Floor Statements

Mr. President.

Mr. President, will the Senator from Iowa yield to a question?

I am interested in whether she believes that climate change is real, caused by humans, and requires Federal action.

Excuse me, Mr. President. May I ask a followup question through the Chair?

I just would like to get clarification. She did say climate change is real, but my question is whether--

--manmade climate change is real, and I did not get an answer.

If she's unwilling to answer that question, I understand.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, it is very important that the American people know that Republicans are still trying to take away their healthcare. Last year, Republicans filed a lawsuit arguing that the entire Affordable Care Act should be invalidated, and now they want to give a promotion to the person who led that effort at the Department of Justice. That person's name is Chad Readler, currently a Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department.

Last year, he filed an argument on behalf of the Department of Justice to take away protections for people with preexisting conditions. The American Medical Association said that Mr. Readler's argument would ``have a devastating impact on doctors, patients, and the American health system as a whole,'' that it ``would cause 32 million people to become uninsured,'' and that it would double insurance premiums.

The American Medical Association was not alone here. Lawyers at the Justice Department refused to sign their names to Mr. Readler's brief. One senior career official actually resigned in protest, and Senator Lamar Alexander said that his arguments were ``as farfetched as any I've ever heard.''

On the same day that Mr. Readler filed his argument to take away people's healthcare, the White House nominated him to a lifetime appointment to the bench on the Sixth Circuit. They wanted to promote him because of his good work suing in Federal court trying to invalidate the entire healthcare system--the entire healthcare law.

We should not sign off on this nominee--not if we care about protecting the health of our constituents, especially those who have cancer, asthma, diabetes, or any other preexisting medical condition.

We should also be wary of putting someone on the Sixth Circuit who makes the kind of poor, farfetched argument that Mr. Readler made, because this isn't purely a question of public policy. If it were public policy, you would definitely say: Don't take 32 million people and take away their healthcare--right? If it were public policy, you would say: Don't do the thing that is going to double premiums.

This is about what kind of a lawyer he is. This is about what kind of a judge he would be. The White House may want to reward his efforts, but we don't have to.

If you look at Mr. Readler's record and feel that, OK, he tried to deport the Dreamers. Even if you concede past his defense of the Muslim ban or his discrimination against a gay couple who wanted to get married or even if you don't mind that he is trying to make it harder for people to vote or his argument to allow kids under 18 to be sentenced to death--even if none of that bothers you--it should bother you that a Senator in Mr. Readler's home State has not returned a blue slip. It should really bother you. If you say you are for protecting people with preexisting conditions, here is your opportunity.

It is one thing to say: Well, we would never do that. We would never take away protections for people with preexisting conditions. After all, we all know people with preexisting conditions.

I have no doubt that is the actual sentiment among Members of the Senate on both sides. Here is the thing. This week is the week to walk the talk. This week is the week to decide whether or not you are for protecting people with preexisting conditions, because you have a guy who led the effort to gut protections for people with preexisting conditions.

Mr. Readler is unqualified for other reasons, but now we have a litmus test on where you stand on preexisting conditions. It is not enough to say it in your campaign debate. It is not enough to say it in the hallway and say: Hey, we want to protect people.

Here is your moment. Someone who has dedicated some portion of his professional life to gut the American healthcare system is now being given a permanent job on the Sixth Circuit. Everybody should vote no.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, as of now, there are zero climate proposals coming from Senate Republicans--none. So it becomes extraordinarily difficult to debate climate change when only one political party is committed to fixing it. I can't underscore this enough. I don't know if I can sort of stage direct the C-SPAN cameras, but if I can--if they would pan out--they would see an empty Chamber on the other side.

Look, if you don't like our proposals--if you don't like the investment tax credit or the production tax credit, if you don't like planting trees, if you don't like fuel efficiency standards, if you don't like mercury and air quality standards, if you don't like investing in high-tech research to find that next breakthrough or if you think climate change is a hoax, come down to the Senate floor and make your argument. Yet they are not even doing that. This is a planetary emergency--the most important moment in human history as it relates to the planet Earth--and the party in power is doing its best to make the problem worse.

Democrats want to invest in clean air, clean water, and smarter infrastructure. We have taken every chance we can to talk about climate and how to fix it. Senator Whitehouse alone has given 200 speeches on the Senate floor about the climate crisis.

The Republican response has been to try to make this silly, to score points about something that was posted on a Congresswoman's website and promptly removed and to make false statements saying Democrats want to ban cheeseburgers or whatever. That is because they don't want to debate this issue seriously because they don't have ideas on climate. Their only plan is to actively, aggressively make things even worse.

They need to make this debate about something--anything--other than what it is, which is a planet in crisis; weather getting weirder and worse, wildfires, coastal flooding, fisheries crashing. Pennsylvania farmers say they had the worst season they have had in 30 years because of all the rain they got last year, while farmers in the Midwest didn't get near enough. It is a rolling disaster happening right now.

In response, here is what the Republicans have done. They have put people who make their money from pollution in charge of regulating pollution. They have given oil and gas companies access to millions of acres of land and water that are supposed to be protected for things like conservation, hunting, hiking. They pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, which means we are the only country on the planet not at the table when it comes to figuring out what to do about this problem.

They have made it easier for companies to put methane in the air or make cars that pump pollution into the air, and instead of just leaving coal companies alone, instead of saying, hey, let's let the market decide, they are actually looking to subsidize coal because now it is noncompetitive with wind and solar, in a lot of instances, but they actually want to subsidize coal so they can get another 10 or 20 years' worth of fossil fuel pollution. This is not what you would do if you were trying to stop climate change. This is what you do if you are trying to make it worse.

So let's take a closer look at some of the worst things on their list. First, you have to look at the people they have put in charge of conserving public lands and keeping air and water clean. This week, the Senate is voting on Andrew Wheeler to run the EPA. He is a coal lobbyist, and I know politicians are prone to sort of overstatement, rhetorical flourishes, but this guy is actually a coal lobbyist. He made his living working for coal.

I don't know him. I presume he is an honorable fellow, but now we are supposed to believe he is the best person to keep coal companies in line, to make sure they follow the rules and don't hurt the air people breathe or the rivers they fish in.

If this were a movie about corruption in politics, this script would be thrown out because it was too obvious.

Then there is Ryan Zinke, who was supposed to protect public lands but instead opened up oil and gas leases at the Department of Interior, or the guy regulating Federal energy who denies that climate change is real, even though we can all see it with our own eyes. If you don't believe the science, you can at least believe your own experience. The weather is getting worse and weirder and more severe. He says carbon dioxide really isn't a pollutant at all.

So the nominees have been awful, but the policy is bad too. Republicans are trying to pull us out of the Paris Agreement that every other country in the world is part of. We are not even trying to lead on this planetary emergency, and it means that we give the leadership mantle to China to take the lead on how the world is going to fix this problem or make it worse, as if Americans should trust China to do what is best for our country.

Then there is the Republican effort to let polluting companies keep polluting. The whole reason the EPA exists is to make sure the air we breathe, the water we drink and swim in, the land we farm on and live on doesn't get polluted, but Republicans have taken control of the EPA to get rid of these protections, and they are telling the auto industry they no longer need to make cars that put less pollution in the air. They have gutted the Clean Power Plan so carbon pollution could be 12 times worse in the next decade--12 times worse in the next decade.

Researchers have found it would be better if we had no policy at all than if we do the things the Republicans want to do.

They have let energy companies off the hook for leaking methane and made it easier for super pollutants to leak into the air. Again, this is the kind of thing you might hear from a politician who is a little overheated, a little overly angry, maybe taking a few liberties with the truth.

This is literally what is happening. They literally put a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA. That should be enough for someone on the other side to say: Gosh. I can't vote for a coal lobbyist to run the EPA. Now, I don't agree with the Democrats about climate change, but I can't pretend this thing doesn't happen to my home State. I can't pretend Alaska isn't melting or the fisheries aren't crashing or our farms aren't having great difficulty or that the floods in South Carolina and North Carolina and Florida aren't real, and so we can't put a coal lobbyist in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.

There was a time when the EPA and environmental protection itself was not a partisan issue. Here we are in the U.S. Senate--which is the place to solve these kinds of problems over the course of this country's great history--and every time we come to the floor to talk about climate change, it is an empty Chamber on the Republican side. We have to do better as a country. We have to do better as a Senate. We have to solve climate change together. Future generations are counting on us to transcend partisanship and to have this great debate.

If Leader McConnell wants to bring a resolution, which he thinks is clever, to sort of divide Democrats, fine. We are not particularly worried about that. We are taking this opportunity to say: Great. Let's talk about climate change.

The first question to ask--the first question to ask--is, what is the Republican plan for climate change? Right now, the answer is very simple. They have no plan.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Missouri. I thank him for his leadership and levelheadedness.

As he is on his way out, I will say that I think the current way we deal with nominees is not tenable. I imagine a scenario where we have a Democratic President, and it will take even longer than it is currently taking to confirm nominees. I think there are a number of us on both sides of the aisle who are open to modifying the way we operate.

For me, the blue-slip question is a redline. I think what they are doing with the blue slips undermines the individual ability for any Senator to have their say, especially as it relates to the circuit courts, but I think there is an opportunity to have a conversation.

On climate generally, I am looking forward to a debate, but it is very difficult to debate in the Senate when only one party proffers a proposal. I don't mean this as rhetorical flourish. I don't mean this as a personal accusation or a partisan attack. It is just a fact that there are no climate proposals coming from the Senators who are Republican. There are zero. So they are trying to have a debate about a resolution which was nonbinding and which was signed by 12 Senators. I get it, but I think, given that this is the world's greatest deliberative body, we ought to have a proper debate about climate change.

We are actually in a climate emergency. This is the most important moment in the world's history as it relates to this particular crisis. We are sitting here trying to score points about an FAQ that was posted on a new Congresswoman's website and trying to make fun of each other and say: They are going to ban cows and ice cream. It is very silly, and it is not worthy of the seriousness of the moment.

I would ask my Republican colleagues--I see a number of them who take the debt, foreign policy, cyber security, personal privacy, and the rules of the Senate very seriously. They are very levelheaded human beings with a seriousness of purpose. Yet when it comes to climate change, it gets into this goofy thing where they are doing everything except debating climate change and what ought to be done about it.

We spent 5, maybe 10 years trying to get most Republicans to concede that this problem exists at all. Now a lot of them are feeling comfortable saying: Yes, this problem exists, but all of the solutions proposed by Democrats are wrong.

That is fine, but I ask this question in all sincerity: What do Republican Senators propose to do about the climate crisis? What is your plan? If you don't like cap and trade; if you don't like a fee on carbon; if you don't like massive investment in green technology and clean technology; if you don't like the extension of the investment tax credit and the production tax credit; if you don't like our solution; if you don't like being part of the Paris climate accord--which, by the way, is nonbinding, which means we get to decide what our pathway is to clean energy. It is not as though the U.N. gets to tell us what to do. It gives us leverage to make sure that as we move forward toward clean energy, the other countries don't cheat. It actually gives us leverage in this situation.

If you don't like our solutions, that is fine. This is the world's greatest deliberative body. This is where the greatest debates in U.S. history have happened. Yet, maybe 19 times out of 20, I have come down to the floor to talk about climate change, and there were Members on this side of the aisle and zero Members on the other side of the aisle. Again, I don't mean this as an attack; I just want a real debate.

I am looking at the Senator from Georgia. We have had robust discussions about debt and deficits and the way we try to avoid shutdowns and sequester and all the rest of it. When it comes to climate change, everybody gets really goofy. Everybody puts on their partisan uniform and refuses to engage. If this debate about the Green New Deal offers us an opportunity to talk about the planetary crisis, then I am happy for it.

We are in debate time on the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to lead the EPA, so it might be helpful to know the origins of the Agency.

In the 1960s, the state of the environment was catastrophic. Millions of freshwater fish and rivers around the country were being poisoned by insecticides, hurting consumer trust and the countless fishermen and families who made a living that way. Pollution was so bad that debris floating in the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire, causing thousands of dollars in property damage. The water in Lake Superior became so toxic from companies' dumping asbestos-laden waste that local communities had to start filtering their own water. Think about that. People could drink the water from their local reservoirs unfiltered until industrial pollution came along.

This was the path our country was on. Pollution was destroying many of the most beautiful places in the country and, maybe more importantly, putting the health of the public at risk.

A scientist named Rachel Carson came along and changed everything when she wrote a book that helped the United States see that we couldn't go on like this. Her book was a call for change, and millions of Americans, on a bipartisan basis, demanded change.

There was a predictable backlash. Here is what one industry spokesman said as public opinion began to coalesce around addressing pollution:

The major claims of Miss Rachel Carson's book ``Silent

Spring'' are gross distortions of the actual facts,

completely unsupported by scientific, experimental evidence,

and general practical experience in the field. Her suggestion

that pesticides are in fact biocides destroying all life is

obviously absurd in the light of the fact that without

selective biologicals, these compounds would be completely

useless.

This controversy went on for the next few years. The public, the science, and the reality pointed toward the truth, but a few loud voices tried to stop the country from making progress. They said that Rachel Carson distorted the facts, that the science wasn't there, and that there was no need to rush judgment.

The U.S. Government moved forward anyway and began to lay the foundation for a new America--one that would preserve and protect our country and its resources for the next generation.

In 1970, President Nixon united several offices and bureaus already in the Federal Government into one single agency, the EPA. The EPA was charged with protecting the Nation's health and being the steward of the environment. It has a legacy of fulfilling that mission. The Agency ended the use of a dangerous pesticide called DDT. It found a solution to acid rain, which was once a major issue for fish, forests, and farming. It took on secondhand smoke, banning smoking in indoor public places.

Thanks to the EPA, Rachel Carson's ``fable for tomorrow'' did not become a reality, but here we are decades later facing another environmental crisis, one that affects the United States and every other Nation on this planet, and I am worried that we are not going to do the right thing this time.

Instead of facing head-on and in a bipartisan way the biggest crisis in the planet's history, the party in power is not just ignoring the problem; they are making it worse. And they are doing it by nominating and confirming people like Andrew Wheeler. This is someone who said: ``Manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.'' This is the guy to head the EPA. He says manmade global warming is a hoax. This is someone who was formally the vice president of the Washington Coal Club, who lobbied for coal companies.

We are in a planetary emergency, and Republicans want someone who is advancing the interests of top polluters to be the Nation's chief environmental steward so that he can continue to advance the interest of the top polluters. Again, it is not just that they are ignoring climate change, which would be bad enough; it is that they are aggressively, proudly, gleefully sometimes, making it worse.

Researchers at Harvard found that the EPA's recent plans to gut the Clean Power Plan will lead to more greenhouse gas emissions. Their plan will be worse for climate than if they did nothing at all. Think about that. If the EPA did nothing at all, it would be better than what they are doing now. This is the result of Mr. Wheeler's leadership, which has until now been in an Acting Director capacity.

During the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, the EPA was led by Anne Gorsuch Burford, who ended up resigning in scandal. President Reagan nominated as her replacement William Ruckelshaus, whom people trusted to do the job and stabilize the EPA. He was a moderate. He was a steady hand. The EPA could use a steady hand after Scott Pruitt, who promoted the interests of polluters over the health of the American people and who crossed many ethical lines. Yet Andrew Wheeler is no Ruckelshaus. That much is clear from his time at the EPA. Under his leadership, EPA inspections are at a 10-year

low. EPA fines are at a 25-year low. Restrictions on new coal plants have been eliminated. Limits on methane pollution are in the process of being rolled back. In other words, polluters are getting their way. That is great news for people who own oil and gas companies, but it is horrible news for people with asthma, for farmers who are trying to get through the worst drought season seen in a century, and for small businesses that are losing customers because of fires.

Listen, climate change is here. It is hurting everything from local economies, to public health, to national security, and the Republicans have decided that the best person to lead the Agency to do something about it is a coal lobbyist. It would be funny if it were not so outrageous.

The Democrats have a plan for climate change. We have ideas to invest in clean air, clean water, and smarter infrastructure. We have bills on investment and production tax credits, solar energy, wind energy, conservation and efficiency, carbon pricing, and planting trees, and we have stood together against nominations like this one. It is time for the Republicans, if not to stand with us, to at least then stand on the other side against us and engage in this great debate. What are we going to do with climate change? We have proposals, and they have none.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, our friends on the other side of the aisle--the Republicans--are misreading the moment. The planet is in an emergency situation, and instead of coming to the table with ideas on how to fix it, they are running the same play they always run; that is, that they take a popular idea--investing in clean energy, maybe making college more affordable, making the Tax Code more fair--and they try to characterize it as a liberal project so people put on their partisan uniforms.

Our ideas are popular, and what they have done recently is, they have taken a batch of our ideas and have said: Socialism. You are going to turn into Venezuela if you do all of these things. I know you think you want affordable college. I know you think you want climate action. I know you think you want to not get ripped off by the Tax Code, but that will cause you to be Venezuela.

This is the play they run every time, and they run it with cover from the Wall Street Journal's editorial board and FOX News to try to trick the American people into opposing ideas they actually like.

That is what is happening with this nonbinding resolution that 12 Senators have cosponsored. Republicans are trying to take frequently asked questions--a document that was posted on the website of a new Member of Congress, and then subsequently taken down and disavowed, and make you believe this is what Democrats want to do when it comes to climate action. They want you to believe we want to take away ice cream and aviation and everything that is good in the world because they know their position on climate change is absolutely untenable.

Over the last couple of days, I read some what we call very serious people in Washington, DC, sort of marveling at Leader McConnell's trolling exercise. This is supposed to be the world's greatest deliberative body. It is not Twitter. This is supposed to be where we solve the greatest problems facing the United States. This is not where we troll each other. This is where we are supposed to have the great debates.

Senate Democrats have done all sorts of work on climate: the ITC and the PTC for solar and wind, conservation and efficiency, carbon pricing, fighting deforestation. So Republicans do not have the high ground here. They are trying to make this a partisan exercise, where you have several news organizations churning because they don't want to deal with climate change.

If the Senate Republican leadership wants to bring up anything about climate, I echo the words of Senator Schumer and Senator Whitehouse: We have never been more fired up. We are going to take this opportunity to have a real debate about climate because Republicans do not have a plan to address climate change. That is not a rhetorical flourish. That is not an accusation. That is just an observation. They don't have a plan to stop climate pollution. They do not agree with 99 percent of the scientific community saying not just that this problem exists but that Congress must act.

If you look at the last session of Congress, it is actually worse than that. I want to put this in context. The last session of Congress spanned two of the worst years of weather in U.S. history.

In 2017, there were about 10 million acres that were burned by wildfires. There were Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. In 2018, we had the costliest and deadliest wildfires California had ever seen. In these two record-setting years, climate change cost the economy and the taxpayers billions of dollars. Communities all across the country struggled to rebuild and recover. People lost their lives, their homes, and their livelihoods.

In these 2 years, the number of pieces of legislation that Republicans put forward to address climate change--even if I thought they were inadequate, even if I thought they were the wrong approach, even if I thought they were half measures or too private sector- oriented, whatever the criticism might have been, I can't even make criticisms of their climate policy. They have no climate policy other than to make things worse.

They have allowed coal companies to leak dirty water and waste into streams without having to clean it up. They voted to make it easier for oil and mining companies to pay foreign governments. They allowed the President to start the process of pulling out of the Paris accords. They allowed him to begin the process of rolling back your fuel efficiency standards, to repeal the Clean Power Plan, to prop up coal-- even though it makes no economic sense in a lot of instances anymore-- and they put climate deniers in top science positions in the government.

They put Secretary Zinke in charge of the Department of the Interior, and the first thing he did was to open up lands for oil and gas leases. They put Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA, and when he finally proved to be a political liability--not for his climate policy but because of his personal habits--they replaced him with someone with the same policies, Andrew Wheeler, who is literally a coal lobbyist.

If you wrote all of this into a screenplay, people would say: That is a little too on the nose. That is a little too obvious. This is ridiculous. This is not actually how Washington works. They wouldn't put a coal lobbyist in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, would they? They did. They did.

It is not just that Republicans don't have a plan to make things better, it is that the Democratic approach is to treat this like the emergency it is and invest in clean air, clean water, and smarter infrastructure, and the Republican approach is to put polluters in charge to actively, aggressively, and proudly make climate change worse.

I have seen the right approach work in Hawaii. For decades, since the demise of the sugar plantation, we relied on imports of fossil fuels for our energy needs. As recently as 2010, we got more than 90 percent of our electricity from burning oil, which is the dumbest way to do things. It is very expensive and very dirty. Less than a decade later, we are well on our way to 100 percent clean energy.

We have addressed the legitimate concerns, we ignored trolls, and we moved forward together. We have quintupled clean energy, lowered electricity rates, and created tons of jobs. Clean energy is the future for Hawaii, and it is the future for the United States. This can be done. Do not be afraid.

If Republicans think the Democratic ideas are no good, fine; then offer a different plan. They are the only major political party in the developed world that doesn't even believe climate change is a problem. There is no other issue where the majority party denies that the problem exists at all, not cyber security, not healthcare, not even income inequality. This is not tenable.

Whenever a Senate Democrat or a group of Senate Democrats come to the floor to talk about climate change, we usually have a good little group over here, and always--always--in my 7 years in the U.S. Senate, there is always an empty Chamber on the Republican side--empty. The only Republican I am ever talking to is someone who is maybe waiting to give a speech about

something else or the Presiding Officer. That is because Republicans in the Senate have no plan at all as it relates to climate change.

We have trillions of dollars in infrastructure that needs to be addressed over the next couple of decades. We could make those investments in ways that also address climate. We could offer tax breaks for clean energy. We should reenter the Paris accord, but they are pulling the same play they always do, to make this so partisan, to mock the issue itself so they can continue to do nothing. They are whistling past the graveyard.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, this morning the FAA grounded planes at

LaGuardia Airport, averaging more than 1,000 flights a day. They made this decision because of a shortage in air traffic control staff, who are not being paid because the President fulfilled his promise to shut down the government 35 days ago.

The FAA's website crashed as people looked for information. Stocks for airlines took a hit, and air traffic in other airports, including Philadelphia and Newark, were delayed because of staffing shortages. We will continue to see the ripple effects of this today. It is not like if travel in and out of LaGuardia is disrupted, it will be business as usual at other airports. More flights will be delayed. LaGuardia has resumed operations, but what is clear is that the ATC, or the air traffic control staff, is thin, and they are making game-time decisions--go, no go.

Apparently, we need another reminder that this shutdown is stupid and dangerous, that it leaves communities and commerce on the edge, because the voices of those affected already--Native Americans, Coast Guard servicemembers, FBI agents, IRS employees, National Park Service workers, and domestic violence victims--weren't enough. The FAA is unique because they have an obligation and the authority under the law to make a go-no-go decision based on safety. They can look at their staffing numbers and say: We can't do this safely, so stop. But the FBI and the Coast Guard don't get to say: Hey, hold off, everybody.

TSA agents and the TSA itself does not have the authority to make a similar call. They can raise the alarm, but they do not have the authority to stop people from coming through checkpoints. They just have to make do. The same goes for all of the families affected by the shutdown. There is no ``go-no-go'' decision. They just have to try to make it work.

The FAA decision demonstrates what is happening throughout the government and throughout society right now. People are right on the edge. Some of them have fallen off that edge. Today, the shutdown became an inconvenience to the very small percentage of Americans who fly regularly, but, more importantly, today is an indicator of what is happening to the government, of who matters to the government.

I certainly hope, as lots of pundits, and journalists, and politicians have mentioned, that once air traffic starts to slow, once airports get snarled, we are at the end of this process and the shutdown will end shortly. I don't know if that is true, but I sure hope it is true.

On another level, it should precipitate a little shame, a little introspection about how we got here, because to fix this now, when airports are snarled, is to say we were OK with people not getting food stamps, we were OK with Native American health clinics running out of medicine, Federal workers working without two paychecks, and Coast Guard men and women deployed without paychecks, so long as the President can build his wall. But if flights are delayed, if the elites are imperiled or inconvenienced in any way at the all, game over, and shame on us if that is what it takes to shut down this shutdown.

This entire time, as funding has run out for food banks and domestic violence shelters, everyone has been focused on whether or not Speaker Pelosi will win the State of the Union exchange with the President, and what are the polling numbers, and how are Democrats and Republicans positioning this, and will these polling drops matter in 2020?

But the moment the elite of this country have a moment of inconvenience, this thing seems to be wrapping up, and shame on us.

Everyone is focused on this slow, horrible train wreck that they can watch with some distance. Suddenly, air travel stops and everybody freaks out. Shame on us. It is day 35. People have gone without-- without food, medicine, gas in their car, paychecks--but delayed flights is the straw that breaks the camel's back.

This has to end. But it should never have even started. It shouldn't have taken a day like this to be, possibly, maybe not the end, maybe not the beginning but the beginning of the end of this shutdown.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, today, we say farewell to a member of our Senate family: Chad Schulken. For more than 16 years, Chad has served the U.S. Senate as a professional staff member and, most recently, clerk on the Appropriations Committee.

He started his career on the committee working for Senator Byrd in 2003 as staff of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and Judiciary. He specialized in budgetary and policy matters affecting the Department of Justice and the Federal judiciary, including the FBI, DEA, ATF, and the U.S. Marshall Service. Two years later, when the Appropriation Committee reorganized, he joined a newly formed subcommittee responsible for Military Construction and Veterans Affairs matters. As the lead staff handling the Department of Veterans Affairs, Arlington National Cemetery, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, the American Battle Monuments Commission, and the Armed Forces Retirement Home, Chad was charged with developing, managing, and negotiating the policy and funding priorities for the VA. Ultimately, it was his job to make sure that Congress kept its promise to the men, women, and the families who have served our country.

Chad has forgotten more about the resource and management needs of the VA than most anyone working in government will ever know, so no one was surprised when he was promoted to be the subcommittee's clerk in 2017. As the lead Democratic staffer, Chad negotiated and helped develop the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs appropriations bill. He helped me in my role as the subcommittee's ranking member. He worked with Republican staff, stewarding the interests of all Democratic Senate offices. He managed the bill across the Senate floor and negotiated a final conference agreement with the House.

Chad has become one of the Senate's foremost experts on budgetary policy and appropriations law. His mastery of Senate rules and procedure have made him a formidable legislative tactician and negotiator. His commitment to his work--to the unique collaborative process that fulfills the Congress's constitutional duty to appropriate taxpayer dollars--is clear in the many weekends and holidays he missed with family and friends to be here to negotiate appropriations bills. It is no wonder he left an impression on many Members, including those he served directly: Senators Byrd, Inouye, Mikulski, Leahy, Hollings, Feinstein, Johnson, Reed, Tester, and myself.

For his professionalism and commitment to our country and the people who have served in our military, we owe a great deal to Chad for his service in the U.S. Senate. We thank him and wish him well as he embarks on a new adventure, one we hope will give him more time with his family: his wife Jessica; three daughters Abi, Bella, and Hundley; and his son Griffin. From all of us in our Senate family, I extend a sincere thank you to Chad and his family.

Mr. President, it has been 34 days since the President fulfilled his promise to shut down the government, and the American people are not happy about it.

Poll after poll shows that people are not OK with the way the President of the United States is handling his job, and it is getting worse by the day, because to any reasonable person, this shutdown has been stupid and useless and cruel.

There are so many failures to talk about, but I want to talk about four specific failures that, if it were any other President, if it were any other time in modern history, would bring a President and a Congress to its senses and end the shutdown.

The first failure is this. Federal workers are in food lines. Federal workers are in food lines. People with jobs are now in food lines. Hundreds of thousands of people who work for the government are either furloughed or working without pay, and, tomorrow, these American public servants will miss their second paycheck.

There is a big difference between missing the first paycheck and the second paycheck. Some people can absorb missing the first paycheck, but this second paycheck is going to be really, really challenging for tens of thousands of American public servants because the rent is due, the mortgage is due, the car registration is due, the insurance is due, and the utilities are due at the beginning of the month.

This brings the amount of money that American public servants are owed by their government for work already performed to $4.7 billion. Remember that about a third of all Federal workers are veterans.

It may be hard for billionaires in the Cabinet to understand, but for the middle class, missing two paychecks in a row is a total disaster.

I have met people working in airport security who can't concentrate. They can't sleep because they can't stop worrying about how they are going to pay their bills. I have met government workers in the midst of applying for food stamps and asking local charities for help. I met a single mom who spent her career working hard to build a life for her family, and she told me that without these paychecks, it is all going backward.

As one Washington Post columnist put it, under the Republican leadership, the United States is starting to look like the failed Soviet system, with middle-class workers literally waiting in bread lines.

I am grateful that for every story I have heard of someone suffering, there is also a story of people stepping up to help. In Hawaii, in particular, local utility companies, financial institutions, and others have decided that they will not penalize Federal workers hurt by the shutdown if they miss a payment. I want to thank our local banks for allowing unpaid Federal workers to make a late payment on their mortgage without a penalty, and I want to thank our credit unions for extending very cheap credit. I want to thank people who are organizing in local communities, not just in Hawaii but across the country, so that middle-class families can make it through this.

Federal workers want paychecks, not food banks. They want paychecks. They don't want charity. They want to be compensated for the work that they do. They shouldn't rely on pop-up kitchens for furloughed workers or online fundraising campaigns or the kindness of families, friends, and strangers--as great as all of that is. They should just get paid, and that starts with opening the government.

Here is the second failure that should end this shutdown right away, and that is that economic growth is already slowing. This week, a White House adviser said that the Nation's economic growth could be zero if the shutdown goes on. Economists and business leaders were already worried about the potential for a recession, and this shutdown is fanning those unfortunate flames.

Small businesses can't get loans. Companies can't go public. This administration has stopped some of the core functions of our market economy, but there is one thing that will not stop, and that is the corruption in this administration.

If you have money, this administration takes care of you, and if you don't, then they will not. Federal workers have been called back to the office to take care of oil and gas leases--to take care of oil and gas leases--and to help financial institutions. They are working unpaid so that special interests can keep making money.

This is the third failure. While people who are fortunate financially are protected, this shutdown leaves the people most vulnerable to fend for themselves.

Food pantries and health clinics that rely on Federal funds are out of supplies, which means that Americans are going to start to go hungry and without medicine for everything from diabetes to addiction.

Landlords who provide housing for 4 million people--mostly seniors and people with disabilities and kids--will soon stop receiving rent payments. They will have to decide how long they can hold out before being forced to evict these people or lose the properties themselves.

Housing authorities are delaying the release of section 8 vouchers.

Domestic violence shelters that rely on Federal funds are furloughing their own workers and cutting back services that save lives. So men, women, and children who need to get out of a dangerous situation at home have fewer options to get to safety.

That brings me to the fourth failure, which is that public safety is gravely at risk. This is a serious matter. This isn't about whether Donald Trump can save face or whether the Republicans can vanquish the Democrats or Nancy Pelosi makes Mitch McConnell look

bad. It is none of that. Public safety is at risk.

Air traffic controllers and TSA workers are working without pay. They are stressed out, and they are becoming increasingly understaffed and undersupported, and there is no ability to train new employees, and they are sounding the alarm.

This isn't my rhetoric. I want you to listen to what the National Air Traffic Controllers Association said yesterday:

We cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at

play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will

break. It is unprecedented.

The National Transportation Safety Board is being forced to choose which crashes to investigate and which not to, leaving us with unanswered questions and risking lives in the future. As of this week, the NTSB has been unable to investigate 87 crashes, including some with fatalities.

This is a pattern. It is a pattern of recklessly endangering the safety of Americans. We are just 2 months out from a wildfire that destroyed 18,000 homes and buildings and killed 86 people. Yet the shutdown has stopped us from training firefighters. It has cancelled controlled burns. It has led to dead trees piling up in places that we know pose a fire risk. This is what happens when you shut down the government to try to get your way. You put real people at risk.

The safety of Americans abroad and at home is threatened by this shutdown. The State Department cancelled a border security summit. This fight is supposed to be about border security. Yet we are not paying TSA, we are not paying FBI agents, we are about to close some of our Federal courts, and the State Department itself just cancelled a border security summit. FBI agents are working without pay. Field offices are operating in fiscal uncertainty. That means investigations into street gangs and drug dealers are on hold, training on child abductions and counterterrorism has been cancelled, and communications with sources about gangs, such as MS-13, have stopped. As one agent put it, ``Our enemies know they can run freely.'' Our enemies know they can run freely.

I ask all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, why would we put public safety at risk? Why can't we reopen the government and negotiate our differences?

The truth is, as it relates to border security--I am in my seventh year in the Senate, and every year, we do a bipartisan bill that includes border security in the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. We always do this.

By the way, every Republican and every Democrat will quietly say: We are not doing a cement wall from sea to shining sea. That makes no sense, and nobody at the Department of Homeland Security thinks that is a good idea.

So we quietly appropriate money--some for personnel, some for beds, some for courts so they can adjudicate some of these cases, and some for physical barriers where it is appropriate, to put up a wall where it makes sense. You don't put up a wall where it doesn't make sense. We do this all the time. So the idea that we are going to shut down the government and shut down portions of the Department of Homeland Security itself in order to get to a place where the President of the United States can save face is just absurd.

We have to be the grownups here, and that is going to require some Republicans to craft a border security package with Democrats, as we have over the last 6 or 7 years, and we have to do that after we open the government. The reason that is so essential is that this President--certainly this President especially, but no President, Democratic or Republican, now or 30 years from now, should ever inflict pain on the American people in order to generate leverage in a policy discussion. When somebody does that--and if it is one of my friends in the Senate and they do this 10 years from now, I want them to read this speech back to me. The answer to the offer, which is, ``I am going to hurt Americans unless you do X,'' should be ``You get nothing in exchange for not hurting Americans.'' That is not a cookie for us.

Barack Obama learned that lesson the hard way. Only when he finally said ``You guys want to screw with the American economy; you want to mess with the debt ceiling; you get nothing'' did they back off, and all that brinksmanship stopped.

Every time we reward hostage taking, we will get more hostage taking. As painful as all of this is, we have to stand firm. We are absolutely willing to negotiate a package related to border security, which will no doubt include some physical barrier, because we do that every year, actually, but I am not doing any of that until the government is opened. That is not just a political position; that is a matter of principle because we can't live like this as a country. We cannot function like this. If we do this, if we cut a deal now and we give $2 billion for the wall, the debt ceiling is coming up in March or April, and here we go again. The fiscal year expires in September, and here we go again. We will never govern. I know the Presiding Officer was a Governor. That is no way to run a country. Let this be the last shutdown.

I know the two leaders of the Senate are in what appear to be constructive conversations. I know there are plenty of adults who want to get us out of this. For the first time in several weeks, I have actually felt somewhat hopeful about the trajectory. I don't think we are going to fix this in the next hour or so, but at least we are talking, and at least there seems to be a desire to structure an off- ramp. But we have to do one simple thing first: We have to reopen the government. People are about to miss their paychecks for the second time tomorrow. It is our obligation to reopen the government.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I have a simple request for my Republican colleagues, and that is this: Open the government. Open the government. There have been too many people suffering for too long for this to go on any further.

One of those people is named Scott Pekalib. He lives in Hilo, HI, and works for the U.S. Geological Survey. He has had a rough few months.

In October, his husband Jay went into the hospital for a routine surgery that went horribly wrong. He went into cardiac arrest and was in an induced coma for several days. He had to be flown to another island to receive the care that was necessary. Scott and Jay spent all of their savings to get through this ordeal. After paying for medicine, hotels, and airfare, they were living paycheck to paycheck.

Now, because of this government shutdown, Scott's paycheck reads zero. He doesn't know how he is going to buy gas to take his husband to the doctor or how they are going to pay the bills that are due. Scott is making impossible choices between buying the prescription drugs he needs and the ones that his husband needs. All of this pain and suffering is because the Senate will not vote to reopen the government.

So I ask my Republican friends to call for a vote, and if the President vetoes the bill, let's act like a separate, coequal branch of government and override that veto. That is our prerogative in the United States, and that is our obligation in the U.S. Senate--to do what is best for the Nation, for the health, safety, and economic security of all of our constituents.

Let's reopen the government.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today, we remember the 400 American and Allied prisoners of war who died 74 years ago from friendly fire aboard the Japanese hell ship Enoura Maru docked in Takeo Harbor, Formosa-- modern-day Taiwan.

Among the dead were men who left their homes in America, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, and Czechoslovakia to fight an enemy they did not know, in places few of them had heard of, all in pursuit of a common cause: freedom, justice, and equality. These heroes were part of the infamous 45-day odyssey of the last transport of prisoners of war from the Philippines to Japan--captive since the American territory fell to Imperial Japan in the spring of 1942 after fighting to defend the Philippines.

On the morning of January 9, 1945, dive bombers from the USS Hornet attacked the unmarked freighter holding 1,300 prisoners of war docked in the Japanese colony's harbor. Two hundred died instantly. Nearly everyone else was wounded. For 2 days, the men were left in the floating wreckage before the Japanese permitted the dead to be removed. Their remains were buried ashore in mass graves.

After the war, the 400 victims of the bombing of the Enoura Maru were exhumed and eventually brought to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. They rest in 20 mass graves marked only as ``Unknowns January 9, 1945.'' Their families did not learn the final fate of their loved ones until 2001.

This past August, we remembered these brave men with a memorial stone on the Memorial Walk at the Cemetery honoring the prisoners of war aboard the hell ship Enoura Maru. The American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society, an organization that represents the American prisoners of war of Imperial Japan and their families, organized the commemoration in Hawaii.

That memorial stone is a monument to their courage, suffering, and sacrifice. It commemorates their tragic death 74 years ago and marks their final return home. Let that stone and our remembrance of the prisoners of war on the Enoura Maru remind us of our sacred commitment to veterans of all eras to ``never forget.'' May they rest in peace.

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

Mr. President, the Senate should demand a better nominee for the Supreme Court. These last 2 weeks have torn our country apart, but even before these allegations against Judge Kavanaugh became public, there was enough in Judge Kavanaugh's record to cause me to vote no.

His record is clear. As a Justice, he will damage women's rights, civil rights, the environment, voting rights, and economic fairness. He will also damage Native Hawaiian self-determination.

Let's start with Native Hawaiian. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he wrote that Native Hawaiians didn't deserve protections as indigenous people. He wrote an amicus brief in the case Rice v. Cayetano, arguing that Hawaii violated the Constitution by permitting only Native Hawaiians to vote in their elections for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs--the agency charged with working to advocate for the Native Hawaiian community.

These views come from a lack of knowledge of the history of Native Hawaiians, as well as Federal law and policies related to U.S. indigenous people.

Based on nothing at all, he thinks indigenous people are just another race. In his words, ``Hawaii's naked racial spoils system . . . makes remedial set-asides and hiring and admissions preferences look almost trivial by comparison.''

He also said: ``[I]f Hawaii is permitted to offer extraordinary privileges to residents on the basis of race or ethnic heritage, so will every other state.''

This is wrong on policy. This is wrong on the law. This is wrong historically, but it is also important to recognize the tone here. ``Remedial set-asides,'' ``racial spoils''--this is not someone who understands the plight of indigenous people and the history of our country as it relates to indigenous people. These views have serious consequences for Alaska Natives and also for American Indians.

The Federal Government's protections for indigenous people are built on tenets of the Constitution, Federal statutes, legal precedent, and congressional actions. They exist against the backdrop of U.S. injustice against indigenous American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities. Judge Kavanaugh's misinformed views on the status of indigenous people are alarming.

His views on women are also alarming. There is no doubt in my mind that Judge Kavanaugh will undermine reproductive rights. He knows better than to say in public that he is going to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. That is not what they do. The Federalist Society trains these people really well to not say what they are going to do. There is a reason everybody who wants to ban abortion is so enthusiastic

about this judge. They are not dumb. They understand his views, and they understand the one thing you can't say is, yes, I will vote to overturn Roe.

Here is an email from his days in the Bush administration--which, by the way, the Republicans tried to hide from the public. He said: ``I am not sure all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since the Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.'' This is exactly why the Senate deserves to know if Judge Kavanaugh would overrule this precedent. I think he will.

Time after time during the hearing, he evaded answers to that question, but we already know he embraces restrictive limitations on abortion that would, in practice, deprive women of their constitutional rights.

Judge Kavanaugh argued in one case that the Federal Government can and should override a young woman's constitutional right to seek an abortion because she was an immigrant.

This young woman had complied with the requirements of State law to make that decision herself. She did not need the Federal Government to transport her, pay for, or in any way facilitate the procedure. She just needed them to let her out of detention to do the procedure, but they didn't want to. They wanted to pressure her to voluntarily deport herself. They put up artificial barriers to prevent her from exercising her constitutional right. Judge Kavanaugh endorsed those barriers. Making a young woman wait weeks to obtain an abortion for no reason based on the Constitution, Federal or State law, or even public policy is an undue burden. Republicans who worry about the overstepping of the State should care about this.

Judge Kavanaugh's dissent shows his lack of respect for Roe, but even if he avoids directly overturning Roe, he could be green-lighting State or Federal laws that, in a practical effect, outlaw abortion.

Judge Kavanaugh would also rip apart of the ACA, if given a chance. He ruled to limit access to contraception under the ACA, and he has made it clear he thinks the Affordable Care Act is a ``significant expanse of congressional authority--and thus also a potentially significant infringement of individual liberty.'' A significant expansion of congressional authority and potentially a significant infringement of individual liberty--now that sounds like something a Republican colleague would say. It is just a view about the Affordable Care Act which that is to the extent we are collecting taxes and establishing some statutory mandates to try to make sure more people have healthcare that is affordable, a zero-sum game. And the more people who have healthcare, the less liberty either the rest of us have or maybe even those people have. I don't really know how it works, but that is a view.

It is a view we hear, and I respect my Republican colleagues for their views. I believe they are sincere in those views. That is not normally the kind of thing you hear from a judge. He has a clear view about the Affordable Care Act that isn't based in jurisprudence; it is based in his long history as a Republican operative.

I want to be very clear. A Republican operative sounds like an epithet. It sounds like a personal insult. I work with a lot of operatives. They tend to be Democrats. Operatives--not all of them-- some of them are pretty cool. Some of them are honorable. A lot of them are really effective. It is not a bad thing to be a political operative. Someone has to run a campaign. Someone has to mobilize voters. It is part of our democracy, like it or hate it. It is just that we don't put them on courts at all. It is just that we have literally never put an operative from either political party on the highest Court in the land.

In his speeches, Judge Kavanaugh has left not-so-subtle bread crumbs about how he would rule on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, which is really the linchpin of the ACA. In a lecture at the Heritage Foundation, he highlighted that the majority of the Supreme Court agreed that ``the individual mandate, best read, could not be sustained as constitutional.'' To him, the Chief Justice upheld the ACA only because he tried too hard to avoid deciding the constitutional issue. The whole speech is about how Judge Kavanaugh would not try too hard to avoid the constitutional issue. The risk that he will provide the vote to strike down the healthcare law is not a hypothetical.

Now, there were a lot of what most people in the bar thought were rather nonserious challenges on the Affordable Care Act in various circuit courts across the country, but I think we have learned that the Supreme Court has an interest in the Affordable Care Act, maybe even a kind of unhealthy obsession with the Affordable Care Act. So the idea that these seemingly frivolous lawsuits will not be successful, I think, is belied by the enthusiasm with which the Supreme Court wants to take these circuit court decisions which are getting appealed and rule on them.

Challenges to the ACA could come before the Supreme Court as early as this term. So I think it is really important for people to remember that. Listen, we all have our talking points on both sides of the aisle. I understand that. It is not a theoretical risk. It is a real risk that ACA is gutted; that the individual mandate is gutted; that protections for people with preexisting conditions is gutted; that what they call essential health benefits could fall away; that the whole architecture of our healthcare system could be gutted in this term.

I am also voting no because Judge Kavanaugh puts corporations above people--again, not a rhetorical flourish. This is most apparent in his opinions about the environment. I want you to know about a case which concerned the EPA's authority to regulate mercury emissions. The mercury rule was based on decades of research that showed devastating health impacts of mercury on the brain, on the lungs, and on fetuses. The Obama administration found that the mercury rule prevented as many as 11,000 premature deaths by reducing heart and lung disease.

Let's be clear. It happened during the Obama administration, but this isn't the EPA; these are professional scientists and researchers. These are civil servants. They are not like Obama appointees who have some ax to grind with a particular chemical. They just found that this chemical is dangerous to people. The EPA was directed by law to study the public health hazards of emissions from electric utilities, including mercury, and to regulate emissions ``if appropriate and necessary.'' That is the standard, ``if appropriate and necessary.'' Judge Kavanaugh thought the mercury rule was inappropriate because it didn't take into account the cost to the electric utilities to implement.

I mean, think about that. You see a law, and it says ``regulate emissions where appropriate and necessary,'' and then you are a judge and you read that law and you say: Listen, Agency, you didn't think about the corporations enough. So somehow that is violative of the law.

To arrive at his decision, he substituted his own judgment of what is ``appropriate'' for EPA. ``Appropriate'' means saving 11,000 lives. For Judge Kavanaugh, it meant not imposing too many costs on polluters.

He has and will continue to fight any attempt by the EPA to keep up with evolving threats to public health from polluted air and water and from climate change. Even though Supreme Court precedent was clear that greenhouse gases fit with the Clean Air Act's ``capacious definition of air pollutant''--in other words, greenhouse gases are a pollutant. Everybody knows that. It is not a dispute among scientists or even among regular people who understand that climate change is real, but Judge Kavanaugh pushed back. When the majority of the DC Circuit followed this precedent in another EPA case, he dissented. The conservative Justices on the Supreme Court were convinced, and they voted 5 to 4 to strike down the EPA's rule. There will be a lot more of that when Judge Kavanaugh joins them.

When Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed, he will use a far-right doctrine to block Federal agencies from protecting Americans' health and safety. He wants to do away with something called Chevron deference, which prevents judges from substituting their judgment for that of Congress or a Federal agency.

Here is how it works. When Congress passes a law, you can't-- especially as it

relates to regulations about pollutants. We don't know exactly--we don't know all the science. So what we say is, for instance: Keep the air clean. Keep the water clean. You, Agency, figure out what is most important to ban, regulate on, and otherwise monitor. So it delegates that authority to Federal agencies which have the technical expertise and knowledge to implement and enforce the law.

Without that authority, we wouldn't have the rules to protect our air and water from pollution. We wouldn't be able to regulate access to new dangerous drugs. We wouldn't have rules to protect consumers from unsafe or predatory products and services because everything is supposed to be legislated.

If you don't believe in Chevron deference, then--we are supposed to every year come up with a new list of chemicals to ban or not ban. What do we know about that? Seriously, what do we know about that? Do you think maybe the lobbyists might be involved in that process more so than if you let the administrative agencies do that?

For the life of me, I don't understand--I mean, I do understand why people want to get rid of Chevron deference, but I don't understand the legal justification for it. The reason they want to get rid of Chevron deference is because it makes life safer for big corporations and less safe for the rest of us.

A vote for Judge Kavanaugh would be a vote against Chevron deference. It would allow judges to decide what a law means without considering Congress's intentions or listening to the Agency.

Perhaps most worrisome for me is Judge Kavanaugh's views on Executive power. The context here is, the Federalist Society provided a list to Donald Trump and Donald Trump said, ``Looks good to me,'' as part of his sort of solidifying the primary, and then Judge Kavanaugh got added at the end. I mean, after the initial list was established, then one person got added at the end.

In terms of their jurisprudence, there is not a big difference between Judge Kavanaugh and the rest of the people on the list, but here is the difference: Judge Kavanaugh has a very unique view of Executive authority and what a President is subjected to in terms of the law.

In his writings and rulings, he has made clear that he thinks a President can choose not to follow the law if he thinks it is unconstitutional. Can you imagine that a President can just say: ``That law is unconstitutional, so I refuse to enforce it''?

Congress couldn't do anything about it because it would all go to the Supreme Court where Judge Kavanaugh sits. Do you think Donald Trump might like that idea? I think Donald Trump might like that idea.

Judge Kavanaugh thinks the President is literally above the law, not just in terms of not enforcing statutes passed by the U.S. Congress; he has made it clear in speeches and writings that he does not think a President can or should be investigated or indicted for criminal offenses while in office.

He said that maybe Nixon was wrongly decided, referring to the United States v. Nixon. It is a 1974 decision in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that President Nixon had to comply with a subpoena to turn over the tapes of his conversations in the White House. He wrote in the Minnesota Law Review in 2009 that he thinks a President shouldn't be indicted for breaking the law. Let me repeat that. He wrote in the Minnesota Law Review in 2009 that he thinks a sitting President shouldn't be indicted for breaking the law.

Now, near as I can tell--I am not a lawyer--but near as I can tell, this is the main difference between Judge Kavanaugh's views and the rest of the people on the Federalist Society list. I mean, the head of the Federalist Society, before Judge Kavanaugh was nominated, was asked: Do you have any favorites? He said: Anyone on this list would be great.

It is just weird to me that the President of the United States picked this guy, a Bush person. It is not normally his preference to pick a Bush person, but this person has this really specific view about how powerful a President should be, and that is really worrisome.

He also wrote that there is ``a serious constitutional question regarding whether a President can be criminally indicted and tried while in office.'' This is the tip of the iceberg.

Judge Kavanaugh has also asserted that the President has ``absolute authority'' to pardon all offenders for any crime at any time, even before a trial or a charge; even before he or she is charged. Does he mean all offenders, even the President? Judge Kavanaugh may have refused to answer this question at the hearing, but his expansive view of Executive power speaks for him.

His view puts the President above the law, and this is dangerous because right now Special Counsel Robert Mueller is in the middle of an investigation into the President's campaign. Instead of following Supreme Court case law, Judge Kavanaugh may try to undermine that investigation and stop attempts to subpoena the President or to collect evidence.

The context, of course--sometimes we in the Senate pretend not to know things we know. There are a lot of smart people here, but we sometimes don't say what is actually going on, which, as everybody knows, even people who are loyal to him--or people who pretend to be loyal to him but privately grouse about him--the President demands loyalty to him, not to the Constitution, not to the country. The President is a person who demands personal loyalty. He could have picked anybody, but he picked Brett Kavanaugh, the one judge who believes the President is above the law and should be left alone.

These issues have been clear since the nomination, and that is why I pledged to vote no. Others came to light last week when the whole country had the chance to hear from Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh. What we saw, I think, was alarming for a lot of people. Whatever your view on all of the stuff I just talked about, actually, we saw behavior that was just weird. It was kind of manic. It was angry. It was wild-eyed. It was threatening. I mean, we talk--listen, I was in the State house of representatives, so I wasn't in a position to deal with advice and consent on State judges, so I hadn't dug into what the criteria were when you are considering a judge.

So when I got to the Senate--I am in my sixth year--there were a lot of conversations about judicial temperament. You think about qualifications. You want to make sure the views are not too extreme. Then you think about temperament. This thing about temperament is being totally ignored by the majority because if you care at all about temperament, if you care at all about the idea of equal justice for all, if you care--and we are so close to the U.S. Supreme Court physically right now. If you care about that magnificent building and the idea that anybody going before that highest Court in the land is going to get a fair shake, it is just vanishingly unlikely that if you are with the National Resource Defense Council or NARO or Planned Parenthood or MoveOn, or whoever he views as part of this attempt to smear him, they are going to court and they are going to be a litigant and they are going to be looking at Judge Kavanaugh saying: Oh, yes, he is undecided.

This is the important thing: Some people will argue that he is going to be an evenhanded jurist, that he sort of lost his cool, but he cleaned it up in this most recent Wall Street Journal editorial. Maybe. I don't think so. I think it is implausible. The point is, he can't even appear--you are not supposed to even appear to be anything less than impartial, and he ripped the mask off.

Again, he is a Republican. That is fine. I get along with Republicans--not all of them, but I get along with Republicans--and he can have all of those views. It is just that once you start articulating really partisan views, especially in the context of a nomination process, then the mask is off, and you don't belong on the Court. You have to display the proper temperament on and off the Bench at all times. ``What that means is in dealings with one's colleagues on the bench, having an open mind, being respectful of a colleague's views, being respectful of the lawyers who come before the court and not treating them disrespectfully, but to have proper respect for the lawyers on the court.''

I am quoting Judge Kavanaugh, and I did not see that Judge Kavanaugh last week.

I just want to make one minor point about that. Whatever we think of that Wall Street Journal editorial, besides the fact that there was no actual apology, it wasn't like a spur-of-the-moment thing where he kind of lost it and said a few things he didn't mean to say. He wrote the speech the day before. That speech was what he wanted to say. That is what he intended to say. So it is not like the passion--I have said lots of things I wish I didn't say, but generally when I write them down, I can't fairly characterize that as a mistake. Maybe I made a factual error. Maybe I stumble. Maybe I shouldn't have said one paragraph.

That whole thing was a mess. That whole thing was an emotional mess. That actually should have been disqualifying, and that should have been the moment where Members of the Republican Party just went over and said: Listen, we have 18 conservative judges. Any of them could get confirmed. This guy is not right for the Bench. This guy is going to be bad for the institution of the Court.

I want to talk a little bit about the Federalist Society, an organization with a mission to alter the legal landscape of the United States. For decades, the Federalist Society has worked to remake the Federal judiciary with the view of power of corporations, Executive authority, social conservatism, and the protection of privilege that is out of the legal mainstream. As Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a professor of politics at Pomona College and the author of ``Ideas with Consequences,'' a study of the Federalist Society, said: ``The idea was to train, credential, and socialize a generation of alternative elites.''

This is because we have Republican Presidents who would nominate and get confirmed Justices that were Republican but not as reliably conservative as they wanted. So the Federalist Society, formed for the purpose of saying, you know, we are not going to get fooled again. We want our stuff. We want our outcomes. We don't want you to actually fairly consider the law and the Constitution and just call balls and strikes and all that. That is what they say. They set up this apparatus to do the opposite; to be very outcome-oriented and to be very conservative. That is what the Federalist Society has done.

This nomination is the latest success story of this ambitious enterprise, and his confirmation will, unfortunately, entrench these judicial views in the Supreme Court for decades to come.

While his views on some issues are known, the Senate and the American people still don't have a full picture of who he is, and that is because at every turn there has been a concerted effort to hide the documents.

Now, this feels like 10 weeks ago, but before the last scandal, what I thought was terribly scandalous was that this man had been in public life, he worked for the government, and so there are tons of records of that, right? You can FOIA it. Most of it is archived because he worked in the White House. In the end, the committee didn't receive 95 percent of the documents related to his public life.

Now, we are not talking about a fishing expedition. We are talking about when he worked in the White House, where are the records of that? We didn't get to see any of it. It was, in my view, a misuse of the process in the Judiciary Committee related to what is considered committee confidential.

In the past, committee confidential essentially means anything that is personally sensitive or anything that is either secret or top secret. Committee confidential is a narrow thing, but what they decided to do is say 95 percent of all the records we just don't get to see. So the U.S. Senate and the public doesn't get to review 95 percent of the records related to Judge Kavanaugh's public service.

These are the reasons I find it hard to believe Judge Kavanaugh is going to have a successful vote tomorrow; and I do understand he will have a successful vote. I guess it is today because we are 3 in the morning.

Judge Kavanaugh's judicial record, his temperament, his views on Executive power should be enough to scare away most Members of this body.

This is a dark day for the Senate, but more important than that--I worry very much about this institution. I worry about the way we have conducted ourselves. I worry about the bastardization of this process. I worry about our ability to come back together. I worry about, the Senate's traditional role, when it is working, is to calm everybody down, is to deal with stuff that is hard. It seems to me that at every stage, instead of being the cooling saucer, instead of being a place where we can deal with tough issues, we serve to inflame the passions of folks on both sides, to cause pain across the country, and to not get to the truth. More important than the institutional aspect, it is a dark day for vulnerable people, women in particular, people of color, indigenous peoples, people with preexisting conditions, people who struggle economically, union members.

The country is feeling torn apart, and the Senate has traditionally played a role in calming tensions down, moving methodically, being fair, and this process is not that. We need another nominee.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, Senator McCain may have represented the people of Arizona, but in doing so, he changed the world.

His family legacy and leadership are, actually, partly rooted in the Pacific. He met his wife, Cindy, in Honolulu, and generations of McCains have left their mark on the region as his grandfather served in the Pacific theater as an admiral in World War II, as his father commanded the Armed Forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam war, and as John S. McCain III became the most famous POW of the Vietnam war. His relationship with the region began with those conflicts--with pain and with loss--but he never let that beginning define his views of the Asia-Pacific.

As a Senator, he called for the United States to transform the peace we made with Vietnam into a partnership. It is thanks, in part, to him that the United States now works closely with Vietnam on everything from economic development to counterterrorism, and the people of Vietnam know it. The monument that marks where he was captured as a naval pilot in Vietnam has turned into a shrine this week, with people leaving flowers in memory

of the man who helped to normalize relations between our two nations. This is just one of the ways in which Senator McCain shaped the Pacific.

Just a few years ago, he designed the Southeast Asia Maritime Security Initiative in order to increase stability and to help professionalize militaries in the region, including the military of Vietnam. He was a strong advocate for freedom of navigation in the region and for human rights. He worked with Senator Cardin to introduce a bill to punish military officials in Burma for the part that they had played in waging genocide against the Rohingya--a bill that, I hope, the Senate will pass soon. He was an early voice that warned about North Korea's nuclear program, and as a longtime member and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, he always stood up for our men and women in uniform.

A few years ago, on the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, my predecessor, Daniel K. Inouye, planned to give a floor speech to remember the 2,400 Americans who died that day. Senator Inouye's staff made it known that he would mark the anniversary on the Senate floor. He gave that speech to a Chamber that was not full, but John McCain was there. He was there for Senator Inouye just as he was there, time after time, for our military and for our country. He was earnest and solemn when it came to fulfilling his oath to the Constitution, but he was also the embodiment of taking your job seriously, not yourself.

One tribute from a former staff member recalled how Senator McCain led a codel to Estonia, where he joined Senate colleague Hillary Clinton and enjoyed several rounds of vodka shots before having decided to take a midnight stroll around town. He also remembered the Senator's holding a press conference in a geothermal pool in Iceland--in his bathing suit and all.

Early on in my time in the U.S. Senate, I would pick up the phone and call my dad to tell him whenever I had had a substantive conversation with Senator McCain, because he was that much of a giant, and now he is gone. We all need people in our lives who ask us to do more, who remind us that we are capable of doing more and of doing better. The world needs heroes, and we have lost one in the death of Senator McCain.

He once challenged a leader in his party to ``set the example for what our country can and should represent.'' That was also his challenge to the Senate. He demanded more of the Senate and more from us. It is for that, especially, he will be missed in this Chamber. Who will hold us accountable when we fall into a destructive pattern? When he lectured us--and he did lecture us--we took it to heart. He was true north for the U.S. Senate. He cared deeply about relationships between Members of both parties. He cared about legislating and about finding a way to govern.

While he is gone, we do not need to forget Senator McCain's lessons and lectures. He is an example for us to follow, and that is as true today as it was in any of his 32 years of service to the Senate. We will miss him in this Chamber, where he cast a long shadow with moral clarity whenever he spoke.

This week, our hearts are with his mother, Roberta, with his wife, Cindy, with his children and his grandchildren, and with all of those who loved him. May his memory be a blessing

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, we swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, including its First Amendment, which says, in part, ``Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment, or religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.''

We can't let statements by the President declaring the press is the enemy of the people go unchallenged. Both parties complain about the media, but who can argue with Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that ``our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,'' or with James Madison, who said that ``the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments,'' or with President Reagan, who said that ``freedom of the press is one of our most important freedoms and also one of our oldest,'' or with Justice Kennedy, who wrote that ``the First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.''

These words of past leaders should inspire us to act, to send a message that we support the First Amendment, and we support the freedom of the press.

Senators Schumer, Blumenthal, and I have introduced a resolution that does just that. It affirms that the press is not the enemy of the people, and it reaffirms the vital and indispensable role of the free press, serving to inform the electorate, uncover the truth, act as a check on the inherent power of the government, further discourse and debate and advance our most basic and cherished democratic norms and freedoms.

This resolution also condemns attacks on the institution of the free press and views efforts to systematically undermine the credibility of the press as a whole as an attack on our democratic institutions.

As if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 607, submitted earlier today.

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

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

nomination of a. marvin quattlebaum, jr.

Mr. President, I want to share an update about what is happening with the Kilauea volcano in my home State of Hawaii.

The first thing people need to know is that the State of Hawaii remains safe to visit and that the Island of Hawaii, where the volcano is erupting, is also safe to visit.

Let's start with a basic geography lesson. Hawaii has eight main islands, and the volcano is on the Island of Hawaii, which people often call the Big Island. It is about 4,000 square miles. This is Hawaii Island. It is about the size of Connecticut. Only 9 square miles are directly impacted by the volcano. So it is actually just this little area in this corner of the island. If you are in the town of Hilo, which is 25 miles away from the volcano, you can't even tell there is a volcano erupting for the most part.

Cruise lines are coming back, and officials are trying to set up areas where people can safely view this spectacular volcano. It is that safe. People need to know that it is business as usual for lots of people on the Big Island and that both the State and the island are open for visitors. We just got the data in for the month of May, and we had again increased tourism statewide. Everyone should come to visit.

With that being said, this is an extraordinarily difficult situation for the communities that are being affected, and even though people are used to living with volcanos, this is extraordinarily tough. Right here, we have fissure 8. This is about a 300-foot lava fountain that has not ceased for several weeks. As recently as 2015, lava approached the town of Pahoa in the Puna district, but we really haven't seen anything like this since the 1974 flow.

For the past few months, we have had 300-foot lava fountains. We have had ash explosions that have reached tens of thousands of feet. We have also had more than 30 billion gallons of lava that have destroyed 600 homes. An estimated 2,500 people have been displaced, one way or another, by the volcanic eruption. In certain areas, there is no power, no water, and no cell phone reception. So even if your home has not been destroyed, your access now may be limited or nonexistent.

Here is the really good news: There has been no loss of human life due to the volcano. Despite all that has happened, the people of Puna and the people of Hawaii Island remain extraordinarily resilient. The bad news is that no one is sure when the volcanic activity will end. Even the experts at the United States Geological Survey don't know. We have several difficult challenges in moving forward--from air quality to the need for economic relief and, especially, for housing and transportation. Hundreds of people are currently living in shelters. Hundreds of animals from homes and ranches are, in a sense, volcano refugees. So we have to secure temporary housing for people who lost their homes or who have been evacuated and then get these people permanent housing and deal with private property damage. We have to make decisions about where to rebuild and start the process of fixing roads, power lines, and other infrastructure in the Puna district.

The Big Island's mayor, Harry Kim, and the entire county emergency operations center team, including first responders, have been working from day one and day and night to keep people safe and deal with these challenges. Several weeks ago, I visited the emergency operations center and saw firsthand that it is really all hands on deck. Something that distinguishes our EOCs from other EOCs and impresses our Federal counterparts is the extent to which we all work together regardless of jurisdiction. You can scarcely tell who works for State, Federal, or county government. You can scarcely tell who is a business leader or a not-for-profit leader or a university professor or a mayor. Everybody is really working together.

There is a long list of people who deserve our thanks. Local media have gone above and beyond to keep people informed by assigning crews to stay in place for weeks at a time. By the way, that is somewhat unusual for a disaster, especially one that has been going on as long as this one.

Nonprofits, such as the Red Cross, the World Central Kitchen, and the Salvation Army, are operating shelters and serving meals. Companies are pitching in by waiving freight charges for relief supplies or working to keep cell towers powered.

I can name every single elected official on Hawaii Island, and each one of them is personally doing significant work in the recovery. Because this is an island State and because it is a small community, this isn't just a matter of their trying to secure resources from State, Federal, or county government, and this isn't just a matter of lawmaking; they are on the ground, they are listening, and they are helping with their hands.

This is part of the general sense that people have of wanting to help during this extraordinary time. Several weeks ago, a resident of Puna named Ikaika Marzo took it upon himself to set up Pu'uhonua o Puna, which means ``a place of refuge'' in Puna. People can donate things or pick up what they need, whether it is information, supplies, or a hot meal. We have seen people drive 100 miles to show up and help. Ranchers are helping out other ranchers--normally they are competitors--by housing displaced cattle. On other islands, people are filling shipping containers with donations. Across the State, we are helping each other out so that people are being fed, finding shelter, and getting the things they need.

Lots of good things are happening, but it is still a very tough situation, an ongoing situation, which is why we have been grateful for the Federal response. Two weeks ago, the White House approved the State of Hawaii's request for individual assistance from FEMA for residents whose homes have been lost or damaged. FEMA has also partnered with the State to open a disaster relief center. From the start, it was clear that they sent their A team. I want to thank FEMA and the White House for their quick action, which is welcome news during this challenging time for the Big Island of Hawaii.

FEMA and the EPA are also working with the State and county partners to monitor air quality, which the EPA is now publishing online so that the public can make informed decisions. This may sound like a small thing, but this is everything when it comes to determining whether Norwegian Cruise Line can come to Hilo, and all that economic opportunity will either be lost or not, or whether schools in the Ka'u and Puna districts can open. What EPA is doing in partnership with the State and county government is really extraordinary.

The Hawaii National Guard was able to command Department of Defense resources under a dual command agreement. General Logan, General Hara, and the National Guard have all been crucial. They are literally doing everything from collecting gas samples to providing security on the ground to providing temporary shelters.

We are grateful for all the help, but we also know it is a long road to recovery because we don't know how long

this is going to go on. In a normal disaster, you have sort of three phases: disaster preparation and planning, disaster response, and then disaster recovery. Because this is an ongoing situation and because we don't know when this is going to end, we have our county, State, and Federal folks, as well as the rest of the community, in disaster prep, disaster response, and disaster recovery--all simultaneously underway. This is an extraordinary situation. There are lots of terrible natural disasters all across the country every year, but this is unique in that particular way.

This is also unique in the sense that most of the time--not all of the time but almost every time--people can go back to their properties. Although they still, under the law, will own their properties, when Kapoho Bay was flattened, when Vacationland was flattened, when we went from 87 homes, roughly, gone to about 600 homes gone in a very short period of time, it is difficult to imagine that these people are going to be able to remake their lives in the path of this current flow.

We have to do all three things at the same time. So we are going to continue to work and to look for Federal partners for help and for flexibility. I will state that our Federal partners have recognized the unique nature of this disaster, and we really appreciate it. I have talked to Majority Leader McConnell, Minority Leader Schumer, Vice Chairman Leahy, Chairman Shelby, and key appropriators about how unique this disaster is, and I look forward to working with the leadership in the Appropriations Committee so the communities affected by the volcano can get the help they need.

Thank you.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I want to thank Chairman Alexander as well as Vice Chair Leahy, Chairman Shelby, Chairman Boozman, and many other people who have made this minibus work. We are going to adopt it tonight. I hope that our work over the last week has set the tone for the Senate's consideration of the remaining appropriations bills.

We have opened debate and considered a number of amendments, and we have avoided controversial issues that have too often torpedoed our work in prior years. Between rollcall votes and the managers' package, we have adopted 40 amendments, including 14 to the MILCON-VA appropriations bill. This speaks volumes to the bipartisan cooperation that I expect will continue as we try to get back to some semblance of the regular order as it relates to the appropriations process.

I especially want to thank my colleague from Arkansas, Chairman Boozman, for managing a fair amendment process and for working to keep the bill bipartisan. I want to thank subcommittee staff Patrick Magnuson, Jennifer Bastin, and Joanne Hoff. And from my subcommittee staff, I thank Chad Schulken and Jason McMahon. They worked late nights reviewing hundreds of amendments.

I also want to thank our counterparts on the Energy and Water and Legislative Branch Subcommittees, and their staffs, for their great work over the past few months to put together bills that I believe will pass overwhelmingly today.

Lastly, it is important to thank Chairman Shelby and Vice Chairman Leahy for getting us to this point. By the end of the week, we will have reported out of the full committees all 12 government funding bills with 3 having passed the floor, and all before July 4. That is what is possible when there is a commitment to making this place work.

I will just call out one particular moment that actually impressed me. Things got a little wobbly when the rescissions package, which was a privileged matter, hit the floor. We had a couple of tough conversations, but we navigated our way through that. Then there was an amendment offered that was in order, but it was about waters of the United States. Without getting into great detail about this, there is probably nothing that causes people to go put on their partisan jerseys more than WOTUS--waters of the United States. Chairman Shelby and many Republicans, including Leader McConnell, said, essentially: Listen, I am with you, Senator Lee, in principle, but this is not the bill on which to do this. That is the kind of discipline that is going to be required of both parties if we are going to keep the appropriations process on track and allow it to be held harmless from some of our more partisan disputes.

Their strong leadership and that of their staffs--Shannon Hines, Jonathan Graffeo, and David Adkins from the majority and, of course, Chuck Kieffer, Chanda Betourney, and Jessica Berry from the minority-- have gotten us where we are today. I urge all of my colleagues to support the minibus package.

I yield the floor.