Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, February 5; further, that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; further, that following leader remarks, the Senate resume consideration S. 1 and that the Senate recess from 12:30 p.m. until 2:15 p.m. to allow for the weekly conference meetings; finally, that all time during recess, adjournment, morning business, and leader remarks count postcloture on S. 1.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. President, this place fancies itself the world's greatest deliberative body, but we would be deceiving ourselves if we ignored the biggest debate that has been happening in America over the last 36 hours.

A publicly elected official--Governor of one of the 50 States--has been defending a practice that is morally repugnant. The Governor of Virginia has been defending a practice that is repugnant to civilized people across the entire world.

Here is just one of the ugly nuggets from Ralph Northam, the Governor of Virginia: ``If the mother is in labor . . . the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated (if that's what the mother and the family desired) and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother.''

Let's be very clear about what we are talking about. We are talking about fourth-trimester abortion or what anyone in the normal world calls infanticide. That is what we are talking about, and the Governor of Virginia has been defending this all day yesterday and again today, going out and trying to equivocate and qualify and then double down and again say he wants to defend this practice, which is infanticide.

Let's be clear about what we are talking about. We are talking about killing a baby who has been born. We are not talking some euphemism. We are not talking about a clump of cells. We are talking about a little baby girl who has been born and is on a table in a hospital or a medical facility, and then a decision or a debate would be had about whether you could kill that little baby. We are talking about the most vulnerable among us, and we have a public official in America out there again and again defending this practice. This is infanticide that we are talking about.

This should be so far beyond any political consideration. We are talking about a little baby--a baby with dignity, an image bearer. We are talking about a tiny life that has done nothing wrong to warrant being left to die cold and alone on a table.

Everyone in the Senate ought to be able to say unequivocally that killing that little baby is wrong. This doesn't take any political courage, and if you can't say that, if there is a Member in this body who can't say that, there may be lots of work you can do in the world, but you shouldn't be here. You should get the heck out of any calling in public life where you pretend to care about the most vulnerable among us. There should be no politics here that are right versus left or Republican versus Democrat. This is the most basic thing you could be talking about. We are talking about a little baby born alive, and we have a public official in America defending the idea: Well, you could have a debate about killing her.

That is why today I am starting a dual-track legislative process to make sure this body has a clear-eyed look at the issue before us, has a clear-eyed look at this atrocity, and to make sure the 320 million men and women who are actually our bosses--to be sure

they have a clear-eyed look at what we stand for. Do we stand with those little, vulnerable babies in desperate need of care and comfort and support, medical treatment, food, or do we stand with the comments of the Governor of Virginia over the last 2 days?

Tonight, I am beginning what is known as the rule XIV process. That is an expedited procedure for floor consideration of my legislation, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

In addition, I want to announce that on Monday night, I am going to be sure that every Senator has the opportunity to come to the floor and say whom we stand for and what we stand against. So I want to announce that in addition to the rule XIV process that I am going to initiate in a moment, I also want Senators to be aware that on Monday evening, I am going to be asking unanimous consent for Senators to come to the floor and pass the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act legislation. I am going to ask all 100 Senators to come to the floor and be against infanticide. This shouldn't be complicated.

Mr. President, I understand there is a bill at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. President, I now ask for a second reading and in order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I object to my own request.

Thank you. I look forward to the debate in this body on Monday evening.

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

Mr. President, I am going to speak again shortly from the floor, but, very briefly, I want to associate myself with the comments of my senior Senator, Deb Fischer from Nebraska, who just spoke and welcomed Nebraska's pro-life students to the Capitol over the next 3 days. It is wonderful to be associated with a movement that is fundamentally about love and is about the dignity of every baby. So I join my senior Senator in welcoming Nebraska's pro-life students to the Capitol and to Washington, DC, for the March for Life on Friday.

I thank the President.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise today to offer a very basic resolution. I want Senators to unanimously reaffirm our oath of office to a Constitution that explicitly rejects religious bigotry.

It is useful to regularly remind ourselves that Americans are First Amendment people. Each of the five freedoms in the First Amendment-- speech, press, religion, assembly, and protest--defines who we are. In America, we talk, we read, we argue, and we march and worship without fear. Because of this fundamental celebration of human dignity and human freedom, America is big enough to welcome a whole bunch of meaty and messy fights on everything from whom you vote for to whom you call God.

Just as the First Amendment prohibits the government from dictating anyone's religious beliefs, so, too, the Constitution explicitly rejects religious tests for Federal office. Our Constitution explicitly rejects religious tests for Federal office. This isn't a Republican belief; this isn't a Democratic belief; this is an American belief. But, tragically, over the last couple of years, some strange things have been happening in this body, and we seem to be forgetting some of those basic 101 American civics truths.

I want to tell you a story. Brian Buescher from my State was recently nominated by the President to be a Federal judge for the District of Nebraska. This is an honor for him and his family, a celebration of his brain, work ethic, and his integrity. By the way, Brian is also Catholic and an active member of the Knights of Columbus.

The Knights of Columbus, for those of you who don't know, is the largest Catholic fraternal service organization in the world. The Knights' 1.6 million members of the organization raise millions of dollars for charity every year, and they contribute millions of hours of volunteer service.

Like a lot of guys back in Nebraska, Brian joined the Knights of Columbus to give back and to also be involved in a bunch of fish frys. This is not the stuff of headlines, but it is the stuff of basic neighborliness.

This is where the story gets weird because at Brian's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee a few weeks ago, one of my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee called the Knights of Columbus ``an extremist organization.'' Huh? It got worse. Brian then got a letter from a Member of this body asking him if he would resign his membership in the Knights of Columbus if he were confirmed to the Federal bench to ``avoid the appearance of bias.''

This is nuts. We are talking about the largest Catholic fraternal organization in the world being called an extremist organization and a nominee for the Federal bench being asked to resign from this organization so that he can serve without the appearance of bias. The clear implication here was that Brian's religious beliefs and his religious affiliations--in this case, an affiliation with a Catholic organization that invests countless hours and millions of dollars annually serving special needs kids--Brian was supposedly therefore potentially unfit for Federal service. This is the same kind of garbage that was thrown at a Member of this body, John F. Kennedy, 60 years ago when he was campaigning for the Presidency.

So today I have introduced a resolution--a 101-level, basic resolution--that simply reaffirms the belief of this body in American religious liberty. The resolution simply says that it is the sense of the Senate that disqualifying a nominee for the Federal bench or any Federal office on the basis of his Catholic beliefs or membership in the Knights of Columbus violates the no religious test clause of the Constitution. It seems obvious on its face.

In this resolution, we are simply reaffirming with President Kennedy and with countless other Americans across 230 years--Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Agnostic, Atheist and others-- we are simply reaffirming the idea that America is big enough for disagreements. Stated differently, we are saying that we believe the U.S. Government is not in the business of trying to resolve debates about

Heaven and Hell; rather, the business of the U.S. Government is to preserve peace and order so that you and your neighbors can precisely wrestle about things such as Heaven and Hell or sports loyalties or dietary preferences. America can handle principled pluralism and honest, serious debate.

This resolution ought to have the support of every single Member of this body. After all, each of us took an oath to defend this very idea when we first came here. This is what America is actually about.

The text of the resolution before us states:

Expressing the sense of the Senate that disqualifying a

nominee to Federal office on the basis of membership in the

Knights of Columbus violates the Constitution of the United

States.

Whereas, throughout the history of the United States, the

religious liberty protected by both the First Amendment and

the No Religious Test Clause of the Constitution of the

United States has been at the heart of the American

experiment;

Whereas, in 1960, the presidential candidacy of John F.

Kennedy was met with significant anti-Catholic bigotry;

Whereas, then-Senator Kennedy responded to the bigotry with

these timeless words: ``For while this year it may be a

Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in

other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew or a

Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. . . . Today I may be the

victim, but tomorrow it may be you, until the whole fabric of

our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national

peril.'';

Whereas the Knights of Columbus (in this preamble referred

to as the ``Knights'') constitute the largest Catholic

fraternal service organization in the world;

Whereas the Knights have a proud tradition of standing

against the forces of prejudice and oppression, such as the

Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Germany;

Whereas the Knights are founded on the principles of

charity, unity, fraternity, and patriotism; and

Whereas, in 2017, the Knights made more than $185,000,000

in charitable contributions and volunteered more than

75,600,000 service hours: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that

disqualifying a nominee to Federal office on the basis of

membership in the Knights of Columbus violates clause 3 of

article VI of the Constitution of the United States, which

establishes that Senators ``shall be bound by Oath or

Affirmation, to support th[e] Constitution'' and ``no

religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to

any Office or public Trust under the United States.''

Period. Full stop.

If a Senator has a problem with this resolution, they are probably in the wrong line of work because this is what America is. This is a super basic point. No religious tests. If someone has a problem with this resolution, what other parts of the Constitution are they against? Freedom of the press? Women's right to vote? Freedom of speech?

This isn't hard. There are no religious tests for serving on the Federal bench. We in this body should rebuke these anti-Catholic attacks.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 19, submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

I thank the Members of this body for reaffirming basic constitutional 101 stuff today. I will report back to Brian Buescher, the nominee for the Federal Bench for the District of Nebraska, that he can ignore those questions he received about whether he would resign his membership in the Knights of Columbus before this body proceeds to vote on his confirmation.

I thank the Senator from Mississippi for yielding to me.

Mr. President, I rise to highlight the work of some truly impressive Nebraska high school students. In September, to celebrate Constitution Day, my office offered a challenge to high schoolers in my State to submit essays describing ``The Relationship Between the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.'' We received contributions from across Nebraska from students in public, private, and home schools.

Today, I am pleased to announce the three winners: Ingrid Williamsen from Logan View Senior High School in the

First Congressional District; Patrick Collins from the AP U.S. History Class at Mount Michael Benedictine in Elkhorn in the Second Congressional District; and Kate Pipher from Nebraska Christian School in Central City in the Third Congressional District.

The lessons these three Nebraska students can teach us are enduringly relevant not only for other high schoolers but in this body today. I would like to read briefly from each of their essays.

Ingrid Williamsen wrote:

The Constitution was put in place so that the rights and

liberties laid out in the Declaration of Independence could

be enforced. It puts limits on the government so that the

government cannot infringe on the rights of the people. It

gives the new government the power to guarantee the liberty

of all the people. Both functions are directly tied to the

Declaration.

In her essay, Kate Pipher wrote:

The Founding Fathers adopted a humble posture to both their

Creator and a great humanity. They understood they did not

possess the power to redefine the rights of man. Their role

was to defend, discover, and reveal those rights for the

citizens. The Constitution's goal is to protect the

inalienable rights of every individual Image-Bearer that the

Declaration of Independence lays out.

Finally, in his essay, Patrick Collins referenced Abraham Lincoln's ``Fragment on the Constitution'' and declared that the Constitution is ``the silver frame that protects the golden apple of the Declaration of Independence. . . . Thus, the Constitution is indeed a structural embodiment of those famous Truths which we held then and hold now to be self-evident.''

I am grateful to have received so many great essays from students across Nebraska. I thank all of them for their work. It is clear to me that not only their classmates but Washington and this body can learn some Schoolhouse Rock Civics from Nebraska high school kids.

I would like to congratulate Ingrid, Kate, and Patrick.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record their full essays.

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

Mr. President, I rise to say in public today what I have been discussing with many individual Nebraskans over the last 17 days about the ``me too.'' movement, the important ``me too.'' movement, about a nation that is accelerating our descent into tribalism and about our continuing decline here in the Senate as a deliberative body--or as a Nebraska woman put it a little more bluntly to me 2 nights ago: What the hell is happening in my country?

One part of the answer to her urgent question is that the Senate is being swallowed whole by 24/7 cable news, and that inclination--that temptation--probably just can't be reconciled with being a great deliberative body. Doing reality TV and wrestling with big, hard, complicated, long-term problems are just fundamentally different things.

I am not here tonight to talk about the Supreme Court confirmation votes that we will probably be taking this weekend. I am here to talk about the nasty process we have been navigating over the past 86 days and about the false choices some people are claiming stand before us and about where we in the Senate will go next week, next month, and next year after that vote.

I am not here to talk about how fundamentally broken the Senate Judiciary Committee is or how absurd it is to think that the problems in our committee structures are going to be solved by preening and grandstanding Senators looking for sound bites, although both of those things are obviously true.

No, I am here to talk tonight about the false choice that is being repeated hour after hour after hour on television that this confirmation vote about one vacant seat on the Supreme Court--in that vote we are somehow going to be making a giant binary choice about the much broader issue of whether we do or don't care about women. That is simply not true. That is not what we are doing this weekend.

Fortunately, many Nebraskans the last 2 weekends when I have been home have been much more nuanced than the kind of screaming we hear on battling cable news channels.

A Supreme Court confirmation vote isn't a grand choice about whether we love our daughters or whether we trust our sons. That is not the choice before us. This is a consent decision about one person for one seat.

Again, I am not here to talk tonight about the particular vote. There is lots of lobbying going on around this body right now. I am not here to talk about that particular vote. But I will say that I have spent more than 150 hours at this point reviewing documents and in hearings and consulting investigators and experts related to this confirmation.

Moreover, I will also say that although I have said many complimentary things about Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his distinguished record of 12 years of service on the DC Circuit Court, I will say that I urged the President back in June and early July to make a different choice before he announced this nomination. I urged him to nominate a different individual. I urged the President to nominate a woman.

Part of my argument then was that the very important ``me too.'' movement was also very new and that this Senate is not at all well prepared to handle potential allegations of sexual harassment and assault that might have come forward, absent knowing a particular nominee.

Let me be clear. There is some academic literature that suggests that very few allegations of sexual assault in the broader culture are fabricated. Or stated conversely, the hefty majority of allegations of sexual assault in our broader culture are probably true.

But in politics, in this city, a place filled with politicians who constantly believe that the end justifies the means, that situation might well have been different, I argued in June. So in the interest of cautious prudence, I urged a different path than the one that was chosen. But so what?

Once the decision was made, once the President made his nomination, that meant that the work the Senate needed to do was to evaluate the specific evidence and claims about the specific individual who was on the floor before us.

But we are being told now that our vote isn't about a specific individual, a specific seat, or specific evidence; rather, we are being told that the choice before us in this confirmation is a much broader choice about whether we do or don't care about women.

If you turn on cable news or if you open up social media--and I highly recommend against both of those things in times like this; for the last 2\1/2\ weeks I have stayed clear almost entirely of those two ugly places, and it is been good for my soul. But what you hear if you turn on cable or if you look at social media is this: Pick a side. It is good versus evil. Everything is immediate. Everything is certain. There is no doubt. There is no gray. There are only tribes of Hatfields and McCoys, Israelis and Palestinians--a world of generational hatred without end. There is no listening, no understanding, no empathy, no possibility that perhaps, just maybe in a broken world, violence, pain, and shame are all too real. Perhaps trying to make angels and devils out of your fellow countrymen and women is not the most useful way for us to try to make sense of the world. Everything might not be black- and-white simple.

We regularly seem--in this body and in the politicized culture that we are trying to serve on cable news--to lack any awareness of the possibility that maybe, just maybe, constant, instant certainty about political battle lines might not be a good way to go forward. We might be undermining rather than building a better world for our kids.

Well, I don't believe this is what most Americans want. I don't believe most Americans are political addicts. I don't believe most Americans trust us in this institution. I don't believe most Americans want our political class to be our leaders right now. I don't believe most Americans want to see each and every question, each and every sphere of life, each and every institution across the land politicized.

I think most Americans are a lot more like my wife, who called me last week from Nebraska sobbing after both opening statements on Thursday. What we saw and heard during last Thursday's eight grotesquely public hours were two different families hurting badly--two families. The Ford family and the Kavanaugh family, both of them homes with children, have been the recipients of constant death threats, and for what? For one seat on the Supreme Court? We know this isn't about that when people are threatening death. This is about tribe.

One of the two families can't let their girls go out alone now. The other family has been forced to move from their home. In both Northern California and suburban Maryland, there are extra folks being hired in the important work of protection and security detail, a part of our economy that we don't want to grow and that is indisputably growing in our time. This isn't right.

We saw people having to grapple with the brokenness and the sinfulness of a fallen world. But they were not just grappling with it. They were grappling with the nastiness East of Eden in realtime on television as a kind of politainment art.

No one really thinks that our body politic is going to get any healthier by giving more oxygen to the one-man clown show that is Michael Avenatti. But do you know what? Not being down with the circus is not the same thing as being indifferent to the complexities of the ``me too.'' movement. I believe we have a widespread legacy of sexual assault in this country. I believe we don't have much of a shared sexual ethic right now, and we haven't for quite some time, and I think that horrible stuff has happened and continues to happen.

I have wept with the victims of sexual assault, and I believe the advocacy groups' data that between one-fifth and one-third of American women have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. Given that most women have many other important women in their lives--a mom, and a daughter, sisters, and a couple of close friends--it means the overwhelming majority of American women have been deeply affected, deeply hurt by the tragedy of sexual violence.

I have had two dear, dear friends who have been raped, and it is an act from the pit of hell. People, men and women, are created in the image of God--Imago Dei, we say in Christianity. Sexuality is a deep and precious gift. It is an intimacy; it is a oneness that is to be shared and given--never taken. Sex is big, not small, and you don't get to decide it for someone else.

The ``me too.'' movement is a complicated movement, but it has been a very good thing. Far too often, many girls and women have been told that they are meat. They have been told this in word and in deed--that they are parts to be consumed rather than God's children to be cherished and respected and partnered with.

Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic, one of the most profound writers on sexuality in our time, wrote recently about a horrible experience she endured during her senior year of high school on Long Island. She was the victim of an attempted date rape, and she contemplated suicide in its aftermath. She struggled in school, and she doubted her worth and value.

After she struggled against this boy trying to violently force himself on her for many scary minutes, he finally gave up and just decided to restart the car. They drove away from that deserted beach in silence.

Listen to her words. She writes:

I told no one. In my mind, this was not an example of male

aggression used against a girl to extract sex from her. In my

mind, this was an example of how undesirable I was. This was

proof that I was not the kind of girl you took to parties, or

the kind of girl you wanted to get to know. I was the kind of

girl you took to a deserted parking lot and tried to make

give you sex. Telling someone would not be revealing what he

had done; it would be revealing how deserving I was of that

kind of treatment.

Hear what she is saying here. This precious young girl was hearing in her sexual assault that there must be something wrong with her, that she is the kind of girl only worth being groped. She is not worth being taken to dinner or engaged in conversation as if she has a mind. If that doesn't make you cry, there is something wrong with you.

And now-adult Mrs. Flanagan continues:

My depression quickly escalated to a point where, if I had

been evaluated by a psychiatrist, I would probably have been

institutionalized as a danger to myself. I had plans for how

I was going to kill myself. I managed to make a few friends,

who introduced me to acid, which was no help with the

depression. I sat in classes in a blank state except for

English. (``To the girl about whom I will someday say, `I

knew her when,' '' my English teacher wrote in that yearbook,

words that stunned me when I first read them, and that I have

never forgotten.)

What a blessing to have had that kind of teacher, someone who proclaimed to Flanagan her dignity and her worth, who shouted meaning into her soul.

Our culture has been living through an epidemic of sexual assaults, and these attacks on girls' worth, on women's worth, need to be grappled with. They need a reckoning. What we are dealing with here is horrible physically, but it is more than that. What we are dealing with--we are dealing with something that has a spiritual level as well.

My view is that the ``me too.'' movement is going to make some mistakes. It is going to have some excesses. But overall, it has been an important and a needed development. A whole lot of brave women have stepped forward, and they have exposed their abusers who have been some of the most powerful men in Hollywood and media and corporate America and elsewhere. These women did this at unthinkable professional and personal risk. They deserve our respect. They also deserve not to have their progress co-opted by the cynics who run this town. Their stories are not fodder for fundraising emails. The ``me too.'' movement doesn't belong to the left or the right; the ``me too.'' movement belongs to the women who have found in it an inspiration to step forward and confront the people who hurt them.

I have two daughters, and, God forbid, in the event that something ever happened to one of them, I want them to feel like they could come forward knowing that their accusations will be taken seriously, that they wouldn't be dismissed or vilified for speaking up, that they wouldn't be ashamed or blamed.

We all know that the President cannot lead us through this time. We know that he is dispositionally unable to restrain his impulse to divide us. His mockery of Dr. Ford last night in Mississippi was wrong, but it doesn't really surprise anyone. That is who he is.

Similarly, it was wrong last week when he said that ``if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities.'' It is wrong when people insinuate that a woman bears blame for her sexual assault because she was drunk. This reinforces the stereotypes that have caused millions of women to bury their experiences of abuse and assault for decades. This kind of repugnant nonsense creates excuses for abusers. Just because a woman drinks or even if she drinks too much does not make her body or her sexuality any less her own, and I don't want anyone telling those poisonous lies to my daughters.

I also have a son, and in the event that, God forbid, he is accused of a crime, I hope that he is presumed innocent and that he is permitted to exercise his right to defend himself. I think there are a whole lot of parents out there who think the same thing. I don't just think this; I know this because I have taken the calls from Nebraska moms who say just this. We want this not because of our politics; we want this because we believe that girls and boys, women and men, daughters and sons are created with dignity and worth.

This is not about choosing between believing our daughters and protecting our sons. That choice is false. But do you know what my constituents back in Nebraska told me this weekend they think this is now about? They think it is about us. They think it is about all of us in this town being addicted to the circus. They don't think very many of us are interested in truth; they think we are interested in political instrumentality. They think we are interested in exploiting differences and divisions in America because we are addicted to short- term power in a city that isn't worthy of much respect.

In closing, let me read one more note from another Nebraska woman this week. This actually came in last Friday.

I was angry at yesterday's hearing--angry that something as

important as a conversation about the victimization of a

woman at the hands of a man became just another move in a

game of partisan chess. But I'm also deeply troubled.

Troubled that the painful memories shared by Dr. Ford in that

hearing. Troubled by the painful memories it evoked in women

across our country who have suffered sexual violence.

Troubled by the fact that this violence comes at the hands of

men. I'm deeply saddened by this violence committed at the

hands of men. I just can't comprehend it. I weep for our sons

and daughters that it exists in our fallen world.

To those victims for whom yesterday's hearing brought fresh

pain, I am so sorry that a political circus opened these

wounds anew. Sorry that this abomination of humanity was ever

experienced at all.

She continues:

Senator, I want you to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, but

I also worry that vote might be heard as a reflection on the

validity of other women's experience. I worry that pundits

are going to tell women that. I am tired of women's stories

just being used for politicians' ends. I'm tired of women

being used and discarded. Women's pain isn't supposed to be a

political football.

She is obviously right.

The ``me too.'' movement doesn't belong to politicians. The ``me too.'' movement has elevated our consciousness and awareness of sexual assault and sexual violence against women. We must not give back the important ground gained in this movement by authorizing this media circus to stand in for generations of stories of tragic pain. And no matter how much cable news screams this, it would be an egregious offense against the cause of women to call this one up-our-down vote a proxy for the validation and validity of claims of sexual violence. We can do better than that, and we must do better if we are actually going to care about women and if we are going to serve our constituents in this body.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, like so many here today, I rise to honor John McCain and to sing John McCain's praises.

There are many here--most here--who knew him longer than I did. I will admit that when the Presiding Officer and I first got here in 2014, I knew John McCain as somebody from the history books. I knew John McCain as somebody destined for the history books. I knew John McCain as an American hero, but I didn't know John McCain, the man. I didn't know John McCain, the flesh and blood, genuinely hilarious guy, but over the past 48 months, I had the privilege of actually getting to become friends with John McCain.

It is sort of weird to say, when you are roughly our age--I am 46 and John McCain was an octogenarian--that he befriended me. I went on many overnight flights with John McCain. I have been to refugee camps with John McCain. I have been to war zones with John McCain. I have been cussed out by John McCain lots of times. He called me a stupid bastard on a regular basis--and he meant it, affectionately. I am convinced he didn't use the term ``stupid bastard'' lightly. He reserved it for those he really cared about.

I have laughed and cried with John McCain. I have wrestled policy with John McCain. I got to grill hamburgers and serve them to troops in Afghanistan on the Fourth of July with John McCain.

As we in this body praise John McCain today and for the rest of this week, as we rightly should, there will be a lot of people talking about his time in the Hanoi Hilton.

John McCain was in prison to fight for our freedom for more than 5 years. He was in solitary confinement for about 3 years. He was tortured for years. If you have ever met any of the POWs who were in the cells around him, almost to a man they credit the fact that they didn't lose their minds during that time to the fact that John McCain kept them sane. He kept them stable.

John McCain told me a story one time on one of those overnight flights--and he has told it to many other people around here--about tap code, which is sort of akin to Morse code, but new folks in the Army learn tap code. It is a way to spell out a five-by-five grid: You can put letters together and make words, make sentences, and make paragraphs.

John McCain thought it was very important that the men who were in prison with him would learn to tell each other stories--they would tell poems they knew from their youth; they would tap out songs they knew from when they were kids--because if they had a sense of history past, they would have a sense of hope and history future. John McCain kept those people sane.

I remember one time hearing him wax on and on about this story, and I was just in awe of how long it must have taken to persuade these men that they were going to teach each other songs and poetry from their youth. I said: How long did it take to do that?

He looked at me like I was just a complete idiot, and he said: What did I care? What the hell did it matter to me? We had infinite time, you moron.

He didn't say ``you moron,'' but it was clear: How do you not get that time was the one thing that just was completely irrelevant when you are in prison? If something takes too long, that is a virtue, not a liability.

One of the things we don't tell here and that we need to tell more is the connection between how he thought about time and why he acted the way he acted as a Senator. If we want to honor John McCain around here, one of the most basic things we should do is recognize that the reason he didn't suffer fools lightly is because he had a concept of time that was--as a man who had spent 5\1/2\ years in prison, he wanted to redeem the time. After he was released, he wanted to make sure he spent all of his time on big things.

His impatience, his volcanic temper flowed directly from the fact that he

thought life was too short to waste on small stuff, and if you were willing to do small stuff, he was going to get up in your grill.

So the fact that John McCain is a hero because of the way he endured torture on our behalf and the fact that John McCain worked really hard on big issues and often ran over people rudely in his interactions with them in the Senate--those things were inextricably linked. If we are really going to honor John McCain, we have to understand that his impatience was a huge part of what he saw as his mission--to serve his fellow Americans.

So how do we honor this man? There is a lot of talk around here right now about what we should do to honor John McCain, and it is an important conversation. My understanding is, the two leaders are going to get together and put together a commission to deliberate over the next many weeks or months about the proper way to honor John McCain. I am glad they are doing that.

There is a lot of discussion about renaming a building after him or renaming a different committee room after him, and some of those tributes may be the right tributes. I am not meaning to prejudge that right now. Obviously, there is something just hilarious about the idea that a Senate office building may be renamed after John McCain because if you had the ``McCain SOB,'' it is obvious what John McCain would want you to call that McCain SOB building all the time.

So there are important things to talk about. Yet I want to urge one bit of caution, which is: We should not think that what John McCain would want us to do in this time and place is in any way reducible to marble because just as America is not the sum of her cities, so, too, the U.S. Senate is not the sum of its buildings. The U.S. Senate is not the places where we meet.

As John reminded us in his farewell charge, read posthumously yesterday, America is an idea. America is a cause. America is about liberty. America is about justice. America is about universal human dignity. Even though John could often run over you, when you were having a debate and an argument if you were in his way, probably more than any person I have ever met John actually believed in universal human dignity.

The reason he was so big on the global stage is because he stood on a tradition 230 years long, announcing what America believes: There are about 7\1/2\ billion people who are created in God's image with universal dignity, and that applies to everybody everywhere. It isn't America's job to fix every problem everywhere, but it is certainly part of America's mission in the world to proclaim that universal human dignity, and that is what John did. That was a huge part of his calling.

Unfortunately, we know all too well that when the public looks at this institution right now, when the public looks to this city, they don't see a place that looks like its beating heart is to proclaim that universal American idea, to proclaim that American sense that everybody is created with infinite worth, and though we know that, we are not doing that much about it.

In this institution, most of the time we finger-point, we don't problem-solve, and the public is groaning for us to do better. The last few years should be blinking red lights for all of us who are privileged to serve here for a time.

When the American people look at Washington, they rightly think it is shady for Cabinet members and their spouses to be raising money from foreign sources.

When the American people look at Washington, they rightly think there is a whole lot of shady going on and that people's taxes and finances ought to be disclosed when they are running for an office of public trust.

When the American people look at Washington, they don't see most Members of Congress as stewards of the public trust but rather as hypocrites with taxpayer-funded sexual lawsuit settlements.

When the American people look at Washington, they think it is weird that the average Member of Congress has an investment portfolio that grows much faster than the market average, and when people leave jobs in this institution they often head for ``cush'' jobs on K Street rather than moving back home, which is where they said they were going to end up after they ran for office.

We have seen multiple indictments across both the legislative and executive branches just in recent weeks in this town. Is it any wonder the American people look at us and wonder if we really care about the crisis of public trust? Is it any wonder that John McCain was impatient with the pace of us tackling big problems in this place?

We obviously have a truncated week here, and many of us are headed to Arizona for a funeral in the next few hours so I will not introduce anything now, but I want to say that when we get back, and as this Commission gets kicked off trying to figure out the proper way to honor John McCain, I plan to make a proposal that we should find a way to honor John McCain not just in marble. Maybe that is a step that is important, but if John McCain were here, I submit to you that John McCain wouldn't be all that concerned about what names and placards and signs we put up on buildings and meeting rooms.

I think we should find a way to honor John McCain in a way that John McCain would have seen fit, and that is we ought to pass a piece of legislation that we wouldn't have passed absent this moment. We ought to come together, in a bipartisan way, and we ought to do something that makes both political parties really uncomfortable.

That was one of the things John McCain was great at. This man is gone and we are surely poorer for it, but we can do something big that is in line with the spirit of how he wanted to disrupt this place. If we wanted to make both parties uncomfortable--and John was a guy who loved to point both barrels at both parties--I think we can find a way to do that in a way the American people will applaud, and I think that might be the right way to honor John McCain.

His willingness to take on everybody and all the sacred cows in this town was why a lot of people hated him, but it is why a lot more people loved him. I think, if we are going to honor his spirit, we ought to find a way to do something that is big and disruptive and uncomfortable for Washington, DC.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak to the issue of the leadership of the Department of Justice.

It has been a strange couple of hours around this building with lots of talk about firing the Attorney General. I would just like to say in public what I have been saying to my colleagues in a message that I just communicated to the President of the United States; that is, that it would be a very, very, very bad idea to fire the Attorney General because he is not executing his job as a political hack. That is not the job of the Attorney General. The Attorney General's job is to be faithful to the Constitution and to the rule of law.

Jeff Sessions just had to issue a statement about 2 hours ago that I would like to read. The Attorney General says:

While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department

of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political

considerations. I demand the highest standards, and where

they are not met, I take action. However, no nation has a

more talented, more dedicated group of law enforcement

investigators and prosecutors than the United States.

I am proud to serve with them and proud of the work we have

done in successfully advancing the rule of law.

That is his job. The Attorney General is a man who, when he served in this body, would have policy disputes with probably all 99 of us or 100 of us now, but the 99 people he served alongside. There are a bunch of issues where I agree with Jeff Sessions on policy, and there are some issues where I disagree with Jeff Sessions on policy.

The Democrats disagree with Jeff Sessions on lots of policy, but I think everybody in this body knows that Jeff Sessions has been executing his job in a way faithful to his oath of office, to the Constitution, and to trying to defend the rule of law. I think Jeff Sessions' statement today that the U.S. Department of Justice is filled with honorable, dispassionate, career prosecutors who execute their job in ways that the American people should be proud of is indisputably true. What he said is something that basically everybody in this body knows and agrees with. Yet, bizarrely, there are people in this body now talking like the Attorney General will be fired, should be fired. I am not sure how to interpret the comments of the last couple of hours.

I guess I would just like to say, as a member of the Judiciary Committee and as a Member of this body, that I find it really difficult to envision any circumstance where I would vote to confirm a successor to Jeff Sessions if he is fired because he is executing his job rather than choosing to act as a partisan hack.

I think everybody in this body knows that Jeff Sessions is doing his job honorably, and the Attorney General of the United States should not be fired for acting honorably and for being faithful to the rule of law.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about what happened in Helsinki today.

Let's not mince words. Today was a terrible day for the American brand, for the American people, and for all of our allies. We did not negotiate from a position of strength. We acted from a position of weakness. As a result, one of the world's worst despots walked away today from Helsinki with a win.

Vladmir Putin is walking away from Helsinki with an undeserved legitimacy. The United States took a loss today when we backed away from our longstanding commitment to principled American leadership and, frankly, basic reality.

Today the press asked the President of the United States whom he believed on the subject of Russia's information operation in the United States in 2016. Did he believe in the men and women of the U.S. intelligence community or did he believe in Vladimir Putin, a member of the Russian intelligence community, a thug turned Russian despot?

The choice here was between the people who are risking their lives on behalf of our freedom and people who go around the world taking people's lives to limit freedom. The President of the United States-- how did he answer? He answered that he didn't see ``any reason'' why Putin would have interfered in the U.S. election.

Make no mistake. Putin has a reason. The reason is clear to all those who have been watching growing Russian authoritarianism in recent years. Putin wants to weaken the U.S. Government. Putin wants to make the American people believe that our system of government isn't any different than his ``thugocracy.'' Putin wants to destroy NATO, which isn't just an alliance. It is, arguably, the most important military alliance in two millennia.

Putin wants to undermine confidence in self-government, not only in this country but around the world. That is why Putin, a Soviet-style dictator who thinks a lot more about American elections than he ever thinks about his sham elections, attacked us in 2016. It is why he is planning to attack us this fall in 2018. It is why there are ongoing information operations against the United States and against our public at present, as everyone who goes into a SCIF and reads their intelligence briefing knows. It is why Putin is planning to attack the U.S. 2020 election already.

That is why the men and women of the U.S. intelligence community unanimously and without any regard to party understand that Putin waged an information operation against the United States in 2016.

That is why Dan Coats, an esteemed former Member of this body, went to the press today--not 6 months ago--and reaffirmed: ``Our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy'' remain the opinion of the U.S. intelligence community.

This isn't a question of Republican versus Democrats. This is a question of patriotism versus deciding that you want to be on the side of sowing discord and doubt in America.

We shouldn't sugarcoat this. Vladimir Putin is a despot, and he is propped up by a band of oligarchs every bit as corrupt as he is. Putin fakes democracy while preventing free and fair elections. Putin funnels massive amounts of Russian wealth from himself to himself and his cronies and keeps an iron grip on the press.

These matters are not matters of dispute. It is not ``on the one hand'' or ``the other hand'' or what some people are saying. The Russian people know who Vladimir Putin is. You can ask the leaders of political opposition in that country who tried to get a free and fair election. You can ask the human rights activists or the international observers who try to speak up against what he has done or show up in my office to give firsthand accounts in certain situations in which Putin has intervened. You can ask the journalists who tried to expose corruption in the country.

Do you know who these men and women often end up being? They are the men and women who just randomly, disproportionately happen to fall out of fifth story windows of office buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the people who just randomly happen to show up in one-car accidents that either are never investigated or, when they are investigated, unfortunately, there weren't witnesses and there are never prosecutions.

Vladimir Putin is working overtime to make the Soviet Union great again. Over the past decade, he has carried out an aggressive, often brutal expansionist campaign. In 2008, he invaded next-door Georgia. In 2014, he invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Putin has provided military support to the Assad regime in Syria. Russian troops are responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. Under the guise of attacking the Islamic State, Russia has targeted hospitals and schools and many other civilian locations.

Putin is currently flexing his muscle across Europe, although his preference there is always for more subtle means than tanks and Kalashnikovs, if he can get away with it. One, he has more deniability and, two, it is cheaper. In 2007, Estonia was hit with a wave of cyber attacks originating in Russia--the beginning of a campaign of cyber warfare that has become one of Mr. Putin's primary tools. Not only in the Baltics and Ukraine but in Germany and France, as recently as last year, Russian hackers attempted to interfere with elections, disrupt parliamentary proceedings, and shut down media operations. This is in addition to trying to put his thumb on the scale of pro-Putin parties across Europe, including by spreading misinformation through influential Russian-backed and Russian-originating social media accounts.

These questions are not actually gray--gray space war--but any Member of this body who does their homework, any Member of the House down the hall who does their homework, and lots of the good and well-meaning people who serve around the President who do their homework know these things to be true. These questions are not in dispute.

Putin's most daring performance to date, though, was deciding to take on the most powerful country in the world with an influence operation inside the United States. National political committees in 2016 saw their computer networks breached and their data stolen. Vladimir Putin isn't obsessed with the ups and downs of political life here in the United States. He isn't an agent of one party or the other--one candidate or the other. Vladimir Putin is an agent of chaos, and his objective is to undermine trust. His objective is to make Americans doubt ourselves and doubt whether U.S. leadership over the last 75 years has been a good or a bad thing and to doubt whether we should keep our word to our allies. Vladimir Putin's objective is to make us think there is no difference between countries on the global stage that believe in human rights, that believe in free press, free religion, free assembly, and free speech versus those who don't. Vladimir Putin's goal is to breach a moral equivalency that allows his thugocracy to be no less ugly than what happens in our country, where people who often disagree decide to argue by means of reason and persuasion, not by violence.

His goals aren't that hard to figure out. His enemy is trust and good faith. Vladimir Putin is trying to create mistrust in this country, and today the President of the United States decided to let Vladimir Putin off the hook and, in so doing, he creates an incentive for Putin to ratchet up his campaigns of misinformation. This should be a time for all Americans to stand together against what Putin is doing. It is a fundamental part of the President's job to articulate basic truths.

While we are being clear about who Vladimir Putin is, we should also be clear about who we, the American people, are. We are a nation that believes in human dignity. We believe this isn't just true of 320 million Americans; it is true of 7.5 billion people across this globe. We believe in free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right of protest--not because government gives us those rights but because God created us with dignity.

Government is not the author or source of people's rights. Governments are just tools to secure the rights that people have by virtue of having been created with dignity. In other words, we believe the very stuff that terrifies Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin believes only that might makes right. Americans don't believe that. We never have, and may we never devolve to believing only that. We are dedicated to the thesis that the dignity of every person is worth protecting. It is not the job of the U.S. Government to be the policemen of every Nation on Earth, but it is most clearly part of the job of the United States to articulate, on the global stage, things that are true of everyone, everywhere. We are dedicated to the idea that humans should flourish.

Vladimir Putin is dedicated to the opposite. He crushes men, women, and children underfoot for the purposes of keeping his hold on power. Americans do not stand with Vladimir Putin. Americans stand with the Russian champions of liberty and of free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right of protest against tyrants like Vladimir Putin.

We believe in peace through strength, and we believe in basic moral clarity. That is why, in the wake of the world's two most destructive wars, Americans created an international order. It is an American-led international order. The international order embodies America's fundamental values, and we push back against the drift to Old World authoritarianism in all of its forms--the very things Vladimir Putin lusts after.

This world isn't made for the elites, but it is made for American interests to be articulated because we are the de facto leader of the free world. That is why we have always negotiated from a position of strength.

Sadly, today, we negotiated from a position of weakness. In previous years, many Americans, myself included, have spoken out against the crazy idea that America could somehow ``lead from behind.'' Today, America decided to simply give in. As I came to the floor tonight, the President tweeted that ``in order to build a brighter future, we cannot exclusively focus on the past.'' Fair enough, but let's talk about that future. What do we want from it and at what cost? Is the cost of the future President Trump wants the sacrificing of American moral leadership on the global stage? Is it walking away from the idea that 7.5 billion people have been created with dignity? Is it walking away from the idea that America fundamentally announces to the world that we believe everybody has the rights of free speech, press, religion, assembly, and protest not because a government might decide to condescend and grant you this right? The government's job is to serve the people by preserving these rights which come from nature and nature's God.

The problem today is not the United States. The problem today is not the Russian people. The problem that needed to be named today was Vladimir Putin. Instead, our President decided to advance a faith moral equivalency that plays right into the hands of Vladimir Putin's bloody hands. Everyone in this body should be disgusted by what happened in Helsinki today.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, one of the most consequential duties of the Senate is the consideration of a Supreme Court nominee. This is the Congress's opportunity to shape the direction of the Federal courts and to defend a judiciary that is focused on laws, not policy. For those of us who have been called to this role for a limited time, this work is important. It will outlast us by decades. None of us should take this duty lightly.

With the appointment of Justice Gorsuch last year and now a record 22 judges to the courts of appeals, the past 18 months have been among the most consequential for the judiciary in the history of the Nation--and that was before Justice Kennedy's retirement.

As significant as these confirmations have been for the last year and a half in the judiciary, the current Supreme Court vacancy is arguably the most important task before the Senate this year. This vacancy is a remarkable opportunity to affirm the role of a judge under our constitutional system of republican self-government.

Fundamentally, this shouldn't be an exercise in policymaking, as vital and important as policymaking can be. Making law is not the job of the courts in any way, shape, or form.

Don't get me wrong. Setting goals and making policy can be very important, but it is done in the open, and it starts at home. Americans answer our biggest questions outside of government with our friends and neighbors, with our communities of worship, in our rotary clubs, and in our small businesses with entrepreneurship and all sorts of volunteerism in America.

With regard to government, policymaking choices are made by the American people through their representatives whom they elect and can hire and fire. To put it bluntly, Members of the Senate and Members of the House of Representatives at the other end of this building can be fired. In fact, 435 of the 535 people we work with in the Congress are always within 23 months and 29 days of being sent back home by the ``we the people'' who are actually in charge of policymaking in America.

But the Court is different. Nobody back home can fire a Supreme Court Justice. They have lifetime tenure. We should reflect more often on why our Founders decided to give members of the judiciary lifetime tenure. That is why we don't want those judges with their lifetime tenure to be writing laws or making policy. If a judge wants to make policy, he or she should take off the black robe of impartiality and run for office. It is a legitimate thing to do. All of us in this body have done it. We think it is a way to love our neighbor and serve our country, but in our system of ``we the people,'' the voters decide who gets to make policy. Judges have black robes, and they have lifetime tenure. They are not policymakers.

Regrettably, as our ever-fraying sense of common identity in America is falling apart in the eyes of many of our citizens, we are warping the role of the Court and of judges, reducing the role of the Court from the plain and ever-compelling words of Marbury v. Madison ``to say what the law is,'' not what some judge wishes it were; we are, instead, seeing the judiciary warped into a profane occupation of pronouncing policy preferences but without any mechanism of meaningful accountability by which the people could still be in charge. We should not let that stand. We should not want to see that perpetual warping of the judiciary into a place of being policymakers--yet policymakers without accountability.

We need a recovery of basic civics in the country about what the role of a judge is and what the purposes of the courts are. We should not let this confirmation process turn into a battle for our own policy preferences that just breaks down our constitutional architecture--the constitutional architecture on which an American free society depends.

Sadly, that is apparently what many people in the Resistance aim to do. They aim to bork Judge Kavanaugh's nomination by any means necessary. We are less than 24 hours into this, and folks are already declaring that if you can't see that Brett Kavanaugh is a cross between Lex Luthor and Darth Vader, then you apparently aren't paying enough attention.

The American people are smarter than that. That kind of charge is silly, and the American people don't want judges who think of themselves as superlegislators.

Unfortunately, far-left super PACs are shouting that we have reached the apocalypse. I was outside last night, right at the edge of the Supreme Court steps. In addition to the signs that were being held up, saying that Brett Kavanaugh was hastening the end of days, there were other signs on the ground, which had been printed with the names of other potential nominees to the Court, about how they were the ones who would bring about the end of days. This isn't true. We need less WWE ``Thunderdome'' and a lot more ``Schoolhouse Rock.''

The confirmation process of the Supreme Court nominee should be an occasion to do basic civics with our kids, and it shouldn't be dividing Republicans and Democrats about policy preferences. It should be an occasion for Americans to come together and talk again about why judges wear black robes and why they have lifetime tenure. This should be a test of the character, competence, and constitutional commitments of someone who has been nominated to the judiciary because in the American system, judges have a peculiar role--no more and no less than what article III of the Constitution gives them.

In Judge Kavanaugh, we have a compelling guy. He is a standout dad, and even his most ardent critic will acknowledge that he is one of the most thoughtful and influential judges on the courts of appeals across the Nation today. He has a ton of impressive opinions to his name, especially on the subjects of separation of powers and administrative law, which are now dominating the docket not only of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, where he currently sits, but also at the Supreme Court to which he has been nominated.

Judge Kavanaugh was put on the circuit court at age 41--12 years ago--a remarkably young man to be put on such a prestigious court. In his 12 years on the court, he has authored more than 300 opinions. I think the current count is that more than 100 of his opinions have been cited by more than 200 of his peers on other courts across the country. He is truly a judge's judge.

Last night, I heard from people on both the right and left ends of the policy spectrum, but legal experts said to me quotes that were remarkably eerie in their echo: Brett Kavanaugh is always the smartest person in every room he is in, yet when you are in the room, you would never know that he knows it because of his humble manner and his winsome ways.

If my colleagues want to pursue these confirmation hearings as mere naked partisanship, they should actually resign their seats and try to get cable news jobs. But if we want to take our jobs seriously, if we want to have an honest debate, then we should be taking seriously our charge to uphold the three branches of government, their separate responsibilities, and the ways they check and balance one another.

With those more than 300 opinions, we have a lot of homework to do. I am looking forward to beginning to dive further into Judge Kavanaugh's opinions over the course of the last 12 years. I am pretty confident that what we are going to find is a guy who has lots of deference and respect for the limited job that a judge is called to fulfill. I hope my colleagues in this Chamber will join me in diving into those opinions, sort of foreswearing the ``Thunderdome'' silliness that many people outside are urging us to turn the confirmation process into.

Thank you.

Mr. President, I rise to draw attention to one particularly important element of the National Defense Authorization Act, which sits before this body.

First, it is worth noting that--despite the bizarre dysfunction of the last couple of days around here--the NDAA is usually a time each year when the Senate looks like an actual deliberative body. We look like an actual legislature.

Most of the typical bickering and made-for-TV sound bites get set aside this week or two every year as we focus on the first purpose of the Federal Government, which is to provide for the common defense.

The NDAA reveals our shared commitment to the men and women in uniform who serve our country so well. This legislation aims to scrutinize and annually reprioritize among the many important tasks that are going on in the Pentagon and in the broader Department of Defense.

If we are going to call on the men and women in the armed services who defend our freedoms to stand ready to defend us and to go into battle when necessary, we must equip them with the right tools to be able to get their job done. That is what this legislation is about each year, but it is not enough to simply be about defending against traditional enemies and traditional threats. We also need to use this annual occasion to pause and deeply look at new and emerging threats we face.

When you ask national security and intelligence experts in private and in public what keeps them up at night, as I do multiple times every week--I ask this question of people in the SCIF. You find something strange in this city. You have an agreement. Public and private sector experts, legislative and executive branch folks, career folks, political folks, whether Republican or Democratic, have widespread agreement that the long-term domain challenge we face is that America is woefully unprepared for the age of cyber war.

Thirty years ago, when the digital age was still in its infancy and the first computer viruses and bugs were created, the United States did not have a cyber doctrine to defend our interests. That was understandable in 1986 because these were new threats. It doesn't make any sense in 2018, and yet it is still true. We don't really have any coherent doctrine to defend our interests. This is inexcusable.

We are, today, overwhelmingly the most advanced digital economy and digital society in the world. Thus, we are, almost inevitably, the No. 1 target globally for cyber crime, but our adversaries are attacking us not merely as targets of opportunity, they are also attacking us because they sense our passivity.

State and nonstate actors alike are becoming regularly more brazen. Year over year, from 2012 to 2013, to 2014, to 2015, and to the present, we see this brazen action coming from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and lots of jihadi nonstate actors. Yet we still do not have a cyber doctrine to guide our planning process, we don't have a cyber doctrine to guide our actions, and we are unprepared for the warfare of 2020, 2025, and 2030.

How can this be? How can we lack a strategic plan, not merely to respond to the attacks against U.S. public and private sector networks but also to go a step further and deter them in real time? Why do we lack this plan?

Since joining this body in January of 2015, alongside the Presiding Officer, I have pushed for a strategic plan that clearly articulates how we will defend ourselves against the new threats in this cyber space. Unfortunately, this call has fallen on deaf ears in both the legislature and the executive branch, both Democratic and Republican administrations. There is far too little urgency. When you speak with generals, when you speak with CIA station chiefs around the world, nobody disputes this. Everyone knows we are unprepared, and we are underinvested in this domain. Yet no one is really in charge.

Fortunately, we are taking a major step in this NDAA to address this deficit in our war planning. While no one piece of legislation and no single proposal can possibly address all of our cyber deficits, there is, nonetheless, some very good news in this NDAA for both the public as a whole and those of us who are losing sleep about our cyber underpreparedness.

The legislation we are debating today, and will vote on in some form tomorrow, includes a proposal to bring American national security into the 21st century by establishing a Cyberspace Solarium Commission. This Commission is modeled after President Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 Project Solarium. At that time, as the Soviet Union was on the cusp of achieving a devastating thermonuclear weapon, Ike recognized that our Nation needed a clear strategy. We needed to be able to defend ourselves and our allies against the expanding Soviet threat. This is where both the historian and the strategist in me gets excited.

Never one to lack a plan, Eisenhower sequestered three different teams of experts at the National War College for 6 weeks. He tasked them with articulating a menu of large-scale, strategic frameworks for the age of nuclear confrontation. The result of Ike's competitive effort was a new national security directive, NSC 162/2, that charted a course that would successfully guide U.S. policy and bureaucratic development over many decades of the Cold War.

We desperately need similar strategic clarity today. The threats to American security are actually even more dynamic and unpredictable than in those early years of the Cold War. Then there were giant technological and scale barriers to becoming a nuclear power; whereas, today, launching a cyber attack that has global reach requires only some coding capability, a laptop, and an internet connection.

This new group, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, will be made up of 13 members, putting cyber and national security experts, along with many Silicon Valley types, in the same room to debate, to think through, and to propose a comprehensive path forward to guide our cyber policy.

One of the reasons Ike's Solarium Commission worked so well was because there was urgency and focus. Under this Cyberspace Solarium Commission, there will be a deadline for the delivery of a comprehensive plan with blue sky freedom to reenvision all current bureaucracies and organizations across our cyber plan and response units within 1 year.

By September 1, 2019, this Commission would be delivering to both the President's Cabinet and to the defense and intelligence committees of the Congress a comprehensive plan to guide cyber security policymaking going forward.

We cannot continue to stand idly by waiting for a massive cyber attack to occur and then figure out how we will use that as a catalyst to begin future planning. We should be planning and prioritizing before the crisis. For 30 years, we haven't yet developed or committed to a serious strategy. Now is the time to act, and this NDAA represents one of the best innovations we have had; that we can set up this national Cyberspace Solarium Commission to report back, within 1 year, a comprehensive plan.

Thank you.

Mr. President, I yield back all time.

I ask for the yeas and nays.