putin. The New York Times writes in some impressive reporting that Xi even asked Putin to delay the invasion until after the Olympics ended, which Putin ultimately did.

One of the biggest ways China has supported Russia through all of this is by amplifying Russian lies and propaganda about the war. Chinese Communist Party propagandists, such as Wang Yi, have done everything from blaming the United States and NATO for the war to playing up Russia's unrealistic security demands, to echoing lies about Ukrainian biolabs.

Xi's henchmen and CCP-controlled state media have always been there to amplify Putin's falsehoods. Some of the stuff Putin is saying at home is laughably absurd even to the hosts of state TV, who are paid to read these scripts. Yet Xi has been willing to take all of it, translate it into Mandarin, and pump it into China to make sure the people in China don't have an accurate understanding of what is happening between Russia and Ukraine. The CCP's state media have been trying to tell the world repeated untrue stories about Russia, and they now cover up the atrocities and horrors that have been committed by Russian troops against Ukrainian civilians.

The propagandizing is obviously despicable, but the diplomatic support the CCP is providing Russia is even more dangerous. Through the COVID pandemic, we saw how China tried to manipulate international organizations like the WHO to promote their own narrative and to bully other countries. During the invasion of Ukraine, they have done the same thing on behalf of Putin.

The Chinese foreign ministry has participated in the consistent spreading of lies about the war through and to other international organizations.

At the U.N., Chinese diplomats have worked tirelessly to provide cover for Russian crimes and to enable Putin's invasion. They have spurned the pleas of Ukraine and other European countries to try to help restore the peace.

And just a couple of weeks ago, China's vice minister met with the Russian Ambassador to announce the regimes will ``continue to strengthen strategic coordination with Russia.'' Statements like these have become characteristic of the twisted friendship that has developed between these two aggressor nations and what they call their ``no- limits friendship.''

China has also attempted to bail out Russia and to save their economy from the crippling sanctions that we and our allies have imposed since the beginning of this invasion. As soon as the sanctions were imposed, Chinese banks were looking for work-arounds so they could keep doing business with Russia, partly for their own interests but largely to help stabilize and subsidize Russia.

Russian banks issued Chinese UnionPay cards, after Visa and Mastercard pulled out of the country, and ordered Chinese currency savings accounts. China was already in the currency manipulation business, but since February, they have been using their talents not just to prop up their own currency but also to keep the ruble from flaming out. And while other free countries have begun shunning Russia's energy sector, China's state-owned energy companies have continued to conduct what they call ``normal trading cooperation'' with Russia, looking for ways to expand and eat up more of the Russian supply.

But China hasn't only been supporting Putin indirectly. Chairman Xi has also aided Putin's invasion of Ukraine directly. The Times of London reported at the beginning of April that China launched a massive cyber attack on Kyiv mere days before Putin invaded. Think about that. The Chinese Government was involved in a cyber attack against free Ukraine to help Russia.

As the Russian army has struggled, Putin has asked Xi for direct military assistance, and Xi is reportedly deliberating about how he can do more, hoping the international community won't notice. We should notice. We should amplify what Xi is doing. He is aiding and abetting Russia's war crimes against civilians.

Here is the fact: Putin and Xi are tied at the hip. China regularly claims that it stands for the principles of state sovereignty, territorial integrity, and noninterference in domestic affairs. Yet China has supported and provided diplomatic cover for Russia's illegal, immoral, and unprovoked war against Ukraine every step of the way. Now there is the chance that Team Zelenskyy could win, and so what has Xi done in response? He has decided to convene meetings to figure out how he can amp up support for Putin.

We should be asking ourselves: Why is Chairman Xi so supportive of this invasion? Part of the reason is because Vladimir Putin is running a scout team offense for Chairman Xi's eventual planned invasion of Taiwan. Xi wants to learn everything he can about how democracies and free peoples will respond and how democracies defend themselves so that he can try to develop strategies to beat us and to beat our allies.

Xi also wants Putin to win because he thinks this will demoralize Taiwan and the rest of the free world. He wants to be able to tell a story where the age of America, where the age of freedom is over. Xi wants to plunge the globe into a new dark age--an age of surveillance state totalitarianism. And step one at this moment is destroying the friends of Ukraine.

We shouldn't deceive ourselves. What we are seeing in Ukraine is a contest between freedom and tyranny. It is not in our national interest to see the tyrants triumph. We need to show the world that the forces arrayed by Putin and Xi cannot defeat the bravery of men and women who want to live free and who believe in freedom.

Zelenskyy and Ukraine's heroes have a chance to smash the new Russia- China axis, but they need our support. Standing up to Putin and helping Ukraine is important for its own sake, but it is also important because this is the opening skirmish in a larger confrontation between tyranny and liberty, between Chinese communists and the American idea.

Will the United States continue to lead the world toward peace and freedom, or will tyrant Xi and his CCP have the chance to impose their totalitarianism on weaker countries around the Pacific?

Today in Ukraine, it is easy to see the line between good and evil, and that is why it is time for us to step up, to help Ukraine, but also to tell the world who Chairman Xi is, what he believes, what he has done on Putin's behalf, and why he is on Putin's side.

Madam President, I want to talk about three things.

First, Ukraine.

What do they need? How much aid? What kind, and how urgently can and should we get it to them?

Second, omnis.

Does the way the Congress spends money make any sense right now?

And, third, political grandstanding.

In particular, can politicians resist the short-term political crack that is social media?

First, Ukraine.

How much aid do they need? What kind and how urgently? The answer is they need everything, and they need it yesterday.

If they can shoot it, we should ship it. Ukrainians are fighting for freedom, and we should be doing more to help: Javelins, Stingers, lethal drones like Switchblades, surface-to-air missiles like the S- 300s, coastal defense missiles, machine guns, ammo, grenade launchers, night vision goggles, and, yes, planes--more and more of them faster.

I applaud the President for some of what he has done, for sending some of this, but I would also note that there are really important weapons that are not yet in Ukrainian hands, like the S-300s.

I would also note that it takes time to cross the border, and we should be sending this stuff as fast as possible, not having the administration's lawyers debate how many angels can dance on the tip of a SAM or debate which weapons should be considered offensive versus defensive.

Look, the Ukrainians are the people who are being victimized; they are the people who have been invaded. Every weapon we give them right now is a defensive weapon. It is Russia that has invaded Ukraine, and these lawyerly distinctions don't really make a bit of difference to a Russian invading pilot. If he gets shot down, which weapons system it came from is not really the concern he is going to have at that moment.

So the answer to the question ``What kind of aid does Ukraine need?'' is more and faster.

Second, omnis.

Does the way the Congress works right now--does the way that we manage the power of the purse, does the way the appropriations process works--make any sense?

Can any of us go home and explain it to our constituents as the cautious, careful, prudent, adult management of the FISC? Obviously not. This process doesn't work.

I am 50 years old, and in the last 46 years--I think the current number is four times in the last 46 years that the Congress has spent at least 30 percent of its money under regular order on a regular appropriations process--four times in 46 years. This doesn't make sense. It is not prudent. It doesn't work.

For weeks, I have been calling on the President and his administration to submit an emergency supplemental to Congress so we can send Ukraine all of the aid they need faster.

Look, I am a fiscal hawk, but I am also a defense hawk, a security hawk, and I am A-OK with our spending a bunch of money fighting for the defense of freedom as long as the Ukrainians have fight in them. They are fighting not just for their kids and their future; they are fighting for free peoples. Putin will not be stopped until someone stops him. So the Ukrainians are doing a service to us--they are willing to fight. We should be willing to fund and to resupply them.

The reality is that my calls for an emergency supplemental were ignored. The administration didn't make any emergency supplemental request. The Congress's hands are not guilt-free either. We didn't even vote on an aid package for the Ukrainians until more than 2 weeks after the invasion.

Why the wait?

Washington did what it always does and decided it would just add the defense money to the orgy of spending and pet projects and bureaucracy--that we spend every year--in the middle of the night in a thousands-and-thousands-paged bill that not a single Member who voted on it here had actually read.

So what did we do with the Ukrainian aid?

The reality is there was some important aid in the omni, but we should talk about how much it was. We spent $13 billion on Ukrainian aid out of a total appropriations package of $1.5 trillion. For those of you doing math at home, that is less than 1 percent of what we passed in the middle of the night last week that was actually Ukrainian aid.

Here is a depiction: This is the aid bill, and this tiny, little subpiece of 1 percent is the portion that was Ukrainian aid.

The reality is that the bill we voted on last week wasn't really about Ukrainian aid. Ukrainian aid was a little bit of sugar on the larger medicine of a $1.5 trillion bill that nobody would actually want to go home and defend to the voters and to the taxpayers of America was well thought out.

So why does this happen?

Well, the American people aren't stupid. A lot of politicians think voters are stupid. They think you can jingle a shiny thing over here and then make up any claim you want, but the reality is voters aren't stupid. Voters are distracted, and they are busy, but they are not unaware of what is happening here.

They know why politicians talk like this--why they say that if you didn't vote for a $1.5 trillion bill, you were against puppies; you were against food for children; and you were against all of these really great ``mom and apple pie'' kinds of things when the reality is you probably voted against the bill because there was a whole bunch of schlock in it that was unvetted, not because you said: Hey, I don't want the Ukrainian freedom fighters to have the military aid that they need. People talk like this so that they can bully the other side.

This is, quite frankly, a boring speech. It is not a speech that I want to be giving. But the truth is, if you allow liars to constantly lie, and they can get away with it, then they just keep doing it. So it is probably useful for us more often to take people's nonsense tweets, which they do for a bizarre audience of political weirdoes on Twitter, and they should have to defend these statements in public.

It is transparently obvious that if you vote against a $1.5 trillion bill, that doesn't mean you were trying to vote against everything particularly in it; that you were against those kinds of funding. It might be because you were against lots of things in it that are indefensible before the voters. It is transparently stupid, and the voters get it.

So to the question of do omnis make sense? The answer is, no, we should do better.

But the question that our Republic is partly going to have to resolve if we are going to get healthy again as a polity is, Will politicians be able to resist the short-term crack of social media?

It doesn't look like very many of us in this body are interested in trying to speak to 70 and 75 and 80 percent of the electorate, but rather that lots and lots of politicians are completely happy to speak to the very narrow range of fan service that they do on Twitter.

Many politicians are addicted to Twitter. They want their sick burns and their retweets and their likes. It is crack and they have an addiction and it is sad.

The truth is that the folks who do this kind of garbage are hopelessly out of touch with the reality of the people's lives that we are actually supposed to be serving. It is not useful to drink your own bath water.

Twitter isn't real life, so it is probably useful for us to pause more often and try to make sure we have some common facts about the connection between political Twitter and reality.

First, only 20 percent of Americans are on Twitter--19 or 20 percent of Americans are on Twitter. Political Twitter is something like the ninth most watched portion of Twitter; sports Twitter, a foretaste of Heaven, unlike political Twitter, a foretaste of Hell. Sports Twitter is much bigger than political Twitter. Hollywood Twitter is bigger than political Twitter. K-pop Twitter is much, much bigger than political Twitter. So let's just start by recognizing that only 20 percent of Americans are on Twitter, and politics isn't a top five subportion of Twitter.

Of those who are on Twitter, only about 40 percent say they ever use Twitter for politics. But for the small minority of Americans who do pay attention to political Twitter--again, 40 percent of 20 percent--if you are doing math at home, we are now in single digits here. So 40 percent of 20 percent is 8 percent of Americans. For those who do pay attention to political Twitter, the political tweets are dominated by a very, very, very, very small share of American adults. Something like 80 percent of all tweets come from 10 percent of Twitter users. But this is the audience that politicians are playing for when they grandstand on Twitter.

Let's be clear, this happens all over the political continuum. This isn't chiefly on the right or chiefly on the left.

If you ever wonder why are politicians such weirdoes, it is mostly because they are grandstanding for a very, very narrow niche audience of weirdoes on Twitter, and so we should actually ask if it is healthy to continue doing that.

So to our core questions, the Ukrainians, do they need aid? Yes, they do. We should fund freedom fighters.

To the question of do omnis work? No, they don't, and everybody knows it.

But to the question of should we continue doing political discourse like this? Should we say that someone who had concerns about this was trying to kill off babies and puppies? No, we shouldn't lie like this. We shouldn't do that.

We owe the voters better than that. We should tell the truth, and we should try to talk to voters like you are actually talking to a room of regular people who have jobs and who are actually trying to put bread on the table for their kids and probably are pretty grateful for the inheritance that is the American Republic and our leadership on the global stage for freedom lovers.

The Ukrainians are that. We should fund the Ukrainians. We should have funded them in a more prudent way than an omni.

But if you voted for an omni when I voted against it, I am not going to attack you for voting for the omni. But don't go out there and lie and pretend that somebody who voted against the omni was against all the stuff in it, some of which is pretty decent.

We can do better. We should.

Thank you.

Would the Senator yield?

So let me just see if I understand what you just said.

Eight-tenths of 1 percent of the bill that was passed in the middle of the night last week is about Ukraine aid. Do you believe that the people who voted against it voted against it because they were against Ukrainian aid?

I am asking a really simple question: Do you think a single person that your Twitter self-pleasuring was for--do you think a single person that voted against it voted against it because they were against Ukrainian aid?

So, then, what is the point of the tweet?

What are the pieces, dude? It is $1.5 trillion.

When you are willing, if I may.

I think there are three topics. Argue with me if I misread the three topics before us.

One is Ukrainian aid. I don't think we differ. And the reason I came to make a speech--and you and I have talked about this offline multiple times in the past. Let me name the three: One, there is Ukrainian aid. Two, there is the budgeting and appropriations process. And, three, there is the grandstanding that happens for audiences that don't have anything to do with persuading a single human being that is called to work in this space.

In bucket one, I think you know that not a person who voted against it--the omni--voted against it because of the Ukrainian aid. So I think it is a dishonest argument.

In bucket two, which--well, I am jumping in and you have the floor; so I will give it back to you. But, in bucket two, you have repeatedly used the term ``people won't vote for something because it is not perfect.'' I think that, if we could put the appropriations process of the U.S. Congress up to the American people for a referendum, the idea that you want to give it a B-plus or an A-minus, I submit you should take that to the voters of Connecticut and try to persuade them of that, because I am going to guess that, whatever the overall approval rating is of Congress, it bounces around between like 9 and 15 percent. My guess is, the way we spend money, it is lower than that. So I don't think you want to give yourself an 86 or a 92 or a 95 percent because it is not perfect. It is obviously an F. The way that we spend money here is not deliberative; it is not thought out. It is always thousands of pages that come out in the middle of the night, and it always votes.

So to your point, that you said budgets pass around here with 50 of 50 Democrats and 10 or 12 of 50 Republicans, that is true. We do have a philosophical difference about whether or not the appropriations process works.

I think you are the one voting on the side that is misaligned with both fiscal reality and the role of the American people. But I didn't come to beat you up about voting.

I am supposed to direct it to the President.

Madam President, I don't think the Senator from Connecticut is on the floor because I came to attack him for voting for the omni. I didn't. He misrepresented why some people who voted against the omni were dishonest by saying they were for more Ukrainian aid when there was Ukrainian aid in this budget.

But the real thing we are talking about is grandstanding, because there is not a person on Earth who is persuaded by that kind of tweet. You

didn't move anybody. You are doing fan service for a subset of people who like Chris Murphy. I get why some people would like things that you stand for and advocate for. I get it.

But there is not a person who disagreed with you who is moved because of a tweet like that. There is not an uninformed American who became informed. But there is a subset of the people who already like you that you got to grandstand for. That is all that happened with that tweet. The Republic got dumber because of that tweet. Nobody learned anything.

Not my view.

Will the gentleman yield?

Will the Senator yield?

I would direct a question.

Madam President, I would ask the Senator from Connecticut to explain to me why the only choice was $1.5 trillion or zero. The Senate could work its will and have passed the $13.6 billion of aid money 10 minutes later.

Madam President, could the Senator from Connecticut explain to me this apparent--to me, false--choice between $1.5 trillion and zero. Why were there no other options?

Madam President, in the interest of comity, I will underscore three points of agreement from Senator Murphy's last few minutes there, as well, just as a way to close us out.

No. 1, I agree with the Senator that there is a lot of grandstanding all over

political theater right now, and that certainly includes people on my side of the aisle who have tried to imply that pieces of this are President Biden's fault that aren't President Biden's fault; that the evildoer here is Vladimir Putin, who is targeting women and children; and Americans should be on the same team against that evil.

So to the degree that the Senator is partly motivated by frustration with some grandstanding that he has seen by people who have an ``R'' behind their name, I agree.

Second point: I am for this funding, and my criticism of the Biden administration has not been because they wouldn't support funding. In the intel space, there are a whole bunch of arguments and fights we have been having that we can't talk about in this setting but where I just want them to go faster.

But the idea that the problem with the administration, from my point of view, is an unwillingness to fund--that isn't my position, and so the Senator and I are united that that would be an unfair criticism of the Biden administration.

And third and finally, he called our budgeting and appropriations process ``insanity.'' Let's put a pin in that because what I was voting against last week was not done for the purposes of saying the Ukrainian aid money shouldn't move, but it is saying that an insane budget process shouldn't work this way, where the American people can't get access into other monies being spent. And we have 12 or 13 subcommittees of the appropriations process, and we almost never get to vote bill by bill.

I would gladly have us stay here 24/7 for 2, 3, 4 weeks--however long it took. And if we had to cast not just 12 or 13 subcommittee approps packages, but if we had to vote on hundreds or thousands of things item by item--it is a pretty clunky process but a much better process than we have right now, which the Senator from Connecticut rightly described is ``insane.'' On that we agree. Thank you for engaging.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, first I would like to associate myself with the comments of the Senator from Ohio, Senator Portman. He was eloquent, as always, about a pressing issue--not only the defense budget issues but the heroism of the Ukrainian people and the implications it should have for us in this Chamber this week and beyond.

Thank you, Senator Portman.

Madam President, it is a little after 4 a.m. in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and President Zelenskyy is still fighting, Ukrainians are still fighting, and Americans need to know their stories. Ukrainians need us to tell their stories.

This story starts, of course, with an unjust, unprovoked invasion. The people of Ukraine posed no threat. They provoked no violence. They lived freely on Russia's southwest border with their iconic wheat fields.

Many of us have been to Ukraine. We made friends there, but we also have Ukrainian American friends back in our States.

Living freely on the southwest border of Russia was enough to provoke the small man--the tyrant of Russia--to hatred. It is bizarre. They lived in freedom. So Putin decided he was threatened.

Vladimir Putin, Russia's desperate Nebuchadnezzar, thought he could crush Ukraine. He thought he could break their spirit. He thought he could put his boot on their neck. He actually thinks that freedom makes people soft; so he thought this would be easy.

He was wrong. Over the last week, Ukrainians have shown us their fighting spirit. They have shown the world their fighting spirit. They are standing firm against onslaught after onslaught, including the relentless targeting of now-civilian populations.

Outmanned and outgunned, the Ukrainian Army is making Putin pay pints of blood for every inch his army advances. The truth is, Putin didn't expect to encounter much resistance. He looked back on his experience in the Donbas, where he took big swaths of territory with a few dozen bullets, and he was convinced that the Ukrainian people would fold in the face of his giant army. He has been caught off guard, and his plans have been set back.

He didn't anticipate the bravery. He didn't anticipate the passion. He didn't

anticipate the heroism. He didn't anticipate the Ukrainian people. He didn't anticipate the way ordinary villagers would stand and rise up against their occupiers, like the one small woman who approached a group of Russian soldiers and began handing them handfuls of sunflower seeds. Why? She told them it was so that flowers--something beautiful-- could grow on the places where their bodies rot after they were killed in the Ukraine.

She spoke for all Ukrainians. She spoke for the Kyiv grandmas arming up with AK-47s. She spoke for the grandpas who are having to reenlist in their late years. She spoke for the students now learning how to make Molotov cocktails. She spoke for fathers who have to kiss their children goodbye as they head back to the frontlines of battle. And she is speaking prophetically in advance for the mothers who are going to bury their sons.

The truth is, Putin has been embarrassed over the last 5 or 6 days by the Ukrainians.

Modern tyrants have developed a few strategies to fight truth- telling. The Chinese Communist Party's version is trying to suppress all information--to choke it off, to make sure no one says anything that is true. Others, like in Russia, decide to blast a billion lies through state-run media, hoping that they can just blot out the truth and sow so much confusion and nonsense that people can't find the needle in the haystack that is the truth.

But in the middle of this crisis, these strategies are failing because people are hungry for stories. People need stories. We need stories. The best and the most powerful stories are almost always the true stories. And, right now, Ukraine is retelling an age-old story of good and evil. And the reason their story is so powerful is because they are telling the true story. If we were to stand here tonight--and Senator Portman and I and many others have been in the SCIF today for many, many hours. I have been there four or five times, and most of us have been there the last hour and a half, 2 hours. And if we were to tell every story of Ukrainian bravery, the Senate wouldn't have time to get anything else done this week.

But there is one store that stands out over the course of this last week, since Putin began his unjust invasion. It has given rise for the courageous Ukrainian resistance to find for themselves a new motto, and this is the story of Snake Island.

There is this little island in the Black Sea, near the mouth at the bottom of the Danube Delta. It is called Snake Island, and it is really small, but it is both strategically and symbolically important because it marks the boundary of Ukraine's territorial waters. Ukraine has always stationed a small number of border guards on this island to keep watch.

In 2019, the current President, Zelenskyy, went to this tiny little piece of rock and he declared: ``This island, like the rest of our territory, is Ukrainian land, and we will defend it with all our might.''

Nobody in 2019 knew he was speaking prophecy. But, right now, over the course of the last week, the world has seen and the world has heard the story. The world has heard the recording of what those 13 Ukrainian heroes did last Thursday as they sought to defend that little piece of rock because it was symbolically important, as all of Ukraine was, that it is not Russia.

Shortly after Putin ordered his troops to attack Ukraine, two Russian naval vessels approached Snake Island and their intent was to seize it. The Russian commander ordered the Ukrainian border guards that they must surrender. He thought he could intimidate them. But like their commander in chief, the dictator--the liar Putin--he was wrong. They couldn't intimidate these men. So he announced that they needed to surrender or they would be fired upon. The Snake Island guards refused to give an inch. One Ukrainian, after conversing with some of his colleagues a little bit--on a recording many of you may have now heard--decided to turn up the volume and he announced: ``Russian warship, idi nahui''--``idi nahui.''

Russians decided to open fire on the island, pounding it with heavy ordnance and, eventually, troops would storm the beach and capture the garrison. But that one sentence--``Russian warship, idi nahui''--that is now the rallying cry of the Ukrainian resistance. It was heard this morning when a Georgian gas station on the sea decided that it wouldn't refuel the Russian ship. And when the Russian ship said, ``What are you talking about?'' they said: No, you are the bad guys.

The Russians said: Why can't we put politics aside? Just let us buy some gas.

These Georgians decided to repeat the new Ukrainian motto back to the gas station and said: Get the hell out of here.

And the gas station pulled away and said: Russian warship, you guys look strong enough. Why don't you row?

That sentence sums up the spirit of countless courageous, brave Ukrainians and what they are doing as they stand in the face of the much larger invading forces.

Snake Island is incomprehensible to a man like Vladimir Putin. He doesn't understand human dignity. He doesn't understand courage. He doesn't understand principle. He is too small. He doesn't understand why people would fight for freedom. This is a man who spent the last 30 years--20 of them now--as the ruler fighting to return Russia to tyranny, fighting to take away the freedom of his people, fighting to take away the liberty and freedom of those on Russia's borders. He doesn't want any of his near neighbors to know freedom. He thinks tyranny is the order of things. And, again, he is wrong.

Unlike Putin, though, our people--the reason so many Americans have been rallying to the Ukrainian cause over the course of the last week-- our people fully understand the spirit of Snake Island. We may not know Snake Island geographically, but we understand what is beating in the hearts of the people who now wanted to echo that motto.

We breathe freedom. We believe in the ideas of the Declaration of Independence. We strive to create a more perfect Union here, where everyone is recognized as having been created equal. We often fail in our execution, but it is our aspiration to affirm universal human dignity and the destiny of people to be free, for we believe that every human is created in the image of God, and there is nothing government can do to erase that.

We have no love for strong men and tyrants. We understand the men of Snake Island in a way that Vladimir Putin cannot, for we believe in human dignity. We believe in universal rights. We believe in freedom from oppression. What we love, Vladimir Putin hates.

Today, Ukraine is standing against a dictator who rejects each and every one of the principles that we have affirmed in our credo founding documents. The defenders of Snake Island and, indeed, all the members of the Ukrainian resistance now are looking to add their names to the list of heroes, from the warriors of Thermopylae to the activists who brought down the Iron Curtain. This heroism is timeless.

Loving freedom didn't make Snake Island's defenders weak. Though they were outgunned, they were strong. The Ukrainians are fighting for a reason: love of country, hatred of oppression, and the aim they have to pass on a free Ukraine to their children for generations to come.

This national resistance, expressed so eloquently by these guards of Snake Island, has also come to find itself embodied in another one of the great new heroes on the global stage, and that is President Zelenskyy. Just a few years ago, this man was an actor and a comedian. Now, though, he has shown such bravery that we see his name listed alongside heroes and great statesmen like Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.

As Russian troops bore down on Kyiv, Zelenskyy could have chosen to flee his country. You might have read some reports that the U.S. State Department allegedly offered to evacuate him and his family. But, instead, Zelenskyy chose that he would stay on the frontlines and lead his people. ``The fight is here,'' he said. ``I need ammunition, not a ride.''

Putin, meanwhile, is off hiding in a bunker, trembling in fear of his own people. People are marching in the streets to oppose his pointless war, and his only response is to try to choke off their speech and to imprison them.

Zelenskyy, on the other hand, fights shoulder to shoulder with the men and

women who are trying to defend his country. You may have seen him breaking bread with some guys this morning. He has put his life on the line for his country, and he is not backing down, and his bravery has changed the world this week.

We don't know how things are going to unfold over the course of the next weeks and months, but Zelenskyy has changed the trajectory this week of Germany, of Finland, of Sweden, of Switzerland, and of kids all over the 7.8 billion-person planet. Zelenskyy is a symbol, and as a courageous man, he has already changed the world. He is a bigger man than Putin. The whole world knows that. Putin's own army knows that. Even Putin's cronies now know that.

But it is not just the Ukrainians who are going to be burying their dead. Russians are going to be burying many of their sons, as well. Thousands of Russians--many of whom are conscripts--will have died needlessly for Vladimir Putin's lies and his vanity.

Putin told Russian parents that their sons were off on training exercise and that they would be welcomed as heroes at the end of these exercises. He didn't tell them they would be shot, lit on fire, blown to bits. He didn't say these things because he is a liar.

While we applaud the bravery of Ukrainians, we should not overlook the humanity of these Russians who will also die, for the West's battle--freedom's battle--is not with Russian moms who didn't even know their boys were being deployed, women who would not desire to have the dictator Putin send their sons to ruin. Human beings are made in the image of God and are dying, and Vladimir Putin alone bears responsibility.

His evil ambitions are destroying not just Ukrainian bodies and souls but also Russian bodies and souls, and this conflict, this chosen war of aggression by Vladimir Putin, is disgusting, and if he actually cared for anything bigger than his ego, if he actually cared for his people, if he actually cared for his nation, the generations of Russians whom this war is going to impoverish, then he would find an off-ramp now. That is what a bigger man would do.

Ukraine, on the other hand, is not the aggressor here. We are seeing a people fighting for their survival because Putin has given them no other choice, and his thugs will keep on killing innocents until they are expelled from Ukraine's borders.

We obviously don't know how history will unfold here, but we do know that truth is on the Ukrainians' side, and the truth is this: that the boys of Snake Island and President Zelenskyy and the broader Ukrainian national resistance are mounting a defense of freedom unlike anything the West has seen since the end of the Cold War.

And that is why this story of Snake Island matters. It is why Zelenskyy's bravery is so important, not just for Ukraine but for the whole world. And it is why that little woman's sunflower seeds are so inspired--for ordinary Ukrainians are responding to Putin's aggression with extraordinary heroism.

We should be in awe of what our friends are accomplishing. Make no mistake though, war is not an abstraction. Our 21st century jargon about kinetic action and lethal force tries to paper over a reality as old as Cain and Abel. War is young men and young women struggling for a last gasp of air while their blood soaks into the mud.

War is started by the old but usually waged by the young, and no one in their right mind would ever wish for war, for it is ugly. But the cause can be necessary, and, in this case, the Ukrainian cause is just. Their war for their country, for their freedom, and for their kids' futures is just. The Ukrainians are willing to shed their blood for their cause, but, as importantly, they are willing to soak the streets with the blood of Russians, who have been sent by the comfortable tyrant Putin, who sends his people to die pointlessly far from home while he consumes the billions that he has stolen from those same people.

Let's be steely-eyed about the coming days and weeks, because things tonight, at 4:30 in the morning, in Ukraine, are ugly, and they are going to get much, much worse. But Ukraine's heroes, despite of the dark nights that are ahead--their heroes--deserve our reverence. While it is ugly in Ukraine, their stories need to be told around the world by free people who believe in human dignity, for there is a great pantheon of freedom fighters across time, men and women who have died fighting tyrants, and we should tell their story. We must celebrate their cause, and we should arm them with as many Javelins and Stingers and rifles as they can possibly use.

We should ship them rations and ammo, and we should share actionable intelligence in realtime with them so they can try to repel the invading force, for as long as they are fighting tyrants, America stands with them and America will arm them, and I am convinced that this Senate will rise to the call to arm these Ukrainian freedom fighters in memory of those boys from Snake Island and all those who are joining their throng.

Glory to Ukraine. Glory to her heroes. America stands with you.

Mr. President, first, I want to commend the senior Senator

from Arizona for an extraordinary stand of courage and just a great speech on the floor a few minutes ago.

I rise today to defend the filibuster again from the latest round of attacks. I did this repeatedly in the last administration, earning the ire and frustration of a President of my own party over and over again as I defended the Senate's purpose and the supermajority requirements that forge a consensus in a big, broad, diverse, continental nation. Today, I rise to defend the filibuster again when it is a President of the other party who has decided to go full demagogue.

For his entire career in the Senate--basically, Joe Biden served in this body as long as I have been alive, plus or minus a few years--Joe Biden was a stalwart defender of the filibuster. He said that weakening the filibuster would ``eviscerate the Senate.'' But earlier this week, the President was pushed around by a bunch of rage-addicted 20- somethings on his staff and agreed to go down to Georgia and just read whatever nonsense they loaded into his teleprompter. It was shameful. It was sad.

The President of the United States called half of the country a bunch of racist bigots. Think about that--half the country a bunch of racist bigots. He doesn't believe that. This was a senile comment of a man who read whatever was loaded into his teleprompter.

His speechwriters puppet-mastered him into saying that anyone who disagrees with him is George Wallace, Bull Connor, Jefferson Davis. If you disagree with Joe Biden, you are Jefferson Davis. It is pretty breathtaking. Equating millions of Americans to some of the ugliest racists in all of American history isn't just overheated rhetoric; it is a disgusting smear. Does President Biden really believe this in his heart of hearts? Based on the conversations I have had with him over the years, I don't think he believes this at all.

So let's go back to last year. Candidate Joe Biden ran for office, promising that he would unify the country. That is why the man was elected--because he said that the crap we went through the last 4 years was wrong. He said he was going to try to unify the country, but now he has decided to surrender to a tiny, little far-left group in the mistaken belief that the loudest voices on Twitter actually represent America.

It would be useful for us to pause and recognize that the overwhelming majority of all political tweets in America come from less than 1\1/2\ percent of Americans. Let's just say that again because there are a bunch of morons around this building who have decided to take their Twitter feed as reality. It is not reality.

What the President said in Georgia was nonsense, and Joe Biden, with his decades in the U.S. Senate, knows that.

The President will be coming to Capitol Hill in the next hour. If President Biden really believes that Jim Crow is the same thing as a lot of States that have decided to reconsider some of their COVID expansion policies around voting--that Jim Crow and redeliberating about COVID expansions are the same thing--he needs to make that argument in person.

If Joe Manchin is really as big a racist as Joe Biden apparently thinks and if Kyrsten Sinema is really a racist--if that is what animates Kyrsten Sinema--in the eyes of Joe Biden, he should have the courage to say that to their faces. He is not going to say that to their faces because he doesn't believe it. Ron Klain has an army of Twitter trolls that he has decided are reality, and he has decided to have President Biden become something completely different than the person who ran for office last year or who served for decades in the U.S. Senate.

In fact, if Joe Biden really believes that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are bigots, why has he not called for them to be kicked out of his party? If they are as racist as Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis, why does Joe Biden want them in his party?

The stuff he said in Georgia is nonsense, and you wouldn't say it to regular Americans in New Jersey or West Virginia or Arizona or Nebraska because it is not true.

In fact, if Joe Biden really believes that Lisa Murkowski is George Wallace, if Tim Scott is Bull Connor, if Susan Collins and I are Jefferson Davis, I would hope he would have the guts to come and say it to our faces, but he will not because this is performative politics. It was nonsense, and everybody knows that it goes away after this weekend.

But Chuck Schumer might have a primary from AOC, so it is really useful to shift the blame for his disastrous leadership of the Senate over the last 13 months from himself to Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. That is really what is happening right now.

President Biden ought to have the courage to stand up to his own staff, and he ought to be enough of a man to apologize to the Senate and to the American people for the nonsense he said in Georgia. The vast majority of what he said in violating the Ninth Commandment and disparaging people was not what he really believes, and he wouldn't say it to me face-to-face. This fiasco was ugly, and it was entirely unnecessary.

It makes no sense to federalize our elections right now. By the way, you can differ with me about that. You can believe that federalizing all elections is a good idea--it is in our constitutional system--but to demonize people as racist bigots because they are not in favor of federalizing the elections is a pretty bizarre leap.

So let's just review a little bit of history. Last year, we had a President who disgraced his office by trying to steal an election. What stopped that? Our decentralized State-based systems of elections are what stopped last year's attempt to steal an election.

It makes absolutely no sense to try to go into nuclear partisanship now when we should actually be talking about how you prevent another January 6 by doing the hard and actual bipartisan work--not the grandstanding for Twitter but the hard and bipartisan work of reforming the Electoral Count Act, which is 130 years old and obviously doesn't work that well. We should reform the Electoral Reform Act.

This is about the subversion of an election, not the suppression. There are real problems in our electoral system, and we could be doing work to actually fix that and try to stop the institutional arsonists in Congress who want to build political brands on the wreckage of American institutions. We could do real work. The President decided to do something completely different this week.

Here is the silver lining. President Biden, Leader Schumer, and everybody in this body know that the charade we have been going through for the last 3 days is great for the 1\1/2\ percent of people addicted to rage on Twitter. I get it. There are 1\1/2\ percent of people who get their jollies out of this. It is bad for America, and it is just as undermining of the public trust in elections as what Donald Trump did last year.

But here is the thing: Everybody going through this charade knows that it dies this weekend. Why? Because Members of the Democrats' own conference know that there is no exception to the way the Senate rules work. Every single Senator knows that the filibuster is not going to die this weekend, and every Senator knows that, if it would, the nonsense rhetoric about one exception--it is like losing your virginity just once--is not really how it works. Once the filibuster goes for x, it goes for y, and it goes for z. Today, it is election centralization. Tomorrow, it is gun politics. The next day, it is climate debates. Every red-hot issue in American culture and American politics would be in the same exception because every issue would be just as urgent next week, next month, and next year.

Fortunately, Senator Manchin knows this, Senator Sinema knows this, and by the way, a whole bunch more colleagues of mine in the Democratic Party also know this. They just don't have as much courage to say it in public as those two. A whole bunch of my colleagues--I tried to count this morning; it is between 15 and 18 of my colleagues in the Democratic Party--have privately told me they regret following Harry Reid over the tribalist cliff in the summer of 2013 for just the one exception of judicial confirmations to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. I think 15 to 18 Democrats have privately told me they regret this. Why? Because that one-time exception is now how the entire Executive Calendar works. Everybody knew, when Harry Reid set this

place on fire in 2013, that that was what it was going to produce and that the exact same thing would happen on the legislative calendar with the supposed one-time carve-out for the legislative filibuster.

Let's remember what this institution is for. What the Senate is supposed to be about is we are supposed to be the one part of Congress and the one part of the American Government that thinks beyond a 24- month window. It is the job of the people who serve in this body--only 100 people right now and only, I think, 2,100 people across 230-some years of U.S. history. Only 2,000 people have had the honor of serving our States in this body. It is supposed to be our job to take the long- term view, not just 24 hours of Twitter. We are supposed to think beyond the 24 months of the next election. That is what our job is supposed to be.

There are a lot of people around this place who apparently can't think beyond 24 hours right now. That is their right, but they shouldn't be Senators because the purpose of this place is supposed to be to take a long-term view.

Some of my colleagues are convinced that Americans are polarized because Congress doesn't act more or faster, and they think that the solution is, supposedly, to eliminate the filibuster. They are kidding themselves. That would not extinguish the fires of red-hot tribalism in this country. It would throw gasoline on them. Addressing the real tribal disease in America requires a Senate that becomes less tribal, not more tribal.

Senator Sinema's speech should be commended to every Member of this body to go back and read. She said there are two fundamental questions before us today. One is, Where does the descent into tribalism in this institution ultimately land? And what can each of us do to stop that?

Those are the two big questions that she said should be before us today.

Getting rid of the filibuster means this: It means that you turn one razor-thin majority imposing its will on the American people and on legislation into a pendulum-swinging, another razor-thin majority, 24 months later, that sweeps all of that aside and jerks the American people around to the opposite legislation of what was just passed 50- 50--51-50 in today's Senate. And all of it flips 11 months from now, and the legislation all gets undone, and new legislation gets put in place.

Do you really think regular folks in New Jersey and Nebraska want that? Hardly any of them want that.

Imagine what the current situation would look like if you have that federally imposed whiplash on our most sensitive issues inside every 24 months. We think tribalism is bad now. I guarantee you can make it worse. And eliminating the filibuster accelerates that descent into tribalism.

There is a place, of course, where simple majorities rule. It is right down that hallway. We have a House of Representatives already. Does anybody want to make the argument that that place is healthier than we are because it is a simple majoritarian body? No, it is plain to see, in an age of hyperpartisanship and social media grandstanding, that the House is being more and more ruled by demagogues and dolts. That is not what the Senate is called to do.

The Senate is supposed to be a different place. The Senate is supposed to be the place where passions are tempered and refined by people who are responsible for thinking beyond our next election, which is why every election cycle in America only has one-third of Senators even up for reelection. That is the whole reason we have 6-year terms. If I had my will, I could be King for a day and write some constitutional amendments and pass them. I would have a single 12-year Senate term, and everybody would be out of here. It is a little bit longer than 6 years, but one term, no reelection, and get back to life, go back to serving in your community.

If you get rid of the filibuster, you will turn the Senate into the House, and you will ensure that this body, too, ends up consumed by demagogues, conspiracists, and clowns. That is what will happen in this body. The American people don't have time for that crap. Nobody wants that.

Americans don't want one-party rule, by the Democrats or by the Republicans. Both of these parties are really crappy. The American people are not fans of these political parties.

Getting rid of the filibuster means you don't have to try to talk to people on the other side of the aisle and get to a 60-vote threshold for legislation or a 67-vote threshold for rules changes. It means that one of these two terrible parties gets to do a lot more stuff a lot faster that will inevitably be incredibly unpopular with the American people.

The American people do not want revolution. They do not want fundamental change. What they want is competence. What they want is more honesty. What they want is less performative grandstanding.

Institutions like the Senate provide frameworks and processes for competent, responsible self-government, for more honesty. We are not living up to it right now, but we could live down to something worse, and ending the filibuster would accelerate that. It would accelerate tribalism. It would accelerate people following Senators into bathrooms, screaming at them, trying to bully them. It will not lead to more productive, compromise legislation that tries to bring along a larger share of the American public.

The rules and the norms of this place have been built up over a very long time, and they exist to discourage demagoguery. Putting cameras in every room we are in around here tries to undermine so much of what the Senate is about. I am for lots of transparency. I am for pen-and-pad reporters everywhere. But the cameras we have put in this place have encouraged so much demagoguery. That is so much of the problem of why we have so much tribalism here and tribalism more broadly in the country.

And if you eliminate the filibuster, you accelerate all those most destructive, short-term performative trends. You encourage more rank partisanship, and you discourage consensus, compromise, and collaboration.

Friends, please do not--like the President did in Georgia this week-- surrender to the angriest voices on social media in the mistaken belief that they reflect the majority of America. They don't. They reflect the majority of Twitter.

Political Twitter is like the ninth most popular topic on Twitter. K- pop music is exponentially more popular on Twitter than politics. The share of Americans paying attention to political Twitter bounces around between one-tenth and one-sixth. And something like 80 percent of all political tweets come from under 2 percent of the public. We should remind ourselves of that again, and again, and again, because there are people here who regularly mistake Twitter with reality and with the American public. We are called to serve the American public. We are not called to serve rage-addicted people on social media.

Now, perhaps more than ever, it is our job to stop giving ear to political arsonists who would burn down our institutions and intensify our divisions. Now is the time for us to think together over the long- term how we renew those institutions.

The filibuster is a part of what can lead us to broader consensus, and eliminating the filibuster will accelerate the political arson around this place and across our land.

Senate, we can do better.

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

Mr. President, according to ProPublica reporting, a Purdue student from China, Zhihao Kong, who goes by the nickname ``Moody,'' wrote a letter condemning the Chinese Communist Party for killing dissidents in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

We all know the famous image of the man who stood courageously, not in front of one tank--most of the images that ran in U.S. newspapers were of one guy standing in front of a tank. And if you just look at that image, you can assume that the tank commander is some nutjob who decided he was going to torment this kid. But if you actually look at the image, as you can through U.S. photo archives, and you pan back out, that first tank is one tank in a long, long, long, long line of tanks coming that this man stands courageously in front of. It is not one nutjob tank commander looking at this guy in Tiananmen Square; it is an autocratic government that is scared to death of the courage of free people. And that man stood there courageously as the Chinese Communist Party was murdering students in Tiananmen Square.

The Purdue graduate student, Moody, decided to write an open letter about that reminding students in America and around the world of what happened in Tiananmen Square.

Well, guess what happened next. After Moody published his essay, China's secret police decided to go visit his family and intimidate them so that they might put pressure on him, asking him, commanding him, coercing him, twisting the arms of his parents and loved ones, to stop talking about the truth, about what happened in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989.

When Mr. Kong refused to back down, other Chinese students at Purdue--not Chinese students in Beijing, Chinese graduate students at Purdue--decided that it was their obligation to harass Mr. Kong. They pursued him around campus, and they threatened to report him to the Chinese Embassy. Think about that for a second.

What do we think about Embassies as for? Two hundred countries around the face of the Earth, and when you are traveling and you have a lost passport or you suffer some, you know, petty crime or you have a family member who has a medical emergency back home, you call up your Embassy for help because you think these are people who love you. You are in a foreign place and you don't maybe speak the language and the Embassy is there to help you navigate a world where you might not know the language, the laws, or the customs.

What happened in the United States--a freedom-loving place--is that these Chinese students, Chinese nationals here in school at Purdue, decided that they thought it might be their job to contact the Chinese Embassy to tattle on Mr. Kong because the man had the courage to tell the truth. He had spoken online. He had written online. He had been involved in dissident events.

So what happened then, besides his parents being harassed by the Chinese secret police and besides graduate students following him around campus to intimidate him and threaten to report him to the Embassy, WeChat decided that they needed to block and suspend his account to cut off his communications with the outside world.

A few days before he was scheduled to speak at a Zoom commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the secret police went to visit his parents again, reminding them that they needed to make sure he put an end to his activism--read ``truth-telling.''

It is convenient for Americans to look the other way and stay silent in the face of this. We have seen many American professional sports leagues; we have seen Hollywood companies lusting after Chinese middle- class markets; we have seen the Marriott hotel chain agreeing to intimidate their own employees so that their employees didn't acknowledge what has happened in Hong Kong and the threats currently against Taiwan; we have seen this censorship using economic statecraft from Beijing to intimidate Americans and American companies and American institutions to do their bidding to suppress people who might tell the truth.

It is convenient to stay silent. Many of our institutions have pathetically agreed with Beijing that they would self-censor at Beijing's and Chairman Xi's bidding.

Well, guess who didn't do that. Purdue University decided they were not going to do that.

So there is a lot of bad stuff happening in the world because of the expansionistic desires of the CCP, and we have a lot of Americans and American institutions who are willing to be complicit in the CCP's desired expansionism, but Purdue didn't. So we should pause today, just for a minute, and celebrate that good news. We should celebrate that courage.

Mitch Daniels, former Governor of Indiana, current President of Purdue, decided that this was not OK, and it was important to tell the truth about this fact, what had happened, and that this wasn't OK.

I would like to read into the Congressional Record today President Daniels' letter to the Purdue campus 36 hours ago because we need a hell of a lot more truth-telling like this in American life. Here is Mitch Daniels and the Purdue leadership on behalf of not just Purdue but American values:

Dear Purdue students, staff and faculty,

Purdue [has] learned from a national news account last week

that one of our students, after speaking out on behalf of

freedom and others martyred for advocating for [freedom], was

harassed and threatened by other students from his own home

country [in this country]. Worse still, [this student's]

family back home, in this case [the home being] China, was

visited and threatened by agents of that nation's secret

police.

We regret that we were unaware at the time of these events

and [we] had to learn of them from national sources. That

reflects the atmosphere of intimidation that we have

discovered [surrounding] this specific sort of speech.

Any such intimidation is unacceptable and [it is] unwelcome

on our campus. Purdue has punished less personal, direct and

threatening conduct. Anyone taking exception to the speech in

question had their own right to express their disagreement,

but not to engage in the actions of harassment which occurred

here. If those students who issued the threats can be

identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary

action. Likewise, any student found to have reported another

student to any foreign entity for exercising their freedom of

speech or belief will be subject to significant [action].

International students are nothing new at Purdue

University, which welcomed its first Asian admittees over a

century ago. We are proud that several hundred international

students, nearly 200 of them [from China], enrolled [at

Purdue] again this fall.

But joining the Purdue community requires acceptance of

[our] rules and values, and no value is more central to our

institution or to higher education generally than the freedom

of inquiry and expression. Those seeking to deny those

rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign

governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their

education elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Mitch

Chairman Xi is a coward, and he sends his goons to intimidate people for telling the truth. That is who Chairman Xi is. He doesn't believe in the dignity of people. He doesn't believe that they are image- bearers of God. He doesn't believe they have the rights of free speech, religion, press, assembly, and protest. He believes that you must intimidate college students for telling the truth. If they are saying something to a small group of people 6,000 miles away, Chairman Xi is intimidated, and he is scared.

That student told the truth. We should celebrate that student. Mitch Daniels and Purdue University stood up to that kind of intimidation. We should celebrate that because that is what American courage looks like, and we need a whole hell of a lot more of it.

We need a lot more people to look like the Women's Tennis Association, not to look like the NBA.

Thank you.

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

I request the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I know that Senator Grassley is going to join us momentarily, so I will cut in line until he arrives. But I would like to thank Senator Crapo for his leadership in organizing this.

It is a little odd to be doing this on the Senate floor when we should be having markups and hearings in the Senate Finance Committee, but the Senate Finance Committee has not been considering any of this proposed legislation despite the fact that we are dealing with New Deal-size and -level legislation. Yet the Finance Committee is not considering it, so I thank Ranking Member Crapo for bringing us to the floor.

I want to talk about some of these taxing and spending issues, but I want to make it clear that I am not here to talk about this because I am obsessed about the marginal tax rates for the top 1 percent of Americans. I am not. It is not why I ran for office. But I am here today to talk about this because, as a China hawk, I am obsessed with the fact that the American people, the American Government, American technology companies and lots of companies that aren't today thought of as technology companies but will increasingly be technology companies operating in different verticals--I am obsessed with the fact that our firms and our people are going to need to be able to compete with the Chinese Communist Party.

The future of everything, from technology to trade, to global security and defense issues, is going to go one of two ways: It is either going to be led by the Chinese Communist Party or it is going to be led by the United States

and our allies and Western values. The future of not just global economics but global security policy over the next 3 and 5 and 7 and 10 years is going to be radically shaped by which direction we go.

Failure is not an option. This next century is going to be defined either by oppression, censorship, and brutality--the sorts of things that we are seeing in Xinjiang right now as the Uighurs are brutally oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party--or we are going to see a world that is led by Western values and beliefs in trade and human rights and open navigation of the seaways and transparent contracts and the rule of law.

That is the proper context in which we should be considering this taxing-and-spending debate, and it would be helpful for the American people if we would discuss President Biden's tax-and-spending spree in the context of that global technology and diplomatic competition with the CCP because these dangerous policies in this $3.5 trillion or whatever pricetag it is going to end up at--this piece of omnibus legislation is going to hurt our ability to compete against Beijing.

Spending is out of control. The American people, last November, just 10 months ago, elected an evenly divided Senate. Yet somehow progressives believe they have a mandate to radically remake America. You actually hear a lot of them use language about radically transforming America, as if an American public that voted for a 50-50 Senate was voting for some sort of radical remaking of American policy as a newer-new, bigger-big New Deal.

They have spent trillions of dollars that we don't have already this year, and now they are looking to add another $3.5 trillion to expand cradle-to-grave government propositions about how government should interfere and interact with the average American's life.

Well, what is government? What a government is supposed to be is a compact for the common defense. The first and most fundamental principle that government exists to do is make sure that everyone is free from violence and chaos and tyranny so that they can organize their lives and local communities. That is the first thing government is supposed to be. Yet we also believe that government has some social safety net responsibilities.

Stated in a summary fashion, you might say that the government is supposed to be the army and we also have some social safety net insurance programs attached to them. It seems like, when you listen to Senator Sanders speak, he thinks of it exactly the opposite: The government is a giant insurance company that just happens to own a navy. And sometimes it sounds like he doesn't even really care if we own a navy; he just conceives of the government as a giant insurance program where everything is compulsory and government decides what programs people need to have and what services they want. The vast majority of the American people don't want that and they didn't vote for that, and a 50-50 Senate shouldn't be trying to deliver that.

This year, the President and my Democratic colleagues have increased spending in every area--social, environmental, and economic policy- related. If there was an opportunity to spend over the course of the last 8\1/2\ months, they have taken it. A couple trillion here, a couple trillion there, and pretty soon, you are talking about real money.

Now it is time to pay the piper, and my colleagues are talking about raising taxes. But this isn't just any tax hike we are talking about. When you look at the corporate rates that we are looking at, we would be talking about the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. These are just the new taxes. Yet even that doesn't pay for all of the new spending. So we are talking about new legislation that would radically raise taxes to the highest corporate tax rates in the industrial Earth and yet still not pay for all of the new spending they are talking about. When deficits grow forever, opportunities shrink.

We have a Member of the House of Representatives who, in her supertelegenic way, figured out how to get attention last week by wearing a dress that said ``Tax the Rich'' on the back of it. What the dress should really read is ``Tax the Young'' because history tells us very clearly that when you deficit-spend at the level they are talking about doing here, this is a tax of current older and wealthier people against younger people. That is how inflation works. That is how debt and deficit work. The dress should have read ``Tax the Young.''

These are tax hikes that make communist China a much better business environment than the United States. Under the President's plan, Americans would have a 32-percent combined rate, compared to a much smaller Chinese tax rate, at their baseline nominal level. But it is important to recognize that the Chinese tax code currently incentivizes high-tech businesses with an even lower 15-percent rate. So we are talking about north of a 30-percent rate against the Chinese Communist Party trying to make sure they attract investment by taxing their technology and digital companies at a 15-percent rate. This is the definition of shooting yourself in the foot.

My friends on the other side of the aisle are a lot of smart folks, and they know that tax rates actually matter for international investment and for competitiveness. One of the ways you know they know is because, for months, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been out seeking a global minimum tax arrangement. She is admitting the obvious truth--that a new tax increase will saddle American firms with a burden that other companies across the globe don't have.

The CCP is not going to bail us out, as we would potentially raise taxes to the highest rates in the world, by also raising their tax rates to bail out President Biden's domestic agenda. Beijing looks at our endless debt, at our entitlement crisis, at our tax hikes, at our disunity, and they see a strategic advantage.

These China-friendly tax hikes would raise the cost of doing business in America. These China-friendly tax hikes would drive innovation overseas. These China-friendly tax hikes would lead to more corporate inversions. These China-friendly tax hikes will hurt American R&D.

If you want the 21st century to be defined by global Chinese Communist Party leadership, you would tax and spend just like this legislation seeks to do. Reckless spending doesn't steward a great nation. Super tax hikes do not promote innovation.

Competition with the Chinese Communist Party is the defining national security issue of our time, whether my colleagues in this body want to admit it on a regular basis or not. While the Chinese Communist Party plunders American intellectual property, steals American ingenuity, and pours investments into their state-run technologies, Washington is debating whether or not we should punish innovative firms and innovative Americans.

This isn't strong. This isn't smart. And the American people know better.

I yield the floor to Senator Grassley.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak in memory and in honor of Corporal Page, a 23-year-old marine from Nebraska. He gave his life defending Americans and our allies in the chaos of the Kabul airport as many tried to escape the capture of Afghanistan by a band of blood-thirsty terrorists.

Corporal Page is 1 of 13 heroes who gave his life that day defending the Kabul airport in the midst of that chaotic evacuation. The American people owe these men and women a debt of gratitude that we will never be able to repay.

Corporal Page lost his life while honoring our Nation's promise that we would leave no one behind. He and his fellow marines never wavered. They didn't fail in executing their duty. They were given an impossible mission, and these men and women fought to the end. It is now our duty to stand with these families, the families of each of these 13, and to honor their sacrifices.

Last Friday, in Omaha, thousands and thousands and thousands of Nebraskans lined the streets to give Corporal Page a hero's welcome as his body was returned home. As his family said, ``Our hearts are still broken, but we are the lucky few who know what it is'' to have the entire city of Omaha give you a hug.

We are called to gather around one another. We are called to join with the grieving and to mourn the loss of these brave men and women.

Corporal Page was a Nebraskan who made his family and his State and his entire Nation proud. He left for boot camp shortly after graduating from Millard South High School, and he was proud to serve in the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment with his fellow marines.

He enjoyed playing hockey. One of my kids played hockey against him. He

went to Millard South High School, but he played hockey for Westside and the Fremont team my kids played on. They got to compete against him and know him as a competitor.

He enjoyed hunting, being in the outdoors. He especially enjoyed the water. He was a Boy Scout in Troop 331. He loved spending time with his family and friends. He was a member of his local church, the Lutheran church of Millard, St. Paul's Lutheran Church of Millard.

Like so many Nebraskans, he was a die-hard sports fan, his favorite team being the Chicago Blackhawks.

Corporal Page gave the last full measure of devotion to his country. His mission was clear. In the chaos of Kabul, Corporal Page was there to protect and save lives, and that is exactly what he did. Marines held the line and pulled both Americans and our Afghan allies to safety. Marines pulled children out of hell, gave them water, and got them to safety.

Corporal Page gave his life so that others would live. Nebraskans will never forget him. Heroes like Corporal Page didn't fail us, and we can't forget them. We must keep our promise to honor his family, to teach our families about their sacrifice, and to strive to live lives of gratitude. It is times like this where we rediscover the heart of our country. Communities that pull together--as happened last Friday and will happen this Friday at his funeral at St. Paul's Lutheran--we pray together, make meals for each other, and we are reminded of the sacrifice so many families have made.

Today, and in the days to come, we in Nebraska will honor Corporal Page, and we across this country will honor the 13 who fell that day. Your sacrifice is a debt we can never repay.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I would like to call up my amendment No. 2023 and ask that it be reported by number.

Madam President, my amendment about doubling DARPA funding is really simple: It doubles DARPA funding. This amendment would provide an additional $3.5 billion a year to the base, $3.5 billion that DARPA currently receives over the next 5 years.

To members of the Armed Services Committee, I would tell you, this amendment doesn't do anything to mess with your base authorization. Your work is not displaced. This is simply additive. Modern war isn't just about enemy landings; it is also about enemy hackings. And the Chinese Communist Party is currently pouring money into machine learning, AI, and quantum because they think if they achieve first- mover advantage in cyber, they will ultimately become the world's preeminent superpower. DARPA's job is to make sure that doesn't happen.

We to need to make sure that Chairman Xi lies awake at night worrying about his critical infrastructure, his networks, and his vulnerabilities. And DARPA is currently doing that work, but DARPA is not funded for us to win the technology race.

Money that goes to NSF, which is the core of the bill that is before us----

I ask for a recorded vote, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Vote on Amendment No. 2023

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

Mr. President, Winston Churchill is often credited with the apocryphal quote that ``we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.''

This is still true, but the 21st century has gotten more complicated. We live in an era of hybrid wars. There are fewer D-days on enemy beaches and more zero-day exploits in enemy servers.

Americans sleep soundly at night because, in addition to these rough men at the ready, brilliant men and women work around the clock to develop national security technology that defends our interests and undermines our enemies. DARPA--the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--is on the frontlines of that work. They are racing against our adversaries.

Our technology struggle against the Chinese Communist Party is the defining national security challenge of our time. Chairman Xi and his techno-authoritarian regime are fundamentally opposed to not just American values but American interests all around the globe.

Our citizens watching this Chamber on most days might think that most of their political leaders are content to ignore this reality, but I assure my colleagues in this Chamber that the CCP is not asleep at the switch.

Beijing is aggressively investing in machine learning and artificial intelligence and in quantum computing. They are hacking and stealing America's research and America's intellectual property. The Chinese Communist Party is on a mission, and they make no attempt to hide it. They want to become the world's preeminent superpower, and they think that by claiming first-mover advantage in the cyber domain, they can achieve this. We can't let that happen.

My amendment to today's legislation is simple: It doubles DARPA's budget, $3.5 billion to $7 billion a year for each of the next 5 years. The work of the National Science Foundation is important as well, and I support that work. I support that research. But the NSF's research is broad. DARPA's research is directly applied to our most critical national security challenges.

Cutting-edge, classified tech development is in DARPA's DNA. When we talk about identifying and disrupting the CCP's AI-enabled cyber and information campaigns, we want DARPA to be leading that work. When we talk about developing new technological tools to push back on the CCP's hybrid warfare, we want DARPA to be leading that work.

If we want American democracy to outlast Chinese techno- authoritarianism, we can make this investment. Doubling DARPA's budget is a cost-effective investment that bolsters that work, and it bolsters the work of the Endless Frontier legislation we are debating this week, and I encourage all of my colleagues to support this amendment.