Floor Statements

Mr. President, if you heard your doctor say there is no vaccine that is safe or effective or there are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS or school shootings started happening with the introduction of Prozac and other drugs--if your physician said any of those things to you, you would look for a new physician.

Yet, this week, my colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee and Health Committee are going to consider the nomination of someone who has not only said all of those things and more, but, if confirmed, he would be responsible for the health and well-being of the entire Nation.

The unique threat that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., poses to our country really cannot be overstated, and now it is up to us, the 100 Members of the U.S. Senate, to deny him the opportunity to use America as one big test lab for bygone diseases.

I want to explain what I mean by that. He thinks that FDA trials are not enough to determine the efficacy of a vaccine, and so he is suggesting that we use placebo in the population. What does that mean? Something might save someone's life, and something might be essentially a sugar pill, but you don't get to know.

There are international conventions against this approach. The Tuskegee experiments conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service were universally rejected, and the Congress banned this approach because you cannot withhold lifesaving care from anyone.

Now, if saying crazy things doesn't seem to be disqualifying for a nominee these days, I understand, but it is not just that he said crazy things or holds deranged views; it is that he has acted on them--it is that he has acted on them.

I want everybody to listen to exactly what happened in Samoa. Not 20 years ago, not 10 years ago, but in 2019, while he was chairman of an anti-vaccine group, he flew to Samoa because he sensed an opportunity to exploit people's hesitation about taking the measles vaccine. People were understandably worried after an accident involving improperly prepared vaccines killed two babies. It was a tragedy, and it was a costly mistake but not a reason to abandon the measles vaccine altogether.

But RFK sought to make people more afraid. He discouraged people from taking the vaccine because he wanted to run a ``natural experiment'' to see how people fared against the disease without protection. To see how people fared against the disease without protection? This guy is up for HHS, Health and Human Services? This guy just wants to see what would happen if we didn't give people the lifesaving protection that they need? He literally flew to the other side of the planet to turn people's fears into a data-collection opportunity.

For some context here, Samoa is a small country and had a population of around 200,000 people at the time. People knew each other, and word got around fast that Kennedy was in town saying a thing. So it was no small thing that this man from America with the last name ``Kennedy,'' pretending to be a health expert, was there peddling all kinds of lies to prevent people from getting a lifesaving vaccine, and those lies spread fast. Vaccination rates plummeted, and within 5 months, Samoa had a measles outbreak. Some 5,700 people were infected with the

measles. Eighty-three people died; almost all of them were children. That was the conclusion of Mr. Kennedy's natural experiment--children died.

This isn't some ancient history I am digging up here; this was less than 6 years ago. It is alarmingly reminiscent of one of the darkest chapters in our country's history--the Tuskegee experiment.

For 40 years, beginning in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service ran an experiment with 600 Black men in Alabama. The majority of them had syphilis, and the objective was to ``observe the disease process.'' So even when penicillin became the standard of care in 1947, the men who needed that treatment, who could have been given lifesaving care, were denied penicillin. Researchers did nothing as men died and they went blind because they wanted to see how the disease would develop--a natural experiment.

It took a young doctor, not long out of medical school, who read about the study in a medical journal and couldn't believe his eyes. He could not understand how the U.S. Government had come to view these poor sharecroppers as expendable, as subhuman. He thought about the Hippocratic oath that he and every other doctor like him had sworn to. What happened to ``First do no harm''?

And so not knowing what else to do but knowing he was risking a whole lot by speaking out, he wrote to the study's authors, and I want to read a bit of what he wrote:

I am utterly astounded by the fact that physicians allow

patients with a potentially fatal disease to remain untreated

when effective therapy is available. I assume you feel that

the information which is extracted from observation of this

untreated group is worth their sacrifice. If this is the

case, then I suggest the United States Public Health Service

and those physicians associated with it in this study need to

reevaluate their moral judgments in this regard.

The man who wrote that letter and was the first--and for a long time, the only--person to sound the alarm about the depravity of the Tuskegee experiment was my dad, Dr. Irv Schatz. It is one of the many reasons that he is my hero.

But I never thought--I never thought--that 60 years later, I would be standing in the very body that passed legislation in response to that shameful period arguing against confirming someone who wants to replicate that experiment at scale.

That is what RFK, Jr., wants to do. He wants to use Americans as lab rats in a national experiment, and if it means bringing back the measles or the mumps or rubella or polio, so be it. That is the cost of doing business, as he sees it.

I understand my Republican colleagues are facing a lot of pressure from within. It is a new administration, and you want to give them deference; an Executive, generally speaking, gets to have their team. But this nomination is not actually like the others. Even if you don't want to take Mr. Kennedy's words so literally--maybe you think he is just wondering aloud--look at his actions. Look at what he has done. Time and time again, he has abandoned every physician's first principle: Do no harm.

I shall do by my patients as I would be done by . . . and

shall minimize suffering whenever a cure cannot be obtained.

That is the part of the oath that every medical student takes at graduation before they can practice. Yet the person nominated to lead the country's entire health system has consistently done the exact opposite. He has caused disease. He has caused pain. He has caused death.

And so the vote we are going to be taking on this nominee is much more than your party or mine. It is life or death. And I promise you, if this person is confirmed, it will not age well--not in a Republican primary, not in a Democratic primary, not in your family, not in your community. Nowhere will an RFK ``aye'' vote age well. This person is going to cause disease across the United States.

I urge a ``no'' vote.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, the government shutdown that Donald Trump just ordered is illegal and unconstitutional. He is not a King, and we do not live in a monarchy.

It is Congress's authority to decide on Federal funding. The power of the purse is the foundational funding of the article I branch. Everybody talks like that. Everybody says those things. But now we are all put to the test--Democrats and Republicans.

Are we going to forfeit all of our power? We are the elected branch. We make the laws. And the President of the United States just ordered a funding freeze for stuff he doesn't feel like funding. That is literally not how it works.

And, today, the White House Press Secretary was asked about specific popular essential programs. You know what she said? She said: Have those people talk to Russ Vought and make an appeal to him.

Now, there are a couple of problems with that. First of all, Russ Vought doesn't get to decide, in an appropriations law, which parts of the law to follow and which parts not to follow. Second of all--let's be really clear about this--Russ Vought is not a government employee right now. He is a nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget.

And so we are supposed to have--I don't know--Medicaid recipients, VA home loan recipients, nursing homes, education organizations, healthcare organizations, transportation contractors, like, appeal: Mercy to the King. Will you please release these dollars? that is not how the American system works. This is illegal.

There is real pain starting today because of this funding freeze. Schools, childcare facilities, fire departments, community health centers, domestic violence shelters--all of them will instantly lose their funding at 5 p.m. today because somebody said: We are fiscal conservatives. You want to enact a fiscally conservative appropriations bill, pass a law. Pass a law.

I also would like to select the Federal funding which I agree with and fund that and select the funding that I disagree with and defund that, but I am not a monarch, and neither is Donald Trump.

We are hearing from so many constituents across the country, and I had a bit of a time delay because it is earlier in Hawaii, but all of my colleagues were getting incoming texts and calls and panicked people. This isn't about some arcane government program; this is, like, basic stuff. People are staged to do construction and told not to show up for work. Some of these construction projects are in places where you only have a narrow window during which you can even do construction, so a 90-day freeze means: Wait until next year. I don't care what the law says; wait until next year.

If you are a disaster survivor in North Carolina or Louisiana or California or Texas or Florida or Maui, you don't know what happens next. If you are a low-income family that relies on the Women, Infants, and Children Program to get healthy meals for your kids; if you live in a remote area like Waianae or Lanai in Hawaii and you go to a community health center to fill your prescriptions, to get a checkup, this freeze on funding means you don't get help.

You know how long it takes to get a home loan, a VA home loan or any other kind of home loan. People are showing up to get their VA home loans and saying: Not today. You might be like 45 days from closing. You are a veteran. You are entitled to this thing under the law. Russ Vought--not a member of the Federal Government yet--has decided you don't get your home loan today.

What an embarrassing abdication of the role of the Congress. All of this high-minded talk from my fellow appropriators about, you know there are really three parties in the Congress--this is the old joke-- Democrats, Republicans, and appropriators, right? The idea is that the appropriators are the adults in the room. The appropriators are the adults in the room, and they are not going to let nonsense, unconstitutional, illegal acts happen because we are the ones that control the purse strings.

I want to make one final point. In addition to all the pain that is being caused, my goodness, the door swings both ways in Washington. Imagine a progressive President reaching into the Federal budget after an appropriations bill is passed and saying: You know what, I don't like that thing. I don't like that other thing. I don't like this one. I don't like that one. I am in charge.

What are we even here for?

So this is not going to be business as usual. I will tell you one thing: I have never in my 13 years withheld my unanimous consent. I have used a little leverage. Everybody does. But we better get this straight on a bipartisan basis--not because I want to score partisan points, not because I want to characterize Donald Trump in one way or the other, but because we all worked so hard and made real sacrifices to get to this place so we could have a position of responsibility to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

What is happening today is unconstitutional. It is also against statutory law. But most importantly, it is causing pain across the country.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, if it weren't for a judge's temporary administrative stay, we would still be in the middle of Trump's pointless and illegal shutdown right now. Federal funding for a whole host of things would be frozen, meaning people all over the country who count on the Federal Government wouldn't get help.

All of us--all 100 of us--got calls from back home, saying: What the heck is going on?

VA home loans are being shut down. The Medicaid portal is being shut down. The Head Start portal is being shut down. Construction projects are being shut down. All because the Trump administration believes that it doesn't have to follow the appropriations law.

Now, lots of us disagree about the size and the scope of the government. Lots of people vote no on the appropriations law. Fine. But once it is the law, the legislative branch sends it to the President of the United States. The President either signs it or vetoes it. In this case, President Biden signed the appropriations law.

There is no provision in the statute and there is no provision in the Constitution that permits a President to pick and choose the spending that he prefers. That just doesn't exist in the law.

The article I branch has one most foundational power in terms of the three branches of government being separate and coequal. ``Coequal'' is kind of a funny way of saying it, but it is important to think of these three branches as in constant struggle against each other for power. Our power is the power of the purse. Our power is the power to enact appropriations bills, to determine the level of Federal spending on various programs.

But what the Trump White House did today was announce by fiat: We are not going to fund disaster relief. We are not going to fund public housing. We are not going to fund rural health care or foster care or opioid treatment or highway and rail projects or wildfire containment or cancer research or clean energy initiatives--all of it gone in an instant and, in this case, only for an instant because Donald Trump woke up yesterday and decided he no longer wanted to fund some of the most basic things that the Federal Government supports.

Again, this really isn't about arguing about the merits of each individual

program, although I don't know who is against allowing highway repairs to continue. I don't know who is against allowing Medicaid-funded nursing homes to continue. I don't know who is against allowing someone who has been waiting for their VA home loan to be able to close on that loan. But it is really not about that. It is about a more basic question, which is, Are we a nation of laws? Are we going to allow ourselves to turn into a monarchy?

I want to harken back to something I mentioned earlier today. The White House Press Secretary was asked about a specific program, and she said: Well, they should talk to Russell Vought.

Russell Vought is the nominee to be the OMB Director, the Office of Management and Budget.

There are a couple of things wrong with this. First of all, it is not his call whether or not to spend the money; the Congress already decided that. Second of all, even more creepy than that, this guy has not been confirmed. He is not a government employee. He is not in charge of anything. And we are supposed to, like, petition this person to beg him to follow the law.

This is the beginning of a long battle over a couple of most basic questions. First, are we going to allow this administration to just cause pain all across the country--every State, every county, school lunches, VA loans, construction projects? You name it. Are we going to allow this President to just do this because he feels like it?

The second question is not about the projects themselves or the programs themselves or even the people they help it is about who are we as a Congress.

When we swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States, is that just the thing we do before they give us the pen and the pin that say ``United States Senator''? You know, you stand right there, and you swear yourself in. They give you a little pen that says ``United States Senator.'' You look at it, and you go: I am a U.S. Senator. But the important part wasn't when they gave you your election certificate. It wasn't when they handed you your pen. It wasn't when they give you this pin here that says ``United States Senate.'' It is when you swear that oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. And the Constitution and laws of the United States of America make it very, very clear: We are not a constitutional monarchy; we are a democracy.

What the court did today is important because it stopped a lot of pain all the way across the country--personal economic pain, family economic pain, macroeconomic pain from shutting down construction projects and business operations and all the rest of it. But it is more foundational than that.

We have to establish some boundaries here that go beyond our partisan boundaries. We have to establish that enough is enough; that you might have your view about the size and the scope of the Federal Government and you might have your view about the previous President or the previous election campaign, but the law is the law here, and we are not going to allow any President, any administration, at any time to disobey the law in this flagrant of a fashion.

One final thought. There will be a Democratic President at some point, and if this becomes the precedent, I promise you, if you are a U.S. Senator on the Republican side, you are going to hate this. You are going to hate the idea that a progressive President can reach into the defense budget or the VA budget or the Department of Commerce's budget and just say: You know what, I don't want to fund that. I am going to plus-up this and defund that.

That is not the way the Federal system is supposed to work.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, Pete Hegseth is just not qualified to be in charge of the Department of Defense. He would oversee almost 3 million employees around the world and an annual budget of over $800 billion. But his only management experience today is running two very small veterans' organizations with, let's just say, mixed results.

Even if he had done extraordinarily well in that job, you do not put a person in charge of a small shop suddenly in charge of 3 million employees. He ran organizations with just a few dozen employees and tiny little budgets and neither of them were anything like the Defense Department in size and scale. And so on what basis are we supposed to trust that Pete Hegseth can manage not just the largest employer in the country but one of the largest employers on the planet?

Much like the rest of Donald Trump's Cabinet, the main criteria for Hegseth's nomination was his loyalty to Donald Trump. I am not saying loyalty to the President is some sort of disqualifier. You want your Cabinet to be loyal. But it can't be the only thing. You also have to be good at this. It is not like you couldn't have found a MAGA world person that was a three-star or a four-star or someone who had run a big enterprise or someone who had been a Governor or someone who had done big things and demonstrated they could run big complex organizations. That is what this is.

This isn't about woke or not woke or foreign policy. This is about: Gosh, this is a big job; and to the extent that the U.S. Senate is in the personnel business to provide our advice and then our consent to a President providing us with a nominee, it is very hard to get to yes on someone who has just never run anything particularly large or complicated.

In 2017--and this is his main qualification--he says:

I think President Donald Trump is the final defensive line

for America.

And as Trump ran for reelection, he said that there would be a ``national divorce'' if Democrats won and that ``the military and police . . . will be forced''--``the military and the police . . . will be forced to make a choice [and] yes, there will be some form of civil war.''

This is the guy we want to run the Defense Department who a couple of years ago suggested if Democrats win, there might be a civil war.

It is not just that Hegseth is a Trump acolyte getting a plum job in the administration. There is plenty of that happening. It is also that he has no real understanding substantively of the job that he would be doing. Leading the Department of the Defense is not just a bureaucratic exercise. Day in and day out, month after month, you are issuing billions of dollars in contracts and making decisions that are not at all obvious and super complex and sensitive. There are tradeoffs and compromises, and you have to know how, as they say, the building works.

So your knowledge and your experience really matter here, which is why it was so alarming that he wasn't able to name a single member of ASEAN when asked by my colleague Senator Tammy Duckworth. It wasn't a ``gotcha'' question. That is pretty basic stuff. ASEAN, which stands for the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations, is an essential part of the strategy in the Indo-Pacific. These are key partners the Defense Secretary directly engages with. Hegseth didn't even know the first thing about them and named a bunch of countries that don't even belong to the organization.

Later, when he was asked by Senator Slotkin whether he would carry out an illegal order from Donald Trump, like using the military against civilians, he refused to give a straight answer. There are a lot of close calls when you are Defense Secretary, but whether or not to turn the military on the public, even if they are Democrats, is not a close call. That is a simple: No, I wouldn't do that. I will not carry out an illegal order. No, the United States military is not in existence for the purpose of carrying out orders against United States citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

Leading our Armed Forces is not a part-time gig. The Pentagon is not a cable news set where you can roll up on a Saturday and say clever things. You can't improv your way out of global conflicts.

The people who lace up and go into battle deserve better than that. They deserve someone who understands the world and all of its complexities and recognizes the weight of their decisions, especially when the chips are down. And Pete Hegseth is not that person.

I urge my colleagues to do the right thing and vote no on his confirmation.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, anyone who has tried to buy a carton of eggs at the grocery store lately has probably seen a sign on the empty shelves saying there is a national shortage of eggs because of the bird flu.

The reason notices like this exist is because the Department of Health and Human Services tracks disease outbreaks around the clock and notifies the public in real time. And, of course, we take that for granted. We should take that for granted. It is the kind of thing that the government just does and that we normally don't argue about.

There are a lot of things for us to argue about, but whether or not the government should tell us if there is a public health problem has never been something that we have argued about. We take it for granted, but it is an invaluable service that keeps the public safe and healthy, which is why it was so bizarre that in one of his first acts as President, Donald Trump suspended all--all--communications from HHS-- health advisories, scientific reports, updates on the website, all of it.

What is that supposed to do other than keep people from getting the information that they need to keep their families healthy? This is about being able to know if a certain kind of meat or vegetable has been contaminated and staying away from it.

For instance, when there was an E. coli outbreak at McDonald's last year, the FDA immediately sent out an alert, which the press picked up on and warned the public about. Those communications are paused. Cucumbers at Costco is another example. E. coli at McDonald's--I don't mean to pick on these particular companies; lots of retail operations have their various public health problems.

I understand elections have consequences, right? And it is within the scope of a new administration that is reasonable for them to kind a take a look at all public policy and implement their own public policy. But, look, this is a little nuts.

I am assuming that there was a person in the White House or in the transition team writing up a bunch of Executive orders and thinking through an ideological lens or even an electoral lens. Fair enough. And they wanted to have a bunch of Executive orders ready to roll. So day one--boom, nothing coming out of HHS.

But the problem is, this isn't partisan; this isn't what people thought they were voting for; and this really could jeopardize the public health. So the resolution I am introducing and asking for unanimous consent on is very simple. It reaffirms the very basic belief that people deserve to have timely and accurate information relevant to their health and well-being.

We are not arguing about like a COVID response. We just want to know if there is a problem in what you are about to eat. And suspending those communications has nothing to do with party. It has to do with keeping everybody safe. So if there is a problem during this pause, the Department of Health and Human Services will not communicate to the public about it.

As if in legislative session, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of my resolution at the desk; further, 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.

Mr. President, a new story was published today about the extent of Mr. Robert F. Kennedy's involvement in the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa, and it shot a chill down my spine. That is not a rhetorical flourish. I read it and I felt hot, I felt angry, I felt worried.

We already know that he flew halfway across the world to Samoa to spread lies about the measles vaccine and discourage people from taking it. We already know that as a result, there was a measles outbreak. Five thousand people got measles; 83 people died; 79 of them were children.

But I think there is a new fact here that is worth lingering on. He saw it as a great research opportunity--he saw it as a great research opportunity. He literally took an informatics expert--somebody who studies how people receive information--with him to Samoa to run a ``natural experiment'' studying what would happen to kids if they weren't vaccinated.

Let me tell you why this is personal to me. My dad is my hero. May his memory be a blessing. He is my hero for a number of reasons; but among them, he was a young doctor, and he was reading the New England Journal of Medicine. He was right out of medical school, and he read about something called the Tuskegee experiments.

What happened in the Tuskegee experiments is the United States Public Health Service withheld lifesaving medication from African-American men to ``observe the disease process.'' They considered these men expendable. They provided half of the cohort with penicillin, which they knew would cure syphilis, and half of the men with a placebo without telling them to, again, observe the disease process.

And so my dad went on the record and Congress actually intervened many years later with Tom Harkin, and on a bipartisan basis, making it explicit that the U.S. Public Health Service has to observe the Hippocratic Oath: ``Do no harm.''

Do no harm.

And it is a dark history for America but a proud moment as I think of my father and his legacy.

But the one thing I never thought would ever occur is that more than 50 years later, we would be at the precipice of confirming a person to run the Department of Health and Human Services who, in this era--50 years after the Tuskegee experiments--flew to Samoa, encouraged people not to take the measles vaccine, watched 5,000 people get sick, watched 83 people die, watched 79 kids die and said: This is a real opportunity for data collection so we can see how this plays out.

I am still a little shocked that this person isn't going to be rejected 100 to 0. I understand partisanship. I understand loyalty. I am not immune to partisan pressures on my own side. But this guy is different. This guy is about to run the Department of Health and Human Services and he doesn't have just, like, one weird idea about one certain aspect of public health. He is a person who has flown across the planet to cause outbreaks of diseases that are generations in our past.

And to add insult to injury, he is repeating the moral mistakes of the Tuskegee experiment that has been actually outlawed by the United States Congress.

I will be talking about this more, but I am just hoping that--we fight about a lot of stuff in this building, but I know there are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle that take their obligations seriously to provide advice and consent to the President of the United States, whether you voted for him or not,

whether your State voted for him or not.

This is an opportunity to say we are a separate and coequal branch of government and if you are a Republican, say: Listen, I support this President, but I don't support this nominee because I don't want measles or mumps or rubella or polio to make a comeback.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, you might think that the person nominated to lead our Nation's top health department, an Agency with a budget of over $2 trillion and responsible for running everything from Medicare to vaccine trials--you might think that that person would at least be interested in, if not experienced in, curing diseases and promoting public health; that they would be someone who follows science and works to build the public's trust in it.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is none of those things.

For the first time ever, we might have a Health Secretary who has actively fueled disease outbreaks. He has literally made a career out of lying about the safety of basic vaccines. And it is not an exaggeration to say lives will be lost if he is confirmed. He has cost lives pretending to be a public health expert before, and he will do it again at scale if he becomes the next Health Secretary.

This is not just some random dude with his buddies, kicking around weird ideas just for the hell of it. He is a Kennedy, with an enormous fortune, parachuting into countries to tell lies and stop people from taking lifesaving vaccines.

In 2019, he flew to Samoa to discourage people from taking the measles vaccine, deepening a hesitancy that was already building. And it did work. Vaccination rates for eligible 1-year-olds--1-year-olds-- fell below 33 percent, and just 5 months later, Samoa found itself in the middle of a measles outbreak. So 5,000 people got the measles; 83 people died--79 of them, kids. And 83 kids died because RFK, Jr., decided to leave the east coast of the continental United States and fly clear across the Pacific to Samoa to tell people not to take the measles vaccine.

This is the nominee for the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

In addition to spreading baseless lies about vaccines, he has also regularly spouted all kinds of deranged ideas, including--this is a direct quote--that COVID was ``targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.'' He also claimed without any evidence that antidepressants are to blame for mass shootings and that chemicals in our water are turning our kids gay.

I don't know why this guy is going to get a single vote. This isn't just somebody who has like a different view than me on mandatory COVID vaccinations. There is a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree about the conduct of the government--State, Federal, county--as it relates to the COVID vaccine and the COVID response. In a global pandemic, people--all of them, all of them in every State--everybody was trying their best. And there are a lot of lessons to be learned, including a kind of close call about whether mandatory vaccinations in the context of COVID as it was on the down slope even worked. But we are not talking about that; we are talking about measles, mumps, rubella, polio.

His plans to remake the Department of Health and Human Services are equally terrifying. He wants to revoke

approvals for the polio and hep B vaccines for children and roll back guidance on other vital vaccines. There is a reason that we haven't had to think about these awful, painful diseases in a long, long time, and it is because we vaccinated our way out of outbreaks.

He has also vowed to fire hundreds of Federal health researchers and scientists and stop all research into infectious diseases and vaccine development because ``[w]e're going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.''

``We're going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.''

This is as dangerous of a decision as the U.S. Senate could possibly take. You would honestly not put him in charge of a local clinic, let alone the country's entire health system.

Look, I get it. I come from Hawaii. A lot of my constituents hear his critique of our food system and agree. Our food system is broken, and people are getting sick because of it. We have subsidized the wrong things for so long that you can find an unhealthy meal faster and cheaper than a healthy one. Ultraprocessed foods are everywhere, and healthy and hearty meals are harder to come by, and that has to change. But we don't have to bring measles and mumps back in order to fix our food system. We don't have to bring back the horrors of polio in the name of cleansing our diet.

There are a lot of people in the Senate, including my dear friend Senator Cory Booker, who work really hard to solve this problem with the seriousness and the thoughtfulness that it deserves, to rein in factory farms, to empower family farmers, to make healthy food more readily available and affordable. We have to do all of that, but we don't have to purchase with this idea that our food system is broken the idea that the only way we can fix our food system is if we bring polio back, if we bring measles back, if we bring mumps back, if we bring rubella back.

The medical profession at its best is about helping people, and I think about doctors like my dad, Dr. Irv Schatz, aboard a hospital ship, the SS Hope, providing free medical care to people across Latin America. So many like him put their lives and their careers on hold to travel far and wide to care for the less fortunate--helping kids with cleft palates, distributing mosquito nets, delivering babies, treating and preventing diseases. It is hard and unglamorous and unselfish work. It is God's work.

So it takes a special kind of person to do the exact opposite, to do what this man did, which is fly around the planet to cause disease--to fly around the planet to cause disease.

So, yes, this is a question of character and competence, but it is also a question of life and death and who we want in charge making decisions when lives are on the line. And it is our job here in the Senate to make damn sure that we protect the public health.

I could not urge more strongly a ``no'' vote on this unqualified nominee.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, after months of swearing up and down that they were focused on lowering the price of eggs, the price of groceries, the price of gas, the price of insurance--that was what the last election was about, right? It was about inflation. It was about the amount that people were paying. That is what the last election was about. Interestingly, the very first thing that Donald Trump and the Republicans have decided to do is to cut taxes for billionaire corporations, and they are going to pay for it by ripping off working Americans.

Now, that might sound like a political talking point. It sounds too convenient, too absurd. How can you spend 4 years pounding on the party in power about how much people are getting hit in the pocketbook--and they were. And they were. The price of eggs; the price of utilities; the price of gasoline--still in Hawaii around 4.59 a gallon. People are still paying too much. Yet the first order of business is not to do anything about that. It is not to do anything about that. It is to cut taxes for the wealthiest international corporations in human history.

I am here today with my Senate Democratic colleagues, and I want to make a sort of broader point. As Democrats struggle through, learn about, argue about what went wrong over the last 2 to 4 years politically, one of things that we did not do well enough is stay on the same theme. This place gets crazy, and it is especially crazy with Donald Trump as President. I remember, and it is distracting.

Even in the best of circumstances, people fly home, and then they arrive on Monday. There is a 5:30 vote, and oftentimes, the last vote is on Thursday at 1:45. So we talk about one thing from Monday at 5:30 until Thursday at 1:45, and the thing we talk about is often whatever is on the floor or whatever is in committee. We are going to do that. We have to do that. We have to comment on what we are working on. But we are also going to talk about this rip-off tax bill because that illustrates the difference between the parties. That is going to illustrate in three dimensions that all of this talk about lowering costs was a lie.

I am here with my Senate Democratic colleagues, including members of the Senate Finance Committee, led by Senator Wyden on the Democratic side, who will be on the forefront of this particular fight. We are not here because we are surprised that Republicans are going to raise and not lower costs because we know that was the plan all along. We are not here because we are shocked that Republicans want to cut taxes for the ultrawealthy. They do that like clockwork every time they

win the House and the Senate and the Presidency. We are here because nothing can distract us from the reality of what is about to happen. This will be a giveaway of the worst kind at a time when people can least afford it.

So how do they plan to do it? And this is a little technical, so bear with me. House Republicans are saying that you have to pay for these tax cuts, right? You reduce revenue to the government. In order to pay for it, you have to find savings. You have to either get new revenue-- that is kind of off the table for Republicans; they don't like new revenue unless it is tariffs, which Americans pay--or you have to cut something.

So last Friday, this document was released--and I understand, if you are watching this on your phone or even on CSPAN, it is kind of small, right? I get it. This document listed their so-called pay-fors; in other words, how are they going to pay for these massive tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals, the wealthiest privately held and publicly held corporations in human history?

Here are just a couple of things they are using as so-called pay- fors: $700 billion in cuts, kicking millions of people off of Medicaid; $500 billion out of Medicare, reducing access to care for seniors everywhere; more than $150 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act subsidies. What does that mean? If you are on ACA, if you get your healthcare through ACA, the subsidy goes away, and your monthly insurance bill is about to skyrocket. Tens of millions of Americans who pay for their health insurance through the ACA exchange and receive that subsidy are going to have to pay more. What happens with that money? It doesn't go for roads. It doesn't go for firehouses. It doesn't go for public health. It goes to this tax cut.

I am not exaggerating. This is not a rhetorical flourish. This is not a political talking point. They are literally cutting Medicare, Medicaid, possibly Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, and they are going to take all these resources--these are their pay-fors--and shovel it to people so that they can continue their private jet subsidies, pay a lower tax rate, eliminate the 15-percent minimum billion-dollar corporation tax.

So before we passed the tax legislation when we were in charge, there were lots of the wealthiest corporations, international corporations, in the history of the planet that paid zero taxes--zero taxes. So what did we do both to generate money but also because it is a question of basic fairness? We established a minimum rate for these wealthy corporations. They want to eliminate that too. Why? Because this is what they do. Because that is actually their governing philosophy.

You know, they say: Campaign in poetry; govern in prose. That is not what is happening here. They campaigned on misleading people that their abiding concern, their main concern was, gosh, people are paying too much for a dozen eggs. And I don't mean to diminish that. People were paying too much for a dozen eggs. But right now, inflation is 2.7 percent, and gas in a lot of places across the country is below 3 bucks. So people were paying too much, and people were rightly pissed off--by the way, at Democrats, too, for not recognizing how acute this problem was for a lot of American families. I get it. But I don't know anybody who thinks the solution to people paying too much out of pocket is to make them pay more out of pocket.

There is not a single voter that I know--not a single voter that I know--that I have interacted with who says: You know what. Gosh, I wish the highest corporate tax rate were just a little bit lower. Gosh, I wish the 15-percent minimum billion-dollar corporation tax were rescinded. Gosh, I wish people who are being subsidized so they can afford healthcare--I wish we would eliminate that. And, gosh, I wish we would use all that money and shovel it back to the wealthiest people in the world.

So we are not going to stop talking about this. I just had two hearings with Sean Duffy and Marco Rubio. I know Pam Bondi was today. Lots of very exciting and interesting things are happening, and we are going to have to comment on that. We are going to have to engage in that. But every week, we are going to be talking about this rip-off. Every week, every opportunity we get, we are going to be talking about this because this is the difference between the two political parties.

With that, I want to yield to my very good friend, who really understands tax policy and with whom I have been working on this and with whom--we fought together to win the ACA fight many, many years ago. Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, earlier this week, I spoke about the historic accomplishments of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs with my good friend and vice chair Lisa Murkowski over the last 4 years.

I made it very clear that the foundation of this success--and continues to be--Native leaders, communities, and advocates sharing their priorities and telling us what is most important to them.

I also emphasized that we cannot and will not rest on our laurels because our progress is still in progress.

That is why, today, we have to pass S. 1723, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act.

This bill would establish a Federal commission to investigate the Federal Indian boarding school era, when the Federal Government partnered with religious institutions in an attempt to assimilate Native children at so-called schools, often far from their homes and families, where they were stripped of their cultures, languages, and identities and beaten and abused, both mentally and physically. Thousands--likely more--died at those schools, and those who returned home were never the same.

The Truth and Healing Commission would turn the page on this shameful era and help begin the healing process for Native survivors, descendants, and communities and those who continue to experience the generational trauma and lasting legacy of these policies today.

S. 1723 passed out of the committee after extensive bipartisan debate. Since then, Vice Chair Murkowski and I have worked with the bill's sponsor, Senator Warren, the Native American Boarding School Coalition, and other advocates to refine the bill and to accommodate feedback. The current version of this legislation is the result of hundreds of hours--hundreds of hours--of drafting, redrafting, discussion, and tough negotiations.

I will now turn it over to the vice chair for some remarks before I make a unanimous consent request.

Mr. President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 432, S. 1723.

I ask unanimous consent that the committee-reported substitute amendment be withdrawn; that the Schatz-Murkowski substitute amendment at the desk be considered and agreed to; and that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time.

I know of no further debate on the bill, as amended.

I ask that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, it is no small task for us to confront the unbearable burden of our history. Yet to stand before that history in silence and to remain idle while these wounds persist is to turn away from one of the most fundamental acts of justice and healing that we are in a position to do something about. We have to turn the light on and let the truth out.

This is the work that we have done in the Senate now, and we do hope the House takes action and passes this incredibly important measure into law.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I am all for considering bills that have gone through the regular process for consideration. In the past month alone, I have been on the floor several times to pass 12 bipartisan bills which advanced out of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs with unanimous bipartisan support.

The difference with this bill is it is not ready. It is just not ready for that consideration, and Senator Daines knows that. The bill has not cleared the committee, and it is not for our lack of trying. It was only introduced a few months ago. And when it was fast-tracked to a hearing at the Senator's request, it was clear that there remained several open questions, and, as of today, many of those questions have still not been answered. And yet we are trying to pass this bill unanimously.

What is happening is that this would be recorded on the Senate floor as a 100-to-0 vote. This bill is not ready for that. The only circumstances under which--especially in Indian Affairs, but mostly in any other jurisdiction, the only way we pass something by unanimous consent is if it has been fully vetted and it is either so meaningless, right--a congratulatory resolution or something--and people just let them go; or it has been so thoroughly vetted that it is really ready and there are no objectors. That is not the case for this bill.

The Indian Affairs Committee has had its most productive years in history these past two Congresses, and we have done it through good- faith, bipartisan work and respecting not just, generally speaking, the process but the bipartisan tradition of the committee itself. We don't have one rule for some bills and another for others. Every bill that has made it through this process is scrutinized by the committee, with feedback from Tribes and others. And if it can be considered, it generally passes out on a bipartisan basis. Actually, our standard is to try to pass these things unanimously, not just one Member of one party and all the Members of the other party. We try to get zero ``no'' votes. If there are any ``no'' votes, it won't pass by consent on the floor.

We have done everything that we can to oblige Senator Daines and accelerate the consideration of this bill, but we cannot pass a bill that is still going through the process. The bill has no score. The bill has no score--something that has been required--sometimes to my chagrin--of every single bill that comes out of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. I don't love that standard because sometimes I just want to pass a bill, and sometimes the score is so de minimis that I think it is a little bit of a waste of time. That is not the case for this bill. It is going to score, and we don't have that score yet. And I am not going to make an exception for one bill. It hasn't had a committee markup, and there is no path in the House.

The Senate hotline ran barely a day ago, and offices are still reviewing it. I want people to understand what that means. That means that offices that are not on the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs are just getting emailed about this bill. For them, it is an issue of first impression. They are being asked to ask their boss: Do you vote yes on this bill that you haven't even analyzed? Do you vote yes on this bill, and there is maybe 2 days--maybe more but let's assume 2 days left in the actual Congress?

This is an attempt to circumvent our normal procedures. That is not how we do things here. For that reason, I object.

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

Mr. President, the past 4 years have been historic for the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs by almost any measure. We secured the largest investment in Native communities in American history, totaling more than $45 billion. We had the committee's most productive 4-year period ever, passing more than a dozen bills into law. And, just this month, we passed another 10 bills in the Senate that are waiting for action in the House.

Taken together, these record investments and laws cover a wide range of priorities for native people--securing ancestral lands and waters, building safer communities for children and elders, and turning a new page on the boarding school era by promoting native languages, education, and healing.

But the numbers alone don't tell the story because behind each of these statutes and investments are real, tangible benefits for Native communities everywhere--from the homes they live in to the roads they get around on to the water they drink every day--and I am proud that we have been able to deliver such important investments in Indian Country, on Hawaiian homelands, and in Alaska Native villages, whose needs have been so often overlooked or even sometimes harmed by the Federal Government.

This progress means more people will have homes with working electricity and clean, piped water. Advance appropriations for the Indian Health Service, for the first time ever, means people don't have to worry about whether or not they can get to a doctor or not if the government shuts down. Significant investments in Tribal transportation and infrastructure means that communities are one step closer to making dirt roads and broadband deserts a thing of the past. And thanks to the provisions in the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, Tribes can be in charge of their own safety again with the ability to keep their children and their neighbors safe.

The committee has also enacted three water rights settlements into law and secured $2.5 billion to pay for these and the more than 30 other already enacted settlements. There is more work to do to get other settlements over the line, and we are going to continue to work with our House colleagues to get it done.

Rebuilding Tribal homelands, expanding broadband, building out transportation projects were key priorities for our committee on a bipartisan basis. We were also focused on helping Native communities unlock clean energy and adapt to a changing climate. Elsewhere, we put real resources into the Federal Government's efforts to revitalize Native languages and work to bring healing around the Federal Indian boarding school era.

From day one, our work was guided by the voices of Native leaders and community members--``nothing about me without me'' as the saying goes-- and we couldn't have done this without the incredible leadership of Native people across our great country, telling us

what matters and holding us accountable.

The progress, though long overdue, is still in progress. The bills we passed and the investments we have made will materially benefit people's lives--for American Indians, for Native Hawaiians, and Alaska Natives. Now, that doesn't mean we get to call it a day, because to say that this is the most productive period for Native people as it relates to congressional action in American history is to say two things: It is to say we did a lot. It is certainly to say we did a lot. We did it on a bipartisan basis. We did it with extraordinary staff from my Indian Affairs Committee staffers to Lisa Murkowski's staffers, to all of the Members and advocacy organizations. We did a lot. It is also to acknowledge that it was a damned low bar. Most Congresses not only didn't help Native communities much but actively harmed Native communities a lot.

The official position of the United States Federal Government was the extermination of Tribal governments. The official position with the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. military, the Department of the Interior, and other Federal Agencies and their representatives was to essentially dismantle Native cultures--language, access to water, access to land. They cut the children's hair. They punished them physically if they spoke their Native language. They removed these children from their parents and incarcerated them in something that they called boarding schools, but let's be clear. It wasn't a boarding school in the sense of ``my kid is 16. We have some extra money. Maybe they are going to go to a good school on the east coast somewhere.'' They were incarcerated.

So it is true that we have done a lot. It is also true that we have done a lot--that we have harmed Native communities for centuries, and this 4-year period marks a change in the relationship between the U.S. Federal Government and Native communities from Hawaii to Alaska and all across the continent.

And so I am extraordinarily proud of the accomplishments of this committee, but I don't want anyone to mistake this for a victory lap. We have so much more to do to undo, literally, generations of injustice. No amount of work we are going to do in a year or even 4 years is going to suddenly and totally reverse generations of neglect and harm by the Federal Government. Yet this is a moment to recognize the great work we have done. It is broadband; it is water; it is economic opportunity; it is Native culture; it is Native language; it is Native music. It is people being in control of their own intellectual property, in control of their own destinies.

That is what this is about. This is about the right of people--the first peoples of the United States--to self-determination. I am proud to be a small part of that legacy.

I yield the floor.

(Mr. BROWN assumed the Chair.)

Mr. President, we are going to try to make some laws in the next week in the area of jurisdiction where I am chair--the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. We have already had the most constructive and productive period for Native people in congressional history. We have invested more in water, in transportation, in broadband, in energy, in culture, and in economic development. We have passed an extraordinary number of bipartisan bills. But we are not done. We have about a week left, and we have a number of bipartisan bills that have to get across the finish line.

So I am going to summarize four bills and try to pass them out of the Senate, and then we will do more work next week on a bipartisan basis to finish out this Congress strong, to make sure we do everything we can for Native people from Hawaii, to Florida, and everywhere in between.

S. 2783, the Miccosukee Reserved Area Amendment Act, will amend existing law to add culturally important land to the Miccosukee Tribe's reservation, and it would also authorize up to $14 million to protect the land from flooding caused by Federal projects to restore the Everglades National Park ecosystem. This is a commonsense bill that passed the Indian Affairs Committee unanimously.

S. 2908, the Indian Buffalo Management Act, introduced by Senators Heinrich and Mullin, would improve the capacity of Tribes and Tribal organizations to manage buffalo and buffalo habitat and clarify the applicability of State and Federal law. It would establish a $14 million annual grant program for 7 years within the Department of the Interior to help Tribal nations play a pivotal role in this recovery effort, especially on their own lands.

S. 4365, Veterinary Services to Improve Public Health in Rural Communities Act is the Vice Chair Lisa Murkowski's bill, and it would allow public health officers from the U.S. Public Health Service to offer some veterinary services at IHS facilities to control domestic animal populations and to prevent the spread of rabies and other diseases to humans.

Finally, the Tribal Forest Protection Act Amendments Act, also introduced by Vice Chair Murkowski, and it will help to mitigate wildfire threats on Federal lands and Tribal or Alaska Native or corporation forest lands. It removes an existing requirement for mitigation work to take place on Federal lands next to Tribal lands. It also expands eligibility to include Federal lands with special geographic, historical, or cultural significance to a Tribe, and it authorizes up to $15 million annually through the fiscal year 2030.

We have a couple of other bills that we are not quite done negotiating about, in particular, a bill introduced by Senator-elect Gallego--Representative Gallego--and Senator Lujan to protect children who are victims of abuse and to help Tribes, to help families to recover. We have to do some final clarifications with our counterparts on the Republican side, and I am hopeful that we will land that one as well.

We also have a couple of bills from Senator Cortez Masto having to do with law enforcement.

And, finally, a bill that is arguably the most important out of all of these in terms of its national impact, and that is to establish a commission to reckon with the shameful legacy of boarding schools, in which children were basically incarcerated, removed from their Tribal communities, and forced to speak a language they didn't speak. Sometimes, forcibly, their hair was cut. Many times they were punished for speaking in their native language or singing their native songs. This is a legacy of abuse at the hands of the Federal Government that we have to reckon with, and this would simply establish a commission to start to delve into this history and come through it to a place of healing, but we are not there yet on those bills.

So here comes the lawmaking part.

Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 560, S. 2783.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time.

I know of no further debate on the bill.

I ask that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 561, S. 2908.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee-reported amendments be withdrawn; that the Heinrich substitute amendment at the desk be considered and agreed to; and that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time.

I know of no further debate on the bill, as amended.

Mr. President, I ask that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.