Floor Statements

Mr. President, last week TrumpCare died, and lots of people are trying to figure out exactly what happened. In my view, it was not a lack of strategy; it was not a lack of effort; it was not a lack of personal relationship between the Speaker and the President. It died because the policy stank. It died because people actually--left, right, and center--decided that cutting Medicaid by $900 billion in order to provide a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans of the exact same amount was just not a good idea in policy or in politics.

Now that TrumpCare has crashed and burned, Republicans are essentially going to try to do the same thing--tax cuts for the rich. Yet, this time, instead of funding it by cutting Medicaid, they are going to charge people more for groceries. Here is their proposal: They want to cut taxes for corporations again. That is what they want to do. Whether one is talking about infrastructure or whether one is talking about healthcare or whether one is talking about so-called tax reform, their solution to everything is to cut taxes for corporations. They want to cut taxes for corporations again, but this time American families will pay for it through taxes on groceries and the other stuff they have to buy on a day-to-day basis.

We have seen this before. It is a giveaway for corporations and the wealthiest among us, but, as usual, they have to find a pay-for, a way to make the arithmetic work, a way to pay for it. They are going to keep proposing so-called solutions for healthcare, infrastructure, or in this case tax reform, but they are basically the same proposal. It is a subsidy for Wall Street. It is because they cannot help themselves.

This particular giveaway will cost the average American family thousands of dollars. Families will have to pay more for gas, medicine, clothes, cars, food. That is how a so-called border adjustment tax works. Everything one buys in the United States will be taxed, and everything outside of the United States will not be taxed. The sort of principle behind that is that somehow we are going to stimulate exports and disincentivize imports. It is not just that you are paying more on the stuff that is imported; it is that everything in the United States that you purchase you will have to pay more for in order to incentivize exports. But all you are doing is charging the American people more. This is essentially a sales tax.

I talked to members of my staff, and they were trying to get into the sort of technocratic, legal details about whether it is technically a sales tax or a value-added tax or a border adjustment tax that fits into some other legal category. But for a regular person, it does not matter what you call it; if you pay more and the government is collecting it, it is an increase in taxes.

They are going to dazzle you with complexity, and I think some in the House Republican leadership are very skillful at trying to make this more complicated than it is. They are trying to dazzle you with complexity so you do not know what they are doing. They are raising taxes on groceries and all of the stuff you buy. That is their version of tax reform.

I can understand. The Tax Code is awful, it is a mess, and we have been trying to do tax reform for I think 30 years. It is not unreasonable for the average American to say ``Yes, you ought to reform the Tax Code,'' but, remember, when they talk tax reform, they want you to have to go to the store and buy a steak, a hotdog, a head of lettuce, gasoline, pillows, diapers, paper--whatever you need--and it is going to cost more with so-called tax reform. If they succeed, the average American family could pay up to $1,700 more per year in order that corporations can get their tax cuts. Think about what $1,700 means for families across the country. For a family of four, with two kids in middle school, $1,700 pays for a few months' worth of groceries. In Hawaii, $1,700 will cover rent for a month, and in lots of other places, it will cover rent for 4 or 5 months. For some people, it pays a year's worth of an electric bill. In the State of Hawaii, it will pay for 4 or 5 months of your electric bill.

We know for certain this will hurt consumers, but on a macroeconomic level--in other words, for the entire country--we have no idea what a border adjustment tax would actually do in terms of our international relationships.

I understand. I voted against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the trade promotion authority. I have been very, very concerned about the extent to which we have not been getting the better of these trade deals, especially when it comes to people who are in unions across the country. But we do not want to engage in a trade war. We do not want to screw up American manufacturing, American farming. We have no idea what the impact would be. Even if one is willing to accept increasing the cost of goods in the United States for some theoretical possibility that this will incentivize exports, we have no idea what it is going to do to the American economy overall. Even in the best-case scenario, entire industries will fall apart.

Take tourism. In 2016 alone, tourism supported nearly 5.5 million American jobs directly and almost 10 million more in industries like restaurants and retail. The tourism industry pumps $2.6 billion into our economy every day. That is more than $30,000 per second.

I will say one other thing about tourism. As we worry about automation, as we worry about artificial intelligence, as we worry about a global economy that is going to eviscerate some of our core industries, tourism is one thing that cannot be taken away from us. If people want to go to Los Angeles, if people want to go to Cleveland, if people want to go to Hawaii, if people want to go to St. Louis, MO, or Kansas City, MO, or Florida, these are jobs that cannot be taken away. So if you want to infuse cash into an economy, create a tourism economy--all of these jobs and all of this revenue will be under threat if this works out the way they want it to work out because the dollar will be so strong that Americans will want to travel abroad and foreigners will want to travel far, far away from us.

Why are we punishing consumers and small businesses? Why are we putting entire industries at risk? House Republicans will tell you it is because they think the corporate tax is too high, but here is the truth: Right now, major corporations have huge teams of tax lawyers who set up fake shell companies so that they get around paying Federal taxes at all, or they abuse loopholes to drastically lower what they owe to the U.S. Government. That is why we see some corporations that end up paying zero dollars in Federal income tax year after year even though they are making a healthy profit in the United States.

Together, Republicans and Democrats should be going after these tax dodgers. Instead of just getting rid of loopholes, they have decided to tax consumers. This makes no sense, and that is why we have to stop it.

Last week, we saved healthcare for 24 million Americans because people

across the country of all political persuasions stood up to fight. This week, the fight goes on. Once again, far too many people are in the crosshairs. I believe strongly that so long as we continue to stand together, we can win this one too. A huge tax cut for the wealthy cannot be funded by increasing the cost of groceries.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, today, we will vote on a resolution that will take away privacy protections from the American people. By voting for this resolution, Congress is ignoring the fact that people want more protections online, not fewer.

In 2016, Pew did a study to determine the state of privacy in the United States, and the center found ``Americans express a consistent lack of confidence about the security of everyday communication channels and the organizations that control them.''

Pew found that this is especially true when it comes to the internet. People no longer trust organizations--public or private--to protect the data they collect.

Today, we are going to make that worse. That is because broadband providers know our complete browsing history. Think about that for a second. They know everything we do online, everything we search for on a daily basis. Think about how personal that information is, how it paints a picture of who we are. It is totally reasonable for broadband providers to have to ask customers for their consent before they take that information--our browsing history, what we do online--and sell it to a third party.

That will no longer be the case after the Republicans vote for this bill and it is enacted into law. Broadband providers will be able to take your browsing history and sell it without your permission. The FCC spent months on this rule, and by using the CRA to get rid of it, Congress is taking away the FCC's authority to do anything like it ever again. That will mean there is no Federal agency--not the FTC, not the FCC--that will even have jurisdiction over the issue of privacy for broadband providers.

What is the solution here? We should work with the private sector, the FCC, and the FTC to find a comprehensive solution together.

At a time when data collection and use is increasing exponentially, Republicans should not be rolling back protections for consumers. This is yet another repeal without replace.

Fifty-five years ago this month, President Kennedy gave a seminal speech about consumer rights. He spoke about the march of technology-- how it had outpaced old laws and regulations and how fast that progress had occurred. That progress is only getting faster. The next massive technological change will be the ``internet of things,'' in which we will have tens of billions of devices connected to each other and interacting with us whether we like it or not.

As technology marches on, what stays the same is the bedrock principle that President Kennedy outlined, which is that consumers have a right to be safe, a right to be informed, a right to choose, and a right to be heard. Those rights are in jeopardy. The FCC took a small but important step, but the Republicans are walking it back.

Let me be clear. This is the single biggest step backward in online privacy in many years. I urge a ``no'' vote.

I ask unanimous consent all time be yielded back.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I would like to talk about U.S. support for Israel. It used to be that U.S. support for Israel was bipartisan. One of the most deeply disappointing realities in Washington today is that this support is becoming characterized as increasingly partisan. That is because--what happened was Republicans came out against one of President Obama's signature foreign policy achievements, the Iran nuclear deal.

That opposition came in the face of consensus among national security experts across the political spectrum, both here and in Israel, that this deal was good for the security of Israel. Ultimately, what happened is, it politicized our foreign policy in the Middle East to the point that what would have otherwise been a bipartisan vote for a bipartisan consensus Ambassador to the country of Israel from the United States, will now be confirmed along mostly party lines.

People will look at this confirmation and say: U.S. support for Israel now exists largely on a partisan basis. Let's be clear. It does not. I support every penny that goes to Israel. I think it is critical that the country maintains its qualitative military edge in the region, and I take a backseat to no one in my personal or professional passion for the United States-Israel relationship.

That is why I cannot support Mr. Friedman's nomination to be the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. He has radical views. He has made outrageous and offensive statements on a wide range of issues.

Here is a sampling of his past comments. Mr. Friedman has said that the State Department is anti-Semitic. He has said that President Obama is an anti-Semite. He has said that the two-state solution solves a ``nonexistent problem.'' Mr. Friedman has called for Israeli citizens who are Arabs to be stripped of their civil rights. He has lobbed one of the worst words in Jewish history at large parts of the American Jewish community, calling them ``kapos,'' which is a term for the Jews who worked for the Nazis in concentration camps. These are more than just provocative statements by Mr. Friedman; they are lies.

For decades, the United States has stood firm as an honest broker of peace. We have said to both sides that they can trust us to help end this conflict, and that is based on the principle that the United States is passionate about peace in Israel but dispassionate about how we get there. Mr. Friedman is not objective about how we get there. On the contrary, he is very passionately for settlements, and he is very passionately against the two-state solution, which means he is basically against decades of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy.

Just a few months ago, the organization he led advertised that they have a new program that will train students to ``successfully delegitimize the notion of a two-state solution.'' This group is actively working to take the two-state solution off the table.

I understand that the Senate is not fully aligned on U.S. foreign policy when it comes to Israel. I understand we have our disagreements. We may disagree on whether a two-state solution is best, on where our Embassy should be located, and on how to approach the peace process, but there are some things we ought to be able to agree upon: that our Ambassador to Israel should not be more involved in Israel's politics than our own, that our Ambassador to Israel should not be so provocative that they wouldn't even be welcome at the negotiating table, and that our Ambassador should not be the kind of person who uses language to fuel violence, hate, and instability. That means we should be able to agree that our Ambassador to Israel cannot be Mr. Friedman.

I urge my colleagues to join me in voting no to support U.S.-Israel relations and reject Mr. Friedman's confirmation.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Mr. President.

It is really a simple proposition and it is a scary one. As soon as this legislation is enacted, internet service providers can collect your browsing data and sell it without your permission. Right now there is a lot of conversation about who has jurisdiction, the FTC or the FCC, and who is more appropriate to govern internet privacy, whether this should be public sector or private sector, but the basic question is this for the pending legislation, Should ISPs, your internet service provider, be allowed to collect your browsing data without your permission and sell it? I think the answer for 98 percent of the public is a resounding no.

Right now there is a single Federal agency that has the authority to protect consumers and their privacy when it comes to data collected by ISPs, and that is the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, but the Republicans are proposing that the Congress strip the FCC's ability to protect your privacy, and when they succeed, the American people will lose the very few Federal protections they have when it comes to online privacy.

Think about how much of your life is on line today--banking, health, your interactions with your kids, your kids' interactions with other kids. It is incredibly personal, and it is not just confidential information in a traditional sense or in a legal sense, it is really a complete picture of everything you are. That is why this is worth fighting about. It is worth protecting. That is why the FCC made these rules--to recognize that we live so much of our lives online and that in a lot of instances we don't really feel like we have a choice about whether we are going to engage in a contract to get broadband service. That is a necessity for many of us. Consumers deserve some basic protections, not only do the Republicans want to get rid of the FCC rule that basically says an ISP cannot collect your data and sell it for commercial purposes, but they want to do it in a way that will ensure that no Federal agency, not a single one, will have jurisdiction over privacy for consumers using broadband. They are trying to take the referee off the playing field and for good.

The problem is very simple. There are actually two agencies that could have jurisdiction over privacy online, but there was a Ninth Circuit Court decision that made a ruling that removes the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission over online privacy in the broadband space. So of the two agencies, the FTC and FCC, the FTC, according to this Federal court, no longer has jurisdiction. Now it is on the FCC's

side of the house, but if we repeal the FCC rule, the way the Congressional Review Act runs is that it will prevent us from ever addressing something ``substantially similar'' again. This isn't about agreeing or disagreeing with this rule. This isn't about whether you think the FCC or FTC ought to appropriately deal with this. This isn't a question about whether you think we should exercise our prerogatives in the public or private sectors. This is about whether you think nobody should have jurisdiction over your privacy online.

So what is the solution here?

Well, we should work with private sector leaders, the FCC, and the FTC to find a comprehensive approach to privacy online. That is what this legislative body should be doing. Instead of aggressively digging into this issue on behalf of consumers, we are actually blowing up the only thing we have, which is this FCC rule. To repeat, by using the Congressional Review Act, Republicans are forever preventing the FCC from protecting your privacy if you use broadband.

I want to end by noting that 55 years ago this month, President Kennedy gave a seminal speech about consumer rights. He spoke about the march of technology, how it had outpaced old laws and regulations, and how fast that progress had occurred. He noted that in just a few decades supermarkets went from carrying 1,500 products to more than 6,000, doctors wrote 90 percent of their prescriptions for drugs that no one had even heard of 20 years before, but let's fast forward to the present day, and we have blown those numbers out of the water. The average supermarket carries 40,000 products; in 2015 alone, the FDA approved 51 new drugs; and of course we now have the internet, which in the United States grew from 148 million users to nearly 240 million in just 15 years. The next nonincremental change in technology in our lives will be the internet of things, in which we will have tens of billions of devices connected to each other and interacting with us whether we like it or not. So the march of technology goes on, but what stays the same is the bedrock principle that President Kennedy outlined; that consumers have the right to be safe, they have the right to be informed, they have the right to choose, and they have the right to be heard. Those rights are in jeopardy. The FCC took a small but important step, and now the Republicans are blowing that up.

Let me be clear. This is the single biggest step backward for online privacy in many years, and we have failed the American people when it comes to their privacy. We should be staring this problem in the face, but what we are doing tonight and tomorrow is making it worse. That is why I will vote no, and I will urge my colleagues to vote no on this resolution.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, what should we call it? What do we call this new bill the Republicans are rushing

through to take away healthcare from millions of Americans? Is it TrumpCare? Is it RyanCare?

It is important to remember that both Paul Ryan and President Trump are branding experts. The President put his name on a line of steaks. He put his name on a magazine, on hotels. Then, here is the Speaker of the House, who has worked pretty hard to be thought of, at least in this town, as a policy wonk and serious thinker, who has branded everything he has worked on from the Ryan budget to ``A Better Way.'' Yet neither leader of the Republican Party wants to own this thing. That is because TrumpCare is one of the worst pieces of legislation I have ever seen.

The process has been a total mess, and this is despite the fact that the Republicans had 7 years to work on a plan. At first, they were thinking about doing this without getting a score from the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO. Then they realized that even their own Members--even their loyal soldiers--did not want to vote on something without knowing how much it would cost or how many people would lose healthcare.

Now they are saying the score either does not matter or it is wrong except for the areas in which they like the score. They spent the last 48 hours trashing the CBO, when there is plenty of evidence that for the last 8 years, they referred to the CBO as an expert source when it fit their needs.

Look, the legislative process requires hearings, expert testimony, and that is not a mere formality. That is how you get a decent product. For all of the complaints about the way the ACA was passed, they did have hearings; they had discussions. It took over a year. President Obama, himself, even went to the Republican retreat and personally engaged in policy.

Moving this fast without having hearings is the kind of thing you do when naming a post office or doing some other noncontroversial measure, or it is the kind of thing you do for something that you don't want people to look at very closely because, with every moment that passes, this coalition frays, if it ever existed in the first place.

Now you have criticism from literally the left, right, and center. That is, in part, because no one saw this coming. No one expected a bill that would look like this because during the campaign this administration promised not to cut Medicaid. It promised that everyone--every single American--would have health insurance, but here we are. If TrumpCare becomes law, 14 million people will lose their healthcare next year. Let me repeat that. In just 1 year, 14 million Americans will no longer have the health insurance they were promised.

I want to talk about what that means, what will it mean if people no longer have healthcare.

This week, the Washington Post featured the stories of people in a single county whose lives have changed for the better because of Medicaid. In McDowell County, WV, Medicaid has helped thousands of people get access to physical therapy and immunizations. It has allowed them to see counselors for mental health problems and opioid addiction. It has helped them to afford the medication they need instead of relying on free samples from clinics.

These services do not just benefit the individuals, they benefit the whole community by making sure people are healthy enough so they can work and contribute to the economy. They allow us to save money by focusing on prevention instead of treatment. This is what is at stake. These are the services that will go away because TrumpCare is going to cut Medicaid by $880 billion.

Here is another thing. TrumpCare is also going to impose an age tax that will allow insurance companies to charge older people more money for health insurance--a lot more. I want to be clear. We are not just talking about senior citizens here, we are talking about people who are pre-Medicare; in other words, anyone under the age of 65 but not exactly young. For example, a 64-year-old will be charged up to five times the amount a 21-year-old will be charged. Starting at age 25, the older you get, the more money you will get charged. That is why AARP has come out against this bill, because every year you get older they will charge you more. This is an age tax. This is a penalty for getting older.

There is an important point to be made about process, and that is this: This is actually not a healthcare bill. That is not a political statement. That is not a rhetorical flourish. Here is what is going on. If this were a healthcare bill, it would be new legislation. In order to pass legislation, under the rules of the U.S. Senate, which were agreed upon by both parties over many years, you need 60 votes. The reason we are working this through reconciliation is, they have nowhere near 60 votes.

So what can you do within the reconciliation process? They are basically stuck with dealing with taxes and subsidies because they only require 51 votes. That is all they can do. This is a tax vehicle.

Then, the question becomes, Who is getting money, and who is getting charged more money? On that count, this tax bill is one of the biggest wealth transfers in American history. It is a transfer from working- class Americans to rich Americans. That is what this bill does. It takes money from the people who need help the most and gives it to the very wealthy.

Here we are in 2017, just a few months out from an election in which income inequality was one of the driving issues on both sides of the aisle. What the Republicans in the House seem to take from that experience is that their mandate is to go in and reduce taxes for insurance executives who make more than $500,000 a year and for the investor class in order to cut Medicaid by $880 billion. It is like they were asleep all of last year or maybe they were never very serious about income inequality. We do not need another election to know this is not what the American people expect from the Congress. They expect bipartisan compromise. They expect results that will make their healthcare better.

My own view is, we can work together on healthcare, but it requires three things: first, good faith; second, bipartisanship; third, legislative hearings. Frankly, we have seen none of these things because the process has been a mess. We need to have a conversation in the light of day and let the American people weigh in. What is the rush?

There is no doubt there is plenty of room for improvement in the existing healthcare law, but TrumpCare makes it much worse. It will cause chaos in the American economy and in 24 million Americans' lives. That is a threat to the progress we have made over the last 7 years. It is a threat to one-sixth of the American economy. Most of all, it is a threat to at least 24 million Americans who stand to lose their healthcare.

These threats are the reasons the Senate needs to come together and say: Slow down. Let's work together. Let's work on forming a bipartisan foundation. Let's have hearings. Most importantly, let's not impose this catastrophe in a hurry on the American people.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, last night the Republicans in the House revealed their plan to scrap the ACA and replace it with something much worse--TrumpCare. There are so many things that are wrong with this bill. A lot of us are still going through the 184 pages and all of its implications, so it is impossible to encapsulate all the difficulties in this legislation in one speech.

I am going to highlight eight problems with this bill to start. First of all, this bill is a complicated and rushed mess. Despite the fact that they had 7 years to work on their own plan, the Republicans cobbled together a bill that makes no sense. In an effort to make everyone in their caucus happy, they have made no one in their caucus happy. That is why we have seen conservative groups--from AEI to AFP, the Heritage Foundation, the Koch brothers--come out and express opposition to the legislation.

Second, this bill cuts Medicaid. They are going to use a phrase called block grants, but I want everyone to understand that is cutting Medicaid. That is a euphemism for cutting the resources for Medicaid. This cuts a program that helps more than 70 million Americans across the country get the healthcare they need. It means less care for pregnant moms, less care for families with loved ones in nursing homes. Nursing home benefits will be totally trashed, and all of these changes will reduce Medicaid to a level not seen before.

By the way, Medicare doesn't escape the ax. It is also in trouble if we enact the House legislation. TrumpCare will actually move up the date of insolvency of the Medicare trust fund by 3 years, to the year 2025. That is not 20, 30 years from now when they talk about the Social Security trust fund. That is quite soon to have Medicare be insolvent, and they are accelerating the date in which Medicare becomes insolvent.

Third, this bill hits the elderly with an age tax. Here is how the law currently works. It is basically a cap on the amount that an insurance company can charge a senior for healthcare. It says you cannot charge more than three times the amount you charge a young person for a senior citizen.

It is capped at three times what you charge for young people. This would increase the cap to five times the cost. If a young person's health insurance costs $250, the maximum under the current law is $750. Now you are talking five times $250--$1,250 per month.

This is an age tax. If there is any doubt about how difficult this is going to be for senior citizens, ask the AARP. They are a bipartisan, well-respected organization that works in every State. Seniors across the country need to understand what this age tax is. You will pay more for health insurance if the law passes as it is.

Fourth, and this is a very important point. This is basically not a healthcare bill because if it were a healthcare bill, everybody knows it would require 60 votes. It would be enacting new legislation. This is a budget bill. All they can do, really, is cut taxes related to healthcare. This is a bill that cuts taxes for rich people.

How does it finance it? First of all, it finances--probably a lot of it by borrowing. The other portion of it is by cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. TrumpCare has special tax cuts that only benefit the highest earning households and another one that will go to insurance company executives who make more than half a million dollars a year.

You cannot make this stuff up. They are cutting taxes for insurance company executives who make more than half a million dollars each year, and they are financing it by cutting healthcare for the people we all represent.

Fifth, this bill will blow up the debt and the deficit. The crazy thing is, we don't actually know how much our debt and deficit will increase because Republicans are in such a hurry to rush this through without a formal CBO analysis. We have no idea how much this is going to cost--probably trillions, but they haven't even asked for a CBO score. They don't want to know how much this is going to blow up the debt and the deficit because all of the fiscal hawks will be found to be hypocrites who have been railing about deficits for all of their career. Yet this might be the biggest budget-busting piece of legislation in many, many years, and they don't want to know how much it costs because they have made a promise. They are going to go ahead and fulfill that promise no matter how ridiculous it is.

Sixth, this bill will trash mental health coverage. The ACA was a huge step forward for the mental health community because it required insurance companies to cover mental health and substance abuse disorders. We are in a moment when every State is struggling with an addiction crisis. What I don't know is why we would rip away these services when so many people are counting on it to break their addictions.

Seventh, this bill will defund Planned Parenthood because they can't help themselves in the U.S. House of Representatives. Planned Parenthood is a provider that offers healthcare to millions of women across the country, but this bill will stop low-income women from getting critical health services like breast cancer screenings from local clinics. Oftentimes, this would happen in communities where women have nowhere else to turn. Many community health centers don't have the services women need or they have twice the wait times that a Planned Parenthood would have. For women waiting to find out if they have cancer, that is simply not an option.

Finally, this bill is too partisan. I think we can all agree that our approach to healthcare could use some improvements, and I am more than ready to work with my Republican colleagues to make healthcare better. That is not just a rhetorical flourish. I have tried to back that up with my legislative actions. I have worked with Senator Hatch on legislation to increase access to high-quality care in hard-to-reach regions. I have worked with Senator Cassidy and many others on a bill to create a public health emergency fund. I have worked with Senators Wicker, Cochran, and Thune on a telehealth bill.

We can work together on healthcare, but it requires three things: No. 1, good faith, and there is no good faith in this piece of legislation. No. 2, bipartisanship. This bill, I am quite sure, will get zero Democratic votes in the House or the Senate. No. 3, we need legislative hearings. We need to have a conversation in the light of day and let the American people weigh in. We need to figure out what it is that they are doing to the American healthcare system.

If they are so proud of their plan, why no hearings? If they are so proud of their plan, why not get at least a score from the Congressional Budget Office? If they are so proud of their plan, why do they lack the confidence that any Democrat will support it?

Look, we do have the opportunity to work together to improve healthcare, but this bill is basically a mess. It is worse than I thought. I think it is worse than a lot of people thought, especially given that they have been talking about this for 7 years. So one might think they would have had a really well-thought-through plan. This has all of the characteristics of something that was rushed out the door in about a 48-hour period.

I hope my colleagues will join me in opposing this very bad piece of legislation and give us some space and time to do this right and to do this in a bipartisan fashion.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, yesterday the New York Times published a story about the nearly 100 Federal protections this administration has attacked. The article highlighted a few of the outcomes of these attacks. For example, telecommunication companies are no longer required to take reasonable measures to protect the Social Security numbers of their customers, and people with severe, disabling mental health issues are now able to buy guns--but do not worry because refugees from war-torn countries like Sudan won't be coming into our country anytime soon. Today, in about an hour, Republicans are going after yet another protection. This time, it is one that protects Americans who work for Federal contractors.

Up until a few years ago, companies that cut corners and saved money by treating their employees badly held a competitive advantage over law-abiding companies in competing for Federal contracts, so President Obama put a policy in place to take away that advantage. In 2015, he put a new protection in place so that the companies that had histories of unsafe working conditions would have to report those histories when they applied for Federal contracts. The idea here is pretty simple: If you want to work for the Federal Government, you need to follow the law, and if you do not, the government has a right to know so that the companies that cut corners do not have a competitive advantage by being able to bid more cheaply over those who play by the rules.

Republicans often claim to be in favor of leveling the playing field for businesses. After all, that was the rationale that was used last month when they voted so that coal companies were no longer responsible for cleaning up their own messes and oil companies could hide payments to foreign governments. Both of those actions were taken in the supposed spirit of caring about the ability of companies to compete. Business competition was placed above the rights of communities to clean air and clean water or the right of American consumers to know they are not supporting a dictator when they fill up at the fuel tank.

But now, when it comes to safe workplaces and pay discrimination, suddenly, having companies compete on a level playing field is not the priority. This just does not make sense to me. This policy was good for workers, good for taxpayers, and good for companies that play by the rules. We should all agree that companies that have good safety and wage records should not be placed at a competitive disadvantage, but the Republicans are giving Federal contractors a green light for pay discrimination and unsafe working conditions. That is the only signal we send by taking away this policy from the previous administration. This is yet another example of the empty words of an administration that claims to care about empowering women in the workplace.

Last week, the President signed two Executive orders that were designed to appear to promote women in the workplace, but when you look beyond the photo-op and the actual orders, they do not do a thing for women in the workplace. They do not put one Federal dollar toward advancing gender equality and gender equity. Now the Republicans are putting a bill on the floor and eventually on the President's desk that will make it easier for companies that discriminate against women in the workplace to get Federal dollars.

If this administration and if this Congress really care about making sure women do not face bias and discrimination, if they really care about businesses being able to compete on a level playing field, then why attack this protection?

I urge my colleagues to do the right thing and vote to keep the fair pay and safe workplaces protection in place.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, 20 is the number of bomb threats that were called into Jewish institutions in our communities across the country yesterday--in just 1 day. In Alabama, Delaware, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, and in my home State of Hawaii, in my Temple Emanu-El, where I grew up and was bar mitzvahed. No one wants to be the parent who picks up the phone and finds out that they need to pick up their child from school because people are threatening violence--and all because of their faith.

Since 2017 began, 100 bomb threats have been called into Jewish schools and Jewish community centers. It sounds like it is from another time, but this is what rising anti-Semitism looks like in our country. Granted, we knew weird stuff was happening: Pepe, David Dukes--this is not normal America. But now the threat of violence is real. It is coming through the phone lines of American schools every day, and it is loud and clear. This rising threat demands leadership. It demands that we regularly and quickly denounce anti-Semitism and do everything we can do to stop it from growing. But that is not what we have seen so far from this administration.

Now, the baseline expectation of an unequivocal, quick and regular disavowal of rising anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim rhetoric from the leader of the free world is no longer being met. Instead, we have to extract it from the administration. We have to ask for it when it doesn't come. We have to ask when it is coming. What is even sadder is that this administration has avoided any opportunity--even the easy ones, even the most obvious ones--to stand against anti-Semitism.

Just over a month ago, the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The White House put out a statement without a single mention of the 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. Here is the crazy thing: The first draft mentioned Jews. The State Department drafted the initial statement which mentioned Jews, like every Holocaust Remembrance Day statement before it did. Then it went to the White House where someone thought: Let's make edits. Let's remove mention of Jews from a statement about International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This was someone's decision. It was an intentional decision. Who would decide that, and why would that be done?

Why remove the mention of Jews? It is like mentioning slavery and not mentioning African Americans. It is like mentioning internment and not mentioning Japanese Americans. When you are talking about genocide, it is not irrelevant to talk about who did it and to whom. It is a requirement. But the White House didn't mention Jews, and it didn't apologize when people were rightfully confused. Only now that violence has been unleashed, that Jewish cemeteries are being desecrated, that people's children are being threatened on a daily basis are we seeing the minimum from the White House to recognize the rise of anti-Semitic sentiments and actions.

I am worried.

Local communities have taken it upon themselves to lead the way and stand up together. This is what leadership looks like. It looks like Muslim Americans showing up to cemeteries to help to restore Jewish headstones. It looks like local police raising money and people taking time to hold a vigil in solidarity with their Jewish neighbors. There have been far too many bystanders to the increasing anti-Semitism across the country. It is long past time to break the silence and to make it utterly clear that the United States is not a place for hate. It is un-American to hate Jews or Muslims or strangers in our midst. That is not who we are or what we stand for. That is not the United States of America.

This week, as Jewish communities are reviewing bomb threat guidance and looking at best practices for security, it is up to all of us to take action and to do everything we can to beat back rising anti- Semitism.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I think it is important to understand what just happened today that makes this debate on Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA so critically important. We call ourselves the world's greatest deliberative body, and that is actually a well-earned reputation. Sometimes we move slowly. Sometimes we move so slowly that it is maddening for both parties and for the American public. There is a reason that the Senate moves slowly. It is because in a lot of instances it has the weightiest decisions that any public official could ever make. In this instance, we are deciding on the person to comply with the Clean Air and the Clean Water Acts, the Endangered Species Act, to discharge their duties as the leader of the EPA.

Something happened today that changes this whole debate. In Federal law, there is something called FOIA, the public records law regarding Federal officials. Most State laws have some kind of open records law, and Oklahoma is no different. There was a lawsuit against the Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, and it basically said: Listen, you have to disclose the emails between your office and a bunch of energy industry companies. And the context here is absolutely important. Scott Pruitt is not just a person who is bad on the issue of climate; this is a person who is a professional climate denier. This is a person who has made his bones, politically and professionally, trying to undermine all the authorities the EPA possesses. This is a person who is a plaintiff in multiple lawsuits, as the Oklahoma attorney general, against the EPA. This is a person who has not promised to recuse himself when he is running the EPA. So imagine that there are going to be pending lawsuits where he was the plaintiff, and they are going to still be before the EPA. He was asked in committee whether he would recuse himself, because obviously it is preposterous to be both the plaintiff and the defendant in a lawsuit. It just stands to reason. He did not promise to recuse himself.

So this is a person who has an incredibly close, uncomfortably close working relationship with the fossil fuel industry. He may have that as a sincerely held belief, but the Oklahoma State law requires that he disclose whom he is working with. Why is that relevant? Well, he actually had a couple of instances where he has taken language given to him, sent to him by email from oil companies, and he just copied it-- select all, copy, drop it, paste it--onto Oklahoma attorney general letterhead, and then transmitted it to the EPA as if it were from the AG's office in Oklahoma. So that is the context.

What did this Federal judge say today? An Oklahoma County district court judge said that according to the Oklahoma Open Records Act-- Aletia Haynes Timmons from the district court of Oklahoma instructed Pruitt's office to hand over the emails by close of business next Tuesday.

So here we are, trying to jam through this nomination, and now it makes perfect sense why they wanted to run the clock. They had congressional delegation trips to Munich for the security conference. There were Republicans who were planning to meet with NATO allies. There was another overseas trip of great import. Yet they abandon all other obligations, all other objectives, and they are bound and determined to run this clock until 1 p.m. tomorrow because they need to vote before these emails become disclosed. Tuesday is when we will see these emails. Yet we seem to be in a

race to get this vote done tomorrow at 1 p.m. Something feels wrong about this. Something feels like they are worried about the contents of those emails.

Gosh, I hope I am wrong. I hope on Tuesday that these emails are perfunctory, professional, proper. I hope I am wrong. I hope my fears and suspicions about what may be in those emails are unfounded. But here we are in the so-called world's greatest deliberative body, and we decided we don't even need another 2 business days to deliberate or to gather more information.

This is a decision that will stick for 4 years. This is a nominee who will run one of the most important Federal agencies that there is, the one in charge of clean air and clean water. The person in charge of clean air and clean water has been corresponding with oil and gas and coal companies--nothing necessarily illegal or untoward about that, but he seems to not want people to know what the content of that correspondence was.

The context here is very, very important, and that is why I am asking that we delay this vote until every Member of the Senate can read and review these emails. I think it is very important that we understand what is in the contents of those emails because there are some things we know about Mr. Pruitt. I am going to try really hard not to impugn his personal motivation. I have no doubt he feels sincerely about the issues we are arguing about. I don't have any reason to believe he has personally done anything improper. But I think it is totally reasonable for us to just see what is in those emails next Tuesday.

This isn't that we are trying to drag this out for 6 weeks or 6 months. This isn't that we are trying to cook up an issue. I didn't know about these emails, actually, until Monday. I didn't know there was a court case. I was perfectly ready to say: Look, it looks like they have the votes. We will have our argument. Maybe we can persuade a couple of people--certainly Susan Collins has been a profile in courage here, and there are Members of the Senate on the Republican side who have been on the right side of climate. But you know what, all that gets washed away. All that gets washed away because you don't get to be on the right side of climate and vote for a climate denier for the Environmental Protection Agency.

And lest you think I am being a little bit overheated here in terms of who Scott Pruitt is, this is what Scott Pruitt has said about himself. He describes himself as a leading advocate against the EPA's agenda. On the role of the EPA he says:

I believe that the EPA has a role to play in our Republican

form of government. Air and water quality issues can cross

State lines, and can sometimes require Federal intervention.

At the same time, the EPA was never intended to be our

Nation's frontline environmental regulator.

That is kind of a well-put-together statement, but I want you to understand how radical of a statement that is, because the EPA was designed to be the Nation's frontline environmental regulation.

The basic premise is that there are certain things that can be done at the local level that ought to be done at the local level. When we configured our governments, we decided we want police forces and firehouses and other municipal services--sewer and water, and trash pickup--certain things get done locally. Some things get done at the county level. Some things get done at the State level. And what we have decided as a nation is that because pollution doesn't recognize municipal, State, or even Federal boundaries, that we actually need Federal law to make sure that if one State is polluting, it doesn't move over to the other State. So the idea that the EPA was never intended to be our Nation's frontline environmental regulator, which is what Mr. Pruitt says, is actually quite radical. It is an intentional misunderstanding of what the EPA is for. It is intended to be our frontline environmental regulator.

Here is Mr. Pruitt on climate change:

Global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates

of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists

continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global

warming and its connections to the actions of mankind. That

debate should be encouraged in classrooms, public forums and

the halls of Congress.

I have to hand it to Mr. Pruitt--he magnificently describes radical policies as though they are not radical. He is very skillful at that. He is very lawyerly at that.

He did very well, in my view, in the EPW Committee, but his views are essentially that the EPA is not the frontline in terms of protecting clean air and clean water, and that blows up the mission of the EPA.

I see the Senator from Rhode Island is here. I would be happy to entertain any questions he may have in a moment.

A couple more quotes from Mr. Pruitt on the Clean Power Plan:

The president could announce the most ``state-friendly''

plan possible, but it would not change the fact that the

administration does not have the legal authority under the

Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions.

``[T]hat the administration does not have the legal authority for regulate carbon emissions.'' Wrong. Factually wrong. Legally wrong. This has been settled. Massachusetts v. EPA. I left my law degree in my apartment, but I know Massachusetts v. EPA, and I know this is flat wrong. So what he says is totally radical. He is a skillful guy. I assume he is a good guy, but he wants to undermine the basic authorities of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

I will finish with this quote before I yield for a question from the Senator from Rhode Island on methane regulation.

My concern is that the EPA is employing its flawed

methodology in order to rationalize new and unjustified

federal regulations to solve a methane emissions problem that

simply does not exist.

That has no basis in fact.

I see the Senator from Rhode Island. Before I yield for his question, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy with the Senators from Rhode Island and Oregon.

I would be happy to yield to the Senator from Rhode Island, if he is ready.

Well, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island. I think one of the great challenges is that it is one thing to misunderstand the EPA's role here; that is dangerous enough as the attorney general of a State or the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association. But when you are in the EPA and you have charge to administer the law, to discharge your duties under Federal law, to the degree and extent that you misunderstand the authorities in the Clean Air Act as either weaker than they may be or sort of optional--I mean, this is the issue in Massachusetts v. EPA.

For instance, the question around carbon was resolved. There were a couple of questions. First of all, is carbon an airborne pollutant? The Supreme Court and the EPA made their finding, and they determined that it was an airborne pollutant.

Once you determine that something is an airborne pollutant, it is not for the EPA, on a discretionary basis, to try to regulate that airborne pollutant. They are then required under Federal law to regulate that pollutant.

So part of the misunderstanding here is the question isn't, Is the EPA authorized to regulate carbon? It is, Are they required to regulate carbon? So he has it wrong doubly--first of all, on the law and second of all, on the science.

I think the danger of putting someone like that in a position of authority

is that they will preempt States, California and others--although California has some pretty significant carve-outs--but they will at least attempt to preempt the States from doing what they want to do to protect their clean air and their clean water.

Yes.

Well, I thank the Senator for that question. It is a really important one because essentially what Scott Pruitt is saying is: Hey, let's let the States handle this. But if you are to take him at his word, I think it is not unreasonable to say: Well how did you handle enforcement of either State or Federal environmental law as the top cop in the State of Oklahoma? Right?

He did two things that would cause everybody to question his commitment to even local environmental protection. The first thing he did when he came in as Oklahoma AG--a lot of offices the attorney general have environmental protection units. It is like a big law firm. They have different units that handle different kinds of crime. They have a civil division; they have a criminal division. They do lots of things. One of the divisions is to enforce environmental law. He disbanded it. He disbanded the State attorney general's division that enforces environmental law. Then he beefed up this thing that did not exist until he got there, which was essentially a division to undermine Federal authorities.

So you are right. He has them coming and going. He is making an argument that the State should be empowered to enforce environmental law. At least we could take that as kind of on-the-level federalism. We have some good Republican colleagues who just really believe that the government that governs least governs best. They think that local problems should be solved at the local level, even though, in my view, when it comes to air pollution and water pollution, that is essentially preposterous because pollution moves.

I really believe that for some of these Members it is a sincerely held belief. It is hard to believe this attorney general when he says: Hey, give us the authority to enforce our environmental laws, and then, when the rubber hits the road--which is how many lawyers you put on the job, how many cops you put on the beat--he basically eviscerates the division that enforces environmental law, and he beefs up this division that is basically a little shop that sues the EPA to undermine the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act federally.

Well, I think the Senator is right. You know, it is fair to look at his record. It is also fair to look at his words. In 2016-- so this is not 10 years ago; this is less than a year ago--he said: Legislation should not be ``we like clean air, so go make clean air.'' It is something that bothers me, that Congress then gives this general grant of authority to EPA.

Congress has given a general grant of authority to the EPA. That is what the law says. So, my concern, when it comes to Mr. Pruitt, is that he understands, as a member of the bar, as an attorney general, what the law says. He has been operating in a political context, I think it is fair to say, as the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association. Working with energy companies, he has been very aggressive in cultivating friends across the country who are very enthusiastic about his nomination and potential confirmation.

But he totally misunderstands the mission of the EPA. It is granted by the Congress, a general authority to enforce clean air. That is what the EPA is, really; it is clean air, and it is clean water. That is what the EPA is about.

The thing I think is especially troubling for me when it comes to the politics of this, is that there was a bipartisan consensus for many, many, many years around the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. I believe the reauthorization of the Clean Air Act came under President George H.W. Bush. This used to be not very controversial because, actually, we can fight about the Iran deal, we can fight about women's reproductive health, we can fight about LGBT rights, we can fight about civil rights, we can even fight about foreign policy and the size and scope of the government, but even if you are an extremely conservative individual, you ought to believe, to the extent that we have government at all, that it should be responsible for keeping us safe and that it is a Federal role to make sure our air is clean and our water is clean.

So this person who is very skillful in kind of eluding--you know, he basically dodged punches in that EPW Committee. We have some very skillful members on the EPW committee. They are very knowledgeable, very passionate. It was rough, but he was able to avoid a sort of knockout blow. The reason is that he is a professional climate denier. This is what this guy has been training to do all of his life.

So, again: We like clean air, so go make clean air. That is something that bothers me.

The Congress then gives a general grant of authority to EPA on the Oklahoma environmental regulations. He said: Federal regional haze standards--if you live in Oklahoma, I understand. You did not vote for Barack Obama, but I don't think you thought you were voting to reduce air quality. So he says that Federal regional haze standards threaten the competitive edge Oklahomans have enjoyed for years with low-cost and reliable electric generation.

This low-cost energy not only benefits Oklahoma manufacturers, but gives the State a considerable edge in recruiting jobs. He is the attorney general. He is supposed to enforce the law. I mean, that sounds like a Member of Congress. That sounds like a Member of the State legislature. But it does not sound to me like someone who is prepared to discharge their duties under the Federal law.

Another space where Mr. Pruitt has some alarming views is on science itself. I am deeply concerned about what is happening to science, to scientists, to government research. We just confirmed the Director of OMB who, in a Facebook post, wondered out loud--he had some questions about the Zika virus. I am not sure he had any special expertise to be raising these questions. We should all be researching and be as scientifically literate as possible, but the OMB Director put on his Facebook post: I have these questions. I am really interested in this, but the real question is whether we should have publicly funded research at all.

So there is a full-on attack on science and facts. There is a full-on attack on reality. But when it comes to environmental science, it is so consequential. I am looking at these pages sitting here. I think about everybody's children and grandchildren. We just have an obligation to get the data right, to really understand what is happening with air quality and water quality.

Here is what Mr. Pruitt says about mercury. ``Human exposure to methylmercury resulting from coal fired EGUs is exceedingly small.''

This is, again, the White Stallion Energy Center versus EPA.

This is what the scientists say: ``As a result of these long-term mercury inputs, there are hotspots and whole regions, such as the Adirondacks of New York, the Great Lakes region of the Midwest and large portions of the Southeast where the fishery is contaminated with mercury.''

There are more fish consumption advisories in the United States for mercury than all other contaminants combined.

I can tell you, just on a personal level, to the Senator from Rhode Island, that I like my ahi. I like my fresh sashimi. I like tuna, and everybody in Hawaii likes fish. So you kind of watch how much marlin you eat, how much ahi you eat because we understand that there is a real mercury problem. This isn't made up. If you talk to ER doctors in Honolulu, they have to deal with mercury poisoning on a weekly basis. That is what the science shows, and that is what the reality shows.

Here is what Mr. Pruitt says: ``The record does not support EPA's findings that mercury, non-mercury metals, and acid gas pose public health hazards.''

And here is what the scientists say: ``There is no evidence demonstrating a safe level of mercury exposure.''

So before yielding for a question, I think it is really important for all of us to understand what is at stake here. We have a nominee who is really unique in the history of the EPA because never before have we had a person who has made it their life's mission to undermine the Agency which they wish to lead.

You could probably argue that Mr. Puzder, who just withdrew his nomination yesterday, had a similar kind of attitude about the Department of Labor.

But even under Republican administrations, we have had Republican Administrators of the EPA who understood: Hey, look, the law is the Clean Air Act, the law is the Clean Water Act, the law is the Endangered Species Act, and I have an obligation, as the EPA Administrator, to accept those premises--right?--and to be the EPA Administrator, to not sort of be on my crusade against Federal law.

If he wants to undermine Federal law, he can go litigate that. He can be a private attorney or he could run for the Congress and try to be a lawmaker. But to the degree and extent that he wants to run the Agency with a specific statutory mission, he has to follow those statutes. And I have seen no evidence that he has any respect for or understanding of those statutes.

I would be happy to yield to the Senator from Rhode Island.

Well, I thank the Senator for the question.

This is what is happening today. It would be enough if we were in the process of debating and confirming a climate-denier to the EPA. It would be enough that this person is a plaintiff in 17 lawsuits against the EPA. It would be enough that he is a plaintiff in these lawsuits against the EPA and he refused to recuse himself if he is running the EPA. As Senator Markey says, he is going to be plaintiff, defendant, and judge in these lawsuits.

All of that would be enough, but today a judge is compelling him to release around 3,000 emails that have squarely to do with the debate that we are having, which is this: Is this person a little too close to the industry that he is going to regulate?

As I said before, gosh, I hope these emails, as they are disclosed, show nothing. I hope that my suspicions, my fears, my concerns are without foundation. But I think about the Republicans, the good Republicans on the other side of the aisle who are voting for this man tomorrow.

Boy, they had better hope there is nothing in those emails. They had better think very carefully about what is in those emails. They might want to delay this vote themselves because, look, if there is nothing in those emails, then we can vote two Mondays from now--no harm no foul. You have career professionals at EPA doing their job. EPA will run for another 5 or 6 business days. It is OK.

We are the world's greatest deliberative body. We go slow on almost everything, and we are rushing on this. Why are we rushing?

Well, I was trying to figure out all week why we were rushing. Then I understood that the court was going to rule today, and they are jamming this. They are ramming this down the American people's throats.

I would just offer this to my Republican colleagues: These emails are going to be disclosed, and maybe you guys and gals know that there is nothing to be concerned about in terms of the content of these emails, where the Oklahoma attorney general is corresponding with a bunch of fossil fuel

companies. Maybe it is all good in those emails.

But the thing is, if that is the case, why did he refuse for 750 days to offer the emails up? I mean, it literally takes more work to not provide the emails than to provide the emails. You have to lawyer up to not do something. You are going to lawyer up as the Oklahoma attorney general to not comply with an Oklahoma statute. This takes a special effort.

Why would somebody want to undertake such a special effort to not comply with State law? I don't know. But I think we may find out on Tuesday.

Gosh, I hope I am wrong. But I have a feeling that the people who are most nervous right now about what is in those emails--in addition to the American public who care about clean air and clean water--are the Republicans who are being forced to vote at 1 o'clock without seeing them. They are being forced to vote on this person to run the EPA that they know is unpopular.

I mean, I understand that in some States this guy is tremendously popular because it is very easy to blast the EPA. In some portion of the Republican conference, Scott Pruitt is totally popular. I get that.

There is a nontrivial number of Members on the Republican side who actually don't want to be on the wrong side of the public when it comes to clean air and clean water, but they are going to be on the wrong side of the public when it comes to clean air and clean water. And it might get worse next Tuesday.

I really wonder why you would work so hard to not disclose the contents of 3,000 emails over a 750-day period.

I want to quote from Mr. Pruitt again on climate change:

Global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates

of our time. That debate is far from settled.

Here is what the scientists say: ``The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify taking steps to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.'' This is from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2005. This wasn't just some sort of recently arrived at conclusion.

Here is Mr. Pruitt again on climate:

We've had ebb and flow. We've had obviously, climate

conditions change throughout our history. That's scientific

fact. It gets cooler, it gets hotter. We don't know the

trajectory, if it is on an unsustainable course. Nor do we

know the extent by which the burning of fossil fuels, man's

contribution to that, is making this far worse than it is.

I mean, sorry, this is not what the scientists say. This is what I say. That is just bunk. There was a point at which that was a tenable position, even if it was scientifically bunk, easily 15 years ago. It was politically kind of workable 10 years ago--maybe even 8 years ago and, depending on your community, 5 years ago. But there is a majority of Republicans who understand the urgency of climate change.

The only place where the reality of climate change continues to be debated fiercely is in the halls of Congress.

Local people in every community across the country understand that this thing is settled fact. This thing is upon us. You don't have to be some wonk. You don't have to understand ocean acidification. You don't have to understand exactly what is going on. You just have to, A, listen to experts who know about climate, who know about weather, who know about atmospheric science. Even if you don't believe any of the experts, you just have to believe your own experience. There is not a person out there--whether they are a fisherman on the Big Island or a farmer in the Midwest or a hunter in the Southwest--there is not a person out there who isn't experiencing the weather getting strange.

Everybody understands that 1 day of weird weather does not climate change make. But there is just no doubt that severe weather and odd weather is getting more frequent and more odd and more severe.

Here is what the scientists say about climate change:

The scientific evidence is clear: Global climate change

caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a

growing threat to society.

Here is Mr. Pruitt again:

Is it truly man-made and is this just simply another period

of time where the Earth is cooling, increasing in heat? Is it

just typical, natural type of occurrences as opposed to what

the administration says?''

I mean, this is so far out of the mainstream that it would be funny if it weren't terrifying. It would be funny if it weren't terrifying to think that the person who is going to run the Environmental Protection Agency, the person who is going to be in charge of administering the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act is saying: Is it truly man-made and is this just simply just another period of time where the Earth is cooling, increasing in heat? I mean, is it just a natural type of occurrence, as opposed to what the Obama administration says?

I would be happy to yield to the Senator for a question. I will note that we have a joke where I am the good cop and he is the bad cop, but I think over time, we are merging.

Well, I think----

You were asking about the willful blindness.

I want to make an observation that there are a couple of kinds of willful blindness. One is willful blindness about climate change in the first place, a desire not to hear the truth, a desire to put blinders on when it comes to these issues. I will note that not every time but almost every time we have a debate on climate, we have a nice complement of Democrats on this side and a totally empty Chamber on the other side. It is not that they don't know what is going on, it is that they know exactly what is going on, and they don't want to deal with it. They don't want to deal with it, and they are good people and patriotic people, but there is a reason to believe this willful blindness is not coincidental.

I would just implore the Senate Republicans who respect the Senate, who understand our special role under the Constitution to give advice and consent on nominations for Cabinet positions, that this isn't some minor sub-Cabinet position. This isn't some matter of little import. I understand both sides employ tactics to delay action on the Senate floor. That is kind of part of the way this body works, right? The minority slows the majority down, and we try to come to some kind of consensus, sometimes a unanimous consent agreement or whatever it may be, to try to make this place work a little better, and it is maddeningly slow, but it forces bipartisanship, right?

I understand the accusation that sometimes gets made that we are just trying to delay for delay's sake. At the beginning of this week--look, I ran for the Senate because of climate. That is how passionately I feel about this issue, but I understood how this thing was lining up, and I said: Look, let's fight the fight. There is no magic between 28 hours and 30 hours. There is no magic between 29 hours of talking about this and 26 hours of talking about this. I was prepared to fight the fight and move this week. I didn't want to employ extraordinary delay tactics. I was actually even arguing with some of my colleagues, with whom I agree so much on climate, about the sort of efficacy just delaying for another couple of hours, but we are not trying to delay another couple of hours for no particular reason. There are 3,000 emails that a judge in Oklahoma is compelling Scott Pruitt to provide to the public, and not 6 weeks from now or 6 months from now but 3 business days from now. On Tuesday morning, the public and, maybe in this instance even more importantly, the Members of the U.S. Senate, who are in a position to determine whether this is the right person to run the Environmental Protection Agency, are going to see the contents of these emails. Do you know what? It is probably nothing. These 3,000 emails that are correspondence between the Oklahoma attorney general, the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association, and a bunch of fossil fuel companies--this guy who has sued the EPA and tried to undermine the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act 17 times, this guy who refuses to recuse himself from running the EPA, from being both a plaintiff and a defendant, I am sure the 3,000 emails he has delayed releasing for 750 days--I am sure the 3,000 e-mails he has delayed releasing for 750 days and is only going to have to provide them to the public because a court is making him, I am sure there is nothing in them. But just in case, why don't we just find out what is in them? Because it seems to me that if they are awful, it would give pause to Republicans.

I just don't get why the Republicans--I understand why people want to jam this through before maybe something bad happens on Tuesday, but if I were a rank-and-file Republican, I would be saying: This looks a little goofy. We don't normally vote on Fridays at 1 p.m., we normally vote on Thursdays at 2:15 so everybody can race off to the Reagan airport and go home. If it is 2:15, I can't get home until Friday, but most people can get home. We vote on Thursday afternoons, and in rare instances do we vote on Fridays--debt ceiling, continuing resolutions, big stuff. We have been moving on nominees kind of at a normal pace. Listen, it has been tough. We have a lot of late nights here. We thank the Senate staff for hanging in here with us. We apologize for the difficulty that you have to undertake to make the Senate work and for us to do our constitutional duties, but isn't it weird that we are just jamming this through on a Friday afternoon?

If I were a rank-and-file Member, I would go to my leadership and say: Hey, this is getting a little weird. I don't want this thing to blow up when I am back home at a townhall.

I would be happy to yield to the Senator from Oregon. There is no better climate champion than Jeff Merkley. It is probably a two-way tie with the junior Senator from Oregon and the Senator from Rhode Island. Before yielding to a question, thank you for your dedication on this issue for the people of Oregon and for the people of this country, but I am happy to yield for a question.

Yes, the Senator is correct.

I thank the Senator for the question. I just want to ask the Presiding Officer what the parliamentary situation is; has my 60 minutes expired?

How much time remains?

I thank the Presiding Officer.

I don't know if it is disqualifying. I would say it is strange, in the extreme, to have the chief law enforcement officer of a State and the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association not comply with his own State statute. This isn't trivial. Not that it would be OK for the attorney general not to comply with any law, but this isn't a nontrivial issue. This is letting the public know the nature of your correspondence with industry--especially since I think it is fair to say that I think even he would agree that he has

distinguished himself among attorneys general as a lead advocate against the EPA and as an advocate for fossil fuel-generating companies. So it is not unreasonable for the public to say: Well, let me understand what the nature of your correspondence was.

My very basic question to the Members of the Senate on the Republican side is, Why in the world would we vote at 1 o'clock before we get these emails? I understand that if we had said, give us 6 months so we can see these emails, that would be preposterous. That would be us delaying for delay's sake. Listen, we feel so strongly, I think it is fair to say about this nominee that we might have even tried that, but then in that case the majority would be within their rights to say: We are not going to let you delay for delay's sake.

But this is not delay for delay's sake. There is information that is exactly on point.

Yes.

I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for that question. The Senator is right that he has been delaying because he wants to be confirmed as the EPA Administrator before these emails become public. There is no other reason that I can think of that is so important that we get the EPA Administrator in. Remember, we have the HUD nominee, we have the Department of Commerce nominee, we have the Department of the Interior nominee, and we have the Department of Energy nominee, who has responsibility and stewardship over our nuclear arsenal. We have decided we are not going to run until Friday afternoon getting a person in charge as the Secretary of Energy to take care of our nuclear arsenal, but it is a really big hurry--and we have to literally prevent Members from meeting with NATO allies--to get this guy through. I really didn't understand earlier in the week what the big rush was and why Pruitt and why now.

Listen, every Wednesday we are in some kind of negotiation about what kind of legislation and what kind of matters come before the Senate, and both sides sort of puff up their chests and make threats about going through the weekend, and we usually come to some sort of agreement. Yet this week there was no budging, and now I get it. They were afraid this judge was going to do what this judge did. This judge is requiring these emails to come out, and I think they are terrified about what these emails say.

Do you know what? There is only one way to prove me wrong, which is to call our bluff and delay. Let's go two Mondays from now. We have a recess, and we will all read the emails. Then it will be great. We will find out that there was nothing untoward, nothing improper, nothing concerning about these 3,000 emails between the Republican attorney general from Oklahoma and these oil and gas and coal companies. I think maybe something is in those emails. Maybe I am wrong. I hope I am wrong. For the country, for the planet, I hope I am wrong.

Yes.

Will the Senator from Oregon yield to a question?

I thank the Senator from Oregon.

I have been thinking a lot about the job of the EPA Administrator. It is one of those things we have taken for granted over many, many years, that we are going to get someone who is going to sort of play it right down the middle of the fairway, but now we are forced to sort of challenge all of our assumptions with respect to what we can expect in an EPA Administrator.

When I think about the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, they are very important, especially for young people who are so passionate about the environment, as they may not know what life was like and what the environment was like before the Clean Water Act. The majority of waterways in the United States were not swimmable. You had rivers catching on fire.

I went to college in Southern California in, I guess, 1990 through 1994, and the success of the Clean Air Act is incredible. I mean, L.A. still has its smog, but because of CAFE standards, because of the Clean Air Act, because of other environmental regulations, you don't have nearly the air quality problems that you had even 20, 25 years ago, and this is a nationwide success story.

Kids had to stay home from school because of air pollution. I know everybody understands that is happening in Shanghai and in Beijing, parts of Africa, parts of the developing world, parts of the industrializing world. But 10, 20 years ago, you would have smog alerts, and kids would have to stay home from school in the United States of America. You had kids who couldn't function because of their asthma. So what is at stake is not a bird or a butterfly.

I got my start in politics because of conservation issues. I am interested in forest ecology and reef ecology, but I understand a lot of people live a different life than that, and they are not in a position to be worrying about birds and butterflies. But everybody worries about clean air and clean water.

So I was wondering if the Senator from Oregon could talk a little bit about the foundation of this debate. I saw the Senator from Rhode Island do this incredible exposition--as I have seen before, and nobody is better at this--in describing the forces behind what is going on. But I would like to talk about the premise that undergirds this debate, which is not about fossil fuel companies versus conservationists; it is about clean air versus dirty air, and it is about clean water versus dirty water.

I know that is something that the Senator from Oregon is very passionate about, and I wonder if he might comment on the basic idea of a clean and healthy environment and the bipartisan consensus that we ought to have related to that.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Through the Chair, I would just like to ask the Senator a question. It strikes me that Governor McCall, President Nixon, I am thinking of Governor Schwarzenegger, I am thinking of Susan Collins, although I am almost sheepish to continue to single her out; it may not always be helpful to her to be singled out as the lone pro-climate person on the Republican side of the fence on this issue--but it strikes me that your beginning as an environmentalist was not based on being liberal or progressive, but your community's values, your family's values, your church's values, your Scout troop's values.

We had a really interesting lunch today with a preacher from North Carolina talking about framing political issues as moral issues. It really touched me because I am telling you, it breaks my heart to think--I mean, look, for some of these arguments about the size and the scope of the government, we just have different views on what the right size and scope and role of the Federal Government is. Some of these questions about geopolitics--tough stuff. You try to get it right. You try to have a coherent world view. Tough stuff. If you serve in the Senate long enough, you are going to get some stuff exactly right, and you may be wrong a few times.

But what really breaks my heart is to see the once-bipartisan consensus, which was based on common sense and morality that we just don't pollute our oceans, our streams, our aquifers, the air we breathe; that we try to preserve our environment for each other and for posterity; and a basic understanding that people who own businesses-- especially once those businesses are incorporated and especially if those businesses are publicly traded--have a different set of imperatives. It is really hard to get each individual business that is in the mining industry or the electricity generation industry or the extraction industry or the transportation industry or the manufacturing industry to voluntarily worry every day about clean air and clean water. It is kind of like not their job. They are supposed to make stuff. They are supposed to extract stuff. They are supposed to make electronics. They are supposed to make this economy work.

So one of the ideas of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act is that we have an obligation to creation itself for those of us who are religious and for those of us who are not. That is a moral obligation, not a political obligation. We have a duty that has nothing to do with us being Democrats, and that duty doesn't stop because they decided to run for office as a Republican.

I am wondering if the Senator from Oregon could comment on the sort of degradation of the bipartisan consensus around protecting our environment, which used to be a sort of 90-percent issue, a bipartisan issue. I am wondering how the Senator from Oregon feels about that.

Mr. President, in late October, people who lived in a place called Donora shrugged off the thick, yellow smog that had covered their small town. It was 1948. It wasn't unusual to see a smog blanket the town, thanks to the zinc plant and the steel mill that smoked endlessly into the Pennsylvania sky. It wasn't unusual to see people coughing as they went about their day. As one reporter put it, ``People are always coughing in Donora.''

What was unusual is that the smog did not clear as the day went on. It lingered, hanging around the town, wreaking havoc for the next 5 days. At first, life seemed to go on. The Halloween parade went on as planned, even though no one could really see the people marching. The high school football game went on as planned, although the quarterbacks avoided passing plays since the wide receivers couldn't see the ball. But then someone died. People couldn't breathe. As the local hospital started to fill, the town hotel set up beds for overflow patients. By the fourth day, the hotel had to set up another emergency section--this time, a temporary morgue. The town's three funeral homes were overwhelmed. On the fifth day, the stacks of a zinc plant stopped their endless streams of smoke, and the smog that would become known as the Donora death fog finally lifted but not before nearly 7,000 people fell ill and 20 died.

This is one of the many stories that show us what life was like in the United States of America before the EPA was created. In the early 1960s, millions of freshwater fish and rivers around the country were poisoned by insecticides--hurting consumer trust and the countless fishermen and their families who relied on the fish to make a living. 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, one of the most beautiful lakes in the United States, became so toxic from companies dumping asbestos- laden waste that local communities had to start filtering their water. Think about that. People could drink the water from local reservoirs, unfiltered, until pollution came along. This was the path our country was on.

Pollution was destroying some of the most beautiful places in this country--on the planet, in fact--putting the health of the public and the health of our economy at grave risk.

There was another event in the early 1960s that helped our country to see clearly that the path we were on would only lead to destruction. Rachel Carson, scientist, public servant, and author, published a book called ``Silent Spring.'' This book laid out in simple, beautiful prose the threats that pesticides and pollution posed to our environment or what Carson called a ``Fable for Tomorrow.'' She wrote: ``The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers and sea, with dangerous and even lethal materials.''

Carson's book made clear that we were contaminating the environment and that this could not go on. Her book sounded a call for change, as millions of Americans began demanding that the government take action, but there was also a 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 is how the controversy went on for the next few years. The public, the science, and the reality all pointed toward the truth, but a few loud voices persisted. They did not want the movement to go forward. This continued even after Rachel Carson passed away, tragically and prematurely, of cancer in the year 1964.

Here is what the New York Times published in her obituary:

The most recent flare-up in the continuing pesticide

controversy occurred early this month when the Public Health

Service announced that the periodic huge-scale deaths of fish

on the lower Mississippi River had been traced over the last

4 years to toxic ingredients and three kinds of pesticides.

Some persons believe that the pesticides drained into the

river from neighboring farm lands.

A hearing by the Agriculture Department of the Public

Health Service's charges ended a week ago with a spokesman

for one of the pesticide manufacturers saying that any

judgment should be delayed until more information was

obtained.

The line of argument captured in the New York Times is familiar to anyone who has watched our Nation struggle to come to a shared set of facts around a number of difficult issues, but even in the face of so much controversy, the country did the right thing. In addressing the threats to our environment, the U.S. Government--with substantial and commendable support from Republicans--began to lay the foundation for a new America, one that would preserve and protect our country and its resources for the next generation.

I would like to highlight three of the critical cornerstones in the foundation: the EPA, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act.

Let's start with the EPA itself. It was established in 1970 by President Nixon. He united several offices and bureaus already in the Federal Government into a single agency--one that

would oversee all of the laws, protections, research, and policies about the Nation's environment. The mission of the EPA was clear from the start, to protect human health and the environment. Almost immediately, something really exciting happened. There was a feeling of hope and anticipation for what this Agency could do for the country. Within the first few months, tens of thousands of resumes came flooding in from across the country as people clamored to work for the EPA.

Here is how one man who worked for the Agency described it:

There was a palpable sense of excitement that we were about

to do something big. We had to do things big because the

newspapers and news magazines were filled with stories about

Lake Erie dying. I think it was a year or two before that the

Cuyahoga had indeed caught on fire. I believe the Houston

Ship Channel had the same issue. We knew we were there to

really deal with substantial problems, and we were going to

meet with immediate pushback.

For the next 40 years, the EPA would build a legacy of preserving and protecting the country's air, water, and natural resources, working to make our country a better place to live.

I just want to say that whatever the final disposition of this nomination ends up being--and I know we will push as hard as we possibly can for the delay of this decision, until we are able to see the contents of Mr. Pruitt's emails as directed by the court this afternoon--but whatever the decision is of the Senate under advice and consent, it is really important that this be said: EPA employees still have an obligation under Federal law to do their job, to protect air and water, to administer the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, to enforce the Endangered Species Act. We are confirming a head of an Agency, but this new head of an Agency is not the Emperor of the Agency.

This new head of an Agency has obligations under the statute to enforce the laws on the books, and he has a current role as the lead of the Republican Attorneys General Association and as a plaintiff in multiple lawsuits against the EPA, and that is a reason many of us object to his confirmation. If he is confirmed, every EPA employee has rights. They have whistleblower rights, they have protections, and they have obligations under the statute so that if this EPA tries to do anything unlawful, anything that contravenes the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, then all of the EPA employees are dutybound under the law to follow the law.

No one in the Federal Government should be forced to do anything unlawful, and we support the EPA employees, in particular, who we know work so hard and are so dedicated to such an important cause. We know they are under intense scrutiny and pressure, and I think it is worth saying that we support them but also that the law supports them.

One of the first actions of the Agency was to ban DDT, a pesticide used in World War II. At first, DDT seemed like a dream chemical. It was used to protect soldiers from pests and then to protect crops like cotton, but soon it became clear--thanks to Rachel Carson and others-- that this chemical was creating far more harm than good. Public health was really in danger. The bald eagle and other wildlife were being poisoned, and the pests that were supposed to be put off from bothering the crops were adapting, becoming more resistant, even as the chemicals became more potent and ultimately more dangerous.

Thanks to the EPA, the use of DDT came to an end. The health of children, families, and wildlife immediately improved. The bald eagle slowly recovered, to the point where it is no longer a threatened or an endangered species.

The Agency also found a solution to acid rain, which was a major problem that killed fish, hurt American farmers, and caused damage to forests and infrastructure alike. After studies showed how high concentrations of lead were hurting our kids, the EPA took action to remove it from gasoline and from the air. Because of that action, lead levels in both kids and adults have dropped by more than 80 percent since the late 1970s. We have a lot more work to do on lead, but that is one of the many EPA success stories.

The EPA then took on secondhand smoke, banning smoking in indoor public places. It pushed the auto industry to design technology that would reduce the amount of pollution created by cars, a step that would reduce the amount of pollution per mile emitted by cars by up to 90 percent. It provides technical assistance to State and local governments that otherwise don't have the resources or the know-how to tackle problems on their own.

The Agency has also empowered the public through right-to-know laws that give people access to information about chemicals, toxic substances, and pollution in their own communities. After studies show how low-income and minority communities face greater environmental risks, the EPA formed an Office of Environmental Justice, dedicated to making these communities as safe as any other in the country. As is so often the case, this Federal Agency set the bar for the rest of the world on how governments can protect and preserve the environment.

One leader of the EPA who served under President George H.W. Bush recalled that the Agency worked with countries as varied as Morocco and Mexico to battle fires or spills. After the EPA sent people to help with a Russian spill that was impacting Estonia, the Prime Minister wrote the EPA a letter, saying their visit was the most important visit of any American's since Charles Lindbergh had flown from Russia to Estonia in 1933.

So the EPA has had incredibly important impacts, from boosting diplomacy around the world to protecting the lungs of little ones right here at home.

The second cornerstone of our efforts to protect the environment is the Clean Air Act. Before the EPA opened its doors, States set their own standards for clean air, and most States had weak standards because they were in a race to the bottom to attract companies that didn't want to have to deal with the damage they caused. Imagine you are in a State and have three or four adjacent States and someone wants to cite a factory. Well, it is very difficult to have a strong environmental standard because that factory is no doubt going to find the place where they are allowed to pollute the most, which is why you have Federal standards. Not surprisingly, these low standards were fueling air pollution.

Every day, the average American takes between 17,000 and 23,000 breaths. If the air we are breathing is filled with toxic chemicals, we are at risk for cancer, birth defects, and damage to our lungs, our brain, and our nerves. That risk is even higher for people with asthma and for senior citizens.

Remember, humans are not the only ones that rely on clean air. Trees, crops, wildlife, lakes, fish are all at risk of damage when we have dirty air. So eventually the American public demanded that something be done to clean up our air.

In 1970, Congress on a bipartisan basis, passed the Clean Air Act. This law, along with later amendments, makes up the complete Federal response to air pollution. It is a beautifully written law. It gives the EPA the authority to limit air pollutants and emissions from industry plants. It empowers the Agency to research and fund different approaches to keeping the air clean. It creates partnerships between Federal, State, and local governments to reduce air pollution. Who could argue with that?

As soon as it was passed, people knew that this law was a game changer. President Nixon said: ``I think that 1970 will be known as the year of the beginning, in which we really began to move on the problems of clean air and clean water and open spaces for the future generations of America.''

That is exactly what happened. The impact was actually felt very quickly, starting with the auto industry. The Clean Air Act called on the auto industry to drastically reduce the amount of nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, and other harmful chemicals that came out of the tailpipes across the country within 5 years.

Consider that today there are more than three times the amount of cars on the road than they were in the 1970s. Now imagine that the chemicals coming out of each of those car's tailpipes were 90 percent more harmful. That is where we would be without the Clean Air Act.

It was not so long ago that communities would cancel high school for kids because the air pollution was so bad, not in Beijing but in California. That is no longer the case, not for numerous

reasons, not for a dozen or so causes but because of the Clean Air Act. This law has literally saved millions of lives. It has improved the health of millions of others.

Because the EPA has been there to enforce it, air pollution has fallen by 70 percent since 1970. Smog levels in Los Angeles have fallen from their peak by two-thirds. Nationwide, lead in our cars is down 98 percent, carbon monoxide is down 85 percent, sulphur dioxide is down 80 percent, acid rain is down 50 percent, and all at a fraction of anticipated costs.

Let me make two points here. First of all, it is actually rare that a law works this well. I mean, it is hard to make a good law. Everybody talks about it as a sausage-making process; you don't want to see what goes into it. But not all laws work over time.

This law actually worked. This law actually cleaned up our air. That is a really important thing to remember. If you undermine this law, if you undermine the agency that enforces it, the air does not clean up itself. This is not an automatic thing. The air is clean because the government protects the air.

I understand that, including the Presiding Officer and many Members of the Republican Party, we have tough debates about how big the government should be, what its responsibility should be. But if you go from Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, to Rand Paul, the sort of Republican libertarian--and I am not sure if you just sat down and had a cup of coffee with either of them or everybody in between on the political spectrum, in terms of their view of what the Federal Government ought to do, gosh, I can't imagine that anybody--if you kind of get them in a private moment--does not think that it is a Federal role to keep the air clean.

There are moments where I see a program within a Federal agency and I might love it, right, because of my political persuasion. But I can understand how a Ben Sasse or a Rand Paul or a Marco Rubio might object to it because they might say: Well, that sounds like a good idea, but my goodness, if that is so important, why don't we let communities decide whether or not to do that?

This is not one of those issues. Go and talk to your constituents about whether they want clean air. I don't know that you are going to find too many Republicans out there--I mean voters, not elected officials--voters, who think clean air is, take it or leave it, not a Federal role.

The truth is, that first of all, clean air is important enough to make a Federal law about in the first place. But there is also a technical reason, not a very complicated technical reason, but a technical reason that you need a Federal law that is about clean air as opposed to a State-by-State patchwork, and that is because the air travels. You cannot pollute in one State and expect that it will not impact the other State.

So one State having tough clean air standards doesn't really function in terms of the ecology because pollution knows no boundaries. The same study that I referred to found that air pollution has improved in the United States, thanks to environmental protection. But our work is not done. Nearly 90,000 people every year in the United States are at risk of a premature death because of air pollution. That number will rise if we chip away at this basic foundation.

The third and final cornerstone of that foundation is the Clean Water Act. It is really important to remember how bad things were before the Clean Water Act. I mean, we are not where we need to be in terms of protecting our water resources. But it is kind of unfathomable how bad it was before this law was passed.

Water in communities across the country was dirty. You could not swim or fish in two-thirds of the lakes, rivers, and coastal waters in the country. You couldn't swim or fish in two-thirds of the lakes, rivers, and coastal waters in the country. That is a data point that you would expect in a country that is still industrializing, that just doesn't have the pollution controls.

When you go to certain parts of the planet and you see essentially a very dirty environment, you would assume two-thirds, maybe more, of those lakes and streams and waterways are too polluted to fish or swim. But this is the United States. It was allowable to dump untreated sewage into open water. You could dump untreated sewage into open water before the Clean Water Act.

But that changed in 1972, when what is now known as the Clean Water Act became law and cleared the way for the Federal Government to restore and protect the health of our water.

According to a study by the Aspen Institute, the Clean Water Act stopped billions of pounds of pollution from fouling the water and dramatically increased the number of waterways that are safe for swimming and fishing. Twenty years ago, you would have had to have a death wish to go swimming in Boston Harbor. Today, you don't have to think twice. That is because of the Clean Water Act.

But this is not just about enjoying the beauty of the water that it provides to so many communities, although not is not a small thing. Look, a lot of people--left, right, and center--people who are not political, people on the progressive side, people on the conservative side, people like lakes. People like the beach. People like the ocean.

It is not unreasonable, whoever you voted for, to think that there are a few things that government should do: They should probably have some kind of transportation infrastructure. There should probably be a law enforcement function. Make sure that the water is clean, the air is clean, and we have some national defense. Right? That is some basic stuff. Even if you are a libertarian, if you are not nuts, you think that the government should do a couple of very basic things, and among them is to keep the water clean.

I wanted to share some interactions I have had with the craft beer industry. They wrote a letter this week about how important clean water is to them. Here is a section of it:

Beer is about 90 percent water, making local water supply

quality and its characteristics such as pH and mineral

content, critical to beer brewing and the flavor of many

classic brews.

Changes to our water supply--whether we draw directly from

a water source or from a municipal supply--threaten our

ability to consistently produce our great-tasting beer, and

thus, our bottom line.

Protecting clean water is central to our business and our

long-term success. Not only does great-tasting beer we brew

depend on it, but so do the communities in which we operate.

Some of the largest and best craft breweries in the country signed onto this letter, from the Allagash Brewing Company in Maine to the New Belgium Brewing Company in Colorado. They are right to be concerned because it will not take much for our water to go back to where it was in the 1970s. So it is in the interest of many industries for our country to have clean water, but not all of them.

Publicly traded companies will do the minimum. In a lot of ways, the way these companies are set up, they are actually obligated under the law to do the minimum. They have to maximize shareholder profit. They have boards of directors, they have earnings reports, they have quarterly obligations. Whether you like it or not, that is the way our system works. So, if you have a fiduciary obligation to maximize profits, then you may give short shrift to environmental concerns.

Compliance costs money. So most companies will comply only if they have to. If they are good companies, they feel that their obligation is to sit down with their lawyers and have the lawyers explain to them what they must do to comply.

But it is a rare company that says: Hey, I want to do much more than that. I mean Patagonia is great. There are other companies that do good work in the environmental space. But let's be very clear: There are a handful of companies that are so motivated, either as a brand strategy or a mission-driven approach, that they are going to exceed their obligations under the law. Most companies are going to do what is required under the law and not much more.

We can count on someone saying on a board of directors in some corner office or someplace on Wall Street: Hey, we can save 3 percent here if we don't clean the water. That is why we need a Clean Water Act. That is why we need the EPA. It is not a matter of left or right; this is a matter of right or wrong. This is a matter of clean or dirty.

This is especially important because our work is not done. We still have a ways to go. We still can't swim or fish in about one-third of our waterways. So these three cornerstones--this foundation of more than 40 years of progress--have prepared us to tackle what is the challenge of our lifetime, climate change. There was a time when this was primarily the concern of the conservation minded among us, people like me: hikers, swimmers, surfers green groups, bird and butterfly people. Right? I understand that.

There was a time where this was mostly an ecological concern. You had science people, you had hiking types who said: Hey, this thing is happening. I read Al Gore's book. This is a big deal. They were 10 years ahead of the curve. But climate change is no longer just an ecological issue; it is an economic issue. It is a quality of life issue. It is an American way of life issue. It is causing real harm to people and costing us billions of dollars now--not in the future, but now.

In recent years, the United States has experienced a record number of devastating storms, extreme temperatures, severe floods and lasting droughts. It is not a coincidence. As the climate changes, normal weather patterns are altered, and this affects our environment, our health, and our economy by influencing everything from the price of produce at the grocery store to our home insurance rates.

So we know that climate change is real. The science makes that clear. In fact, our own personal experience makes that real. A lot of people fish or hunt or hike or surf or snorkel or go to the lake or just go outside and experience something that seems to be changing.

There is a difference between weather and climate. The weather is tomorrow morning's temperature and whether it is raining or not and whether it is windy or not. The climate is the conditions that create the weather. It is not arguable anymore by anybody credible that the climate has changed and, therefore, the weather is getting absolutely more volatile.

Now we can, unfortunately, rely on our own experience and our own eyes to confirm that the climate and the weather are getting weirder-- in some cases, more dangerous and certainly more unpredictable. Make no mistake, this is caused by humans, and that means we can do something about it.

Climate change deniers need to know that they are on the wrong side of history. They can't just cite the cost of transitioning to a clean energy economy--a cost that continues to decline, I should point out-- while ignoring the cost of doing nothing, because the cost of doing nothing on climate change is absolutely astronomical, whether in storm aid, infrastructure mitigation, private property loss, or disruption in financial and insurance markets. It is much less expensive to move toward a clean energy economy than to allow severe weather to drain our economy as a whole.

As a Senator from the State of Hawaii who has led the way in building a clean energy infrastructure--producing clean, renewable energy and cutting our dependence on fossil fuels--I know that we can achieve meaningful change across our Nation, but we need the EPA and an Administrator to achieve this.

By law, the EPA has the authority to take steps to cut any pollution that threatens human health and welfare, including carbon pollution. Even the Supreme Court agreed that if EPA found carbon pollution to be a danger, the Agency was obligated to act to reduce the threat. So EPA has begun undertaking efforts to rein in those emissions.

Every protection that the EPA creates is the result of years of scientific inquiry, stakeholder involvement, public comments, and technological feasibility studies.

For all the talk of Federal overreach, EPA gives an enormous amount of authority to the States. For instance, in the Clean Power Plan, EPA sets emissions targets--that is true--but it was up to each State to develop a plan that is best suited to its unique circumstances.

The State of Hawaii has a really unique situation because we have lots of clean energy opportunities. But in terms of baseload power, we get all of our fuel from Asia, and it is LSFO. It is low sulfur fuel oil. So what we do is we bring in oil on tankers, which is costing three and a half times the national average for electricity, and we light it on fire, and that creates electrons. That is not smart. So we are in a transition.

But there are other States that have geothermal resources or biofuel resources. So the EPA said: Hey, carbon is a pollutant. You have to reduce carbon pollution because, under the law, under the Clean Air Act, any airborne pollutant must be regulated, right? You have to reduce the airborne pollutants.

The EPA said: You have to do this over time, but we understand you are going to have your own energy mix and your own challenges. All you have to do is submit a plan that is kind of like thought through. So West Virginia's plan is different from California's plan and is different from Hawaii's plan. They empowered the States to endeavor to come up with their own energy mix.

Here is the good news about EPA's rules. This news is on the Clean Air Act. It is on the Clean Power Plan. This is always the case. It always comes in below the estimated cost because what happens is, if you tell industry to innovate, even if they don't want to, frankly, even if they complain about it, even if they tell you that it is going to crash the American economy, which they often say, they end up driving innovation in the private sector.

In the case of electricity generation and transportation, the Clean Power Plan and the CAFE standards, the fuel efficiency standards for cars, accelerated the technological transition that was already underway.

Here are a couple of examples. When the auto bailout came in, President Obama negotiated very hard for an increase in fuel efficiency standards. You can imagine that the American auto industry was basically on the ropes. It was about to die without a major bailout. So they got the bailout, but there were also some strings attached, which were that they bring up fuel efficiency standards. They freaked out. And you know what happened? They met the standards. And you know what happened after that? The American auto industry has never been stronger because people like fuel-efficient cars, right?

What has happened with the Clean Power Plan and with the Paris climate accord and the investment tax credit and the production tax credit is that the cost of solar and wind energy is declining. But when utilities began thinking about long-term investments in a carbon- constrained world, the increased demand for clean energy drove down these costs even further, which is good for both consumers and the environment. In fact, more solar capacity was added in 2016 than any other energy source, by far. Solar and wind combined to make up almost two-thirds of the new capacity last year.

I want people to understand that the clean energy revolution is underway. The only question is whether we are going to have to take a 4-year break from this clean energy revolution and give the keys to the car to China and other countries, which would be pleased to let the United States abdicate its role as the leader of the clean energy revolution. We are going to lose all of those solar jobs, we are going to lose the innovation opportunities, and we are going to lose all of those wind energy opportunities.

The question is not whether we are going to make a transition to clean energy. The question is how quickly and whether the United States will drive it or not.

Consumers loved the first generation of hybrid vehicles so much that there were waiting lists to buy them. CAFE standards, along with similar fuel economy standards around the world, drove the automotive industry to innovate even further. Now we have unprecedented numbers of hybrid and hybrid electric vehicles on the road, and we stand at the precipice of a new age of electric vehicles.

So we find ourselves at a crossroads. If we continue down the path President Obama set us on, I have no doubt that American ingenuity and innovation will allow us to continue to lead the world in the clean energy economy, but if we turn back the clock and hand our future back over to the dirty fuels of the past, we will cede economic leadership to China, India, Germany, and the

rest of the world. Those countries are moving toward clean energy so quickly that we may never catch up; we may never be able to take full advantage of the economic opportunities that clean energy represents. It is sad, but it is true, that this is the path that our country will go on if Scott Pruitt is confirmed to lead the EPA.

I know for the public, after so many troubling nominees, that it is hard to wake up outraged for yet another nominee. But the reason to freak out about this one is very simple--clean air and clean water. Ask anyone who lived in L.A. or in Boston since the 1970s, and they can tell you that our country has clean air and clean water because of the laws that were put in place and the Agency that has done its job to implement them.

All of this will be in jeopardy with Scott Pruitt at the helm. He made his political bones trying to shred the EPA's ability to enforce the laws that protect clean air and clean water. Now this administration wants to give Mr. Pruitt the ultimate opportunity to lead the Agency that he has worked so hard to undermine. And he hasn't hidden the fact that he is utterly opposed to the EPA.

Let me highlight four statements that he has made that illustrate this point. He said: ``The EPA was never intended to be our Nation's frontline environmental regulator.''

The reality is that the opposite is true. The EPA was created for exactly that reason. Before the EPA existed, there were a number of offices and bureaus across the Federal Government that worked on protecting the environment, but the government saw--Congress saw--that it wasn't enough. Our Nation's waters were polluted, and the air was not clean. People were getting sick and even dying because there wasn't enough being done to protect the environment. So the intention behind the EPA was absolutely to put a single Agency on the frontlines of protecting and preserving clean air and clean water.

Not only does Mr. Pruitt disagree with the very mission of the EPA, but he also doesn't seem at all interested in the work being done by this Agency. He was asked during the confirmation process to name a single protection on the books at the EPA. Here is his answer:

I have not conducted a comprehensive review of existing EPA

regulations. As attorney general, I have brought legal

challenges involving EPA regulations out of concern that EPA

has exceeded its statutory authority based on the record and

the law in that matter.

I mean, just as a parent--forget my job as a Senator--as a parent and as a citizen, this really concerns me. I don't want to see the EPA led by someone who is basically given a softball question in the confirmation hearing: Name something you like about the EPA. But he declines to go on the record supporting clean air or clean water.

I mean, you would think that he could just say: Well, I like the Clean Water Act; I like the Clean Air Act. He could even offer caveats, saying: I think there has been overreach, and I think there needs to be a recalibration. Say whatever you want, but he couldn't even bring himself to say he supports the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act. That was the second comment that he made that was disturbing.

The third one relates to a Federal standard that targets pollution that decreases visibility. Mr. Pruitt had this to say about these standards:

[They] threaten the competitive edge Oklahoma has enjoyed

for years with low-cost and reliable electric generation.

This low-cost energy not only benefits Oklahoma

manufacturers, but gives our State a considerable edge in

recruiting new jobs.

What Mr. Pruitt is referring to is actually another reason why the EPA was created in the first place. When States were in charge of environmental protections, it was often a race to the bottom. Everyone would try to lower their standards so that companies would move plants and factories to their State. And the result is exactly what you would imagine. Companies were happy to meet the lowest standard possible, leaving huge messes for the State to clean up, and that is not a good use of our taxpayer dollars.

It isn't the government's job to allow companies to make a huge mess and say: Hey, we will clean that up for you. There is no need to clean it up. We have it.

Let's look at how this has worked out for Oklahoma. I would like to read an article by journalist, author, and climate expert Eric Pooley, which was published by Time magazine:

Mercury is a deadly neurotoxin that damages the brains of

the ``developing fetus and young children,'' according to the

American Academy of Pediatrics. It is spewed into the air

from coal-fired power plants and other industrial sources

before settling into lakes and waterways and contaminating

the fish we eat.

But Pruitt's challenges against the EPA's mercury standards

include a tidy piece of scientific denial, claiming ``the

record does not support the EPA's findings that mercury . . .

pose[s] public health hazards.''

After that legal challenge failed, Pruitt sued a second

time to block the mercury rules--even though virtually all

power plants had already complied with them at a fraction of

the expected cost.

Thanks in part to the EPA rules Pruitt opposed, mercury

levels in Atlantic Bluefin tuna are rapidly declining.

This isn't an abstract thing. If there are high mercury levels in fish and people eat the fish, they actually get the mercury poisoning. This happens in Honolulu all the time. We like our fish. And people go to the ER all the time. They don't know what it is, and it turns out that it is mercury poisoning.

But Oklahomans aren't so lucky. While Pruitt was busy

trying to kill national mercury rules, the number of Oklahoma

lakes listed for mercury contamination was climbing. This

year, the state lists 40 lakes with fish consumption

advisories due to mercury levels--up from 19 listed in 2010.

Eight lakes were added just this year.

Another Attorney General might have been trying to identify

the sources of the pollution. But Pruitt was apparently too

busy suing the EPA.

Pruitt also attacks limits on ground level ozone. The

ground level ozone--better known as smog--despite the fact

that ozone problems are huge and worsening in Oklahoma. The

latest American Lung Association report gave all Oklahoma

counties surveyed an ``F'' for ozone problems and found that

the number of high ozone days had increased in most counties

as compared to 2010 to 2012.

The argument in this article can be boiled down to a single phrase: With Mr. Pruitt leading the EPA, we can bet that as goes Oklahoma, so goes the Nation. I can't speak for the people of Oklahoma, but I can say that when it comes to these kinds of statistics on polluted air and water, we would like to pass. If you ask most people in this country, they would agree that this is not the kind of environment they want their kids to grow up in.

The fourth disturbing statement Mr. Pruitt has made is about lead. Because of the EPA we have seen lead levels in both kids and adults drop by more than 80 percent in the past few decades. This is one of the legacy achievements of this Agency. This is something the next leader of the EPA should understand, but the senior Senator from Maryland, Mr. Cardin, raised this during a confirmation hearing. The Senator asked Mr. Pruitt if ``there is any safe level of lead that can be taken into the human body, particularly a young person.'' Another softball question.

Here is how Mr. Pruitt answered him: ``Senator, that is something I have not reviewed nor know about.'' This is pretty alarming because clearly he does not understand that in just 30 years this is an issue that the EPA has taken on as a high priority. This is an issue that we need the next leader to take seriously so we don't see any kind of backsliding. If you look at Mr. Pruitt's actions, they do, in fact, speak loudly about his approach to the EPA. Here is another news report:

The new administration is reportedly looking to close the

Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, and instead

let individual program offices handle enforcement. The outlet

inside EPA quoted ``a source familiar with the plan'' who

says the Trump administration intends to ``disassemble the

enforcement office . . . take it, break it up, and move it

back into the program offices.''

Environmental advocates were quick to point out that Scott

Pruitt--the Oklahoma Attorney General Trump picked to lead

the EPA--made almost the same move back home. Pruitt closed

his office's Environmental Protection Unit not long after he

took office in 2011.

Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

But Mr. Pruitt did more than close Oklahoma's Environmental Protection Unit. He also started a new unit solely dedicated to suing the EPA. He closed the Environmental

Protection Unit and set up a unit to sue the EPA. That is all they do-- the other unit that people in Oklahoma might count on to investigate water contamination or illegal dumping. Mr. Pruitt's new unit has been quite active. Their office has filed more than a dozen lawsuits against the EPA. He has sued the EPA because of the way it tackles cross-state air pollution and the Agency's limits to oil and gas pollution. He sued to allow air pollution when facilities start up, shut down, malfunction, and to stop plans to address air pollution in his home State.

He sued the EPA because he disagrees with the Clean Power Plan, which will prevent an estimated 90,000 asthma attacks every year while saving American families money on their electric bill. He sued EPA to end protections against carbon pollution from new powerplants, even though these protections will cost companies very little to implement, and he challenged the clean water rule, which the EPA says protects the streams and wetlands that form the foundation of our water resources.

This is not a comprehensive list. I think there are 17 lawsuits he has filed. Guess what. Some of them are still pending. Mr. Pruitt was asked: Will you recuse yourself from the lawsuits in which you are the plaintiff? And he refused. So he is going to be the plaintiff and the defendant.

I am sure Mr. Pruitt is a good person, I am sure he is good to his family, but he also needs to be good to the American people and faithful to the law: the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act. This is the foundation of what the EPA does. He doesn't get to have an opinion about those laws. He gets to implement those laws. If he wants to run for office, he can run for office and change those laws. If he wants to referee what authorities exist on those lawsuits, he can litigate, but if he is going to be the EPA Administrator, he has to check his ideological baggage at the door, and there is only one way we can be sure that he will not take his biases to the EPA.

I don't understand why in his confirmation hearing he didn't say: Look, anywhere I brought suit, anywhere I am a plaintiff, I am out. It is not unusual for a nominee to say on certain issues: I will recuse. There is ample precedent. It was done this year. It is also just plain common sense. It is the moral thing to do, the ethical thing to do, and it is politically smart because it is a problem that this person wants to remain plaintiff and defendant.

So it is disappointing and it is worrying. The agenda needs to uphold the Agency's mandate not to dismantle what the EPA has already done.

Senator Booker asked Mr. Pruitt how many kids in Oklahoma had asthma. Fair question to ask when you consider how many lawsuits Mr. Pruitt has filed against the EPA that if he wins will increase air pollution, and you can bet that more air pollution will hurt those kids who already have trouble breathing. Mr. Pruitt did not know how many kids in his home State have asthma, but here is the answer: 1 in 10--1 in 10 kids have asthma.

If Mr. Pruitt takes over the EPA, he is no longer responsible for just the kids in Oklahoma who have asthma. He is also responsible for the kids across the country and in my home State of Hawaii. There are millions of people in the United States who suffer from asthma, and for each and every one of them, not to mention the countless others at risk, Scott Pruitt guarantees that it will become harder to breathe. Scott Pruitt is going to guarantee that it becomes harder to breathe because he has sued the EPA to end the regulations that keep our air clean enough for us to breathe. Never before in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency has a President nominated someone so opposed to the mission of the EPA. Look, this administration has made it very clear where it stands on climate, on science, on protecting clean air and clean water.

We have seen climate change called the Chinese hoax. We have heard rumors that scientists will be muzzled and research stopped. We have seen the President sign a law that allows oil companies to hide what kinds of payment it is making to foreign governments in exchange for extracting oil. So there is no question that dirty energy is preferred by the current administration, but that doesn't mean the Senate has to be a rubberstamp here.

We are the Senate, and the United States Senate has a specific role under our Constitution and in our history. There comes a time where issues related to party have to be subsumed by issues related to the health and welfare of the country, and we have strayed from the bipartisan consensus that existed for decades and decades and decades, the basic premise that it is an American value in every small town, in every urban place from coast to coast, and everywhere in between, everybody likes clean air and clean water. Everybody at some point on a weekend wants to drive someplace or walk someplace and just be outside and be able to take a deep breath, enjoy your family, enjoy your friends, enjoy not having to work for 2 or 3 hours--go fishing, go hunting, go hiking, go surfing, go snowboarding, go skiing, whatever it is that people like to do to kind of restore themselves, that depends on our commitment to a legacy, and it depends on a commitment to these statutes. It really does. It depends on our commitment to the Clean Air Act and to the Clean Water Act and to the Endangered Species Act.

I will just close with this. I have never seen the Senate in such a rush when there is not an actual deadline. I mean, we hurry when the government may shut down--and sometimes we screw that up too--but usually when we are in a hurry like this, when we are doing all night, there is a reason for it. I think it is just weird that congressional delegation trips overseas were canceled, multiple Members on a bipartisan basis were supposed to be meeting with NATO allies about 2 hours from now, but all of that got canceled.

Normally our vote is on a Thursday afternoon or a Friday morning, and this vote is at 1 p.m. on Friday. That is because somebody is bound and determined to get this vote done before those 3,000 emails between Scott Pruitt and a bunch of energy companies are disclosed. It is not a theoretical thing anymore. There was some talk about whether this was going to be disclosed. Now a judge is ordering that these emails get disclosed. Now everybody seems to be in an incredible hurry to make sure that we conduct this vote before those emails are disclosed.

I was talking to Senator Whitehouse and Senator Murphy about the content of those emails. I don't know what is in those emails, but here is what I know. I know the attorney general spent 750 days trying not to disclose those emails. I know they are between him and a bunch of energy companies. I know there seems to be a strong motivation on the Republican side to conduct the vote before we get the emails. And in the world's greatest deliberative body, it seems absolutely reasonable and consistent with our constitutional obligation to provide advice and consent on nominees and especially for a Cabinet position as important as this.

It just seems like we should probably wait to see what is in those emails. If I were a Republican on the other side, I would be very uncomfortable casting a ``yes'' vote, and I would be waking up Tuesday morning, probably at 1 a.m., and checking on the Internet and hoping there was nothing explosive in those emails. I hope there is nothing explosive in those emails. I don't want to know that we just confirmed someone who is inappropriate for the EPA, but we are going to know by Tuesday.

If my concerns are not well-founded, great. We can vote two Mondays from now, and we will have a new EPA nominee, but why not wait to find out what is in the emails. So I urge a ``no'' vote tomorrow, but more than that, I urge that we give ourselves the time to deliberate and to be a Senate.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Senate is preparing to vote on Congressman Mick Mulvaney to lead the Office of Management and Budget. This nomination may seem like it doesn't deserve a lot of attention because we don't hear much outside of Washington about the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. It is kind of a wonky, obscure office, with fewer than 500 staff members.

At a time when there are so many looming questions about this Republic, about this administration, it is easy to overlook the Congressman's nomination, but it actually matters very much, particularly at this moment, and that is because the person who controls the budget, the person who has the final say on fiscal and financial priorities for the administration has immense power. This position controls the President's budget, and that means that this person can give the green light to programs and policies across the Federal Government or stop them in their tracks. And because he has a long track record as a legislator, Congressman Mulvaney has already shown what kind of decisionmaker he will be if he is in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, OMB.

I will be blunt. His record and his ideas are worrisome. It should concern every Senator who is worried about some of the biggest issues facing Americans, from Social Security, to public health, to the basic, uninterrupted operations of the government itself. So this vote is a moment of truth. It will determine where we really stand on the issues that shape both individual lives and our country's future.

Let me highlight just four issues to show why this person is the wrong person to run OMB.

The first is Social Security. More than 80 years ago, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. In doing so, he created a national plan to provide economic security for American workers. Since then, Social Security has proven to be the most successful anti-poverty program in our history. Each year, it lifts more than 20 million Americans, including 1 million children, out of poverty.

It is hard to imagine a world without Social Security, but I want everybody to understand that pre-Social Security, we had tens of millions of Americans--more than we do now--who would be in poverty upon retirement. So this program has actually reduced poverty among the elderly more than any other program could possibly have accomplished.

Nowhere is Social Security more important than in Hawaii. More than 200,000 people receive Social Security benefits. For more than one in four Hawaii seniors, Social Security is their only source of income. And the money just isn't enough; it is about $14,000 a year. Just to give folks an understanding of Hawaii, we are considered the second or third most expensive housing market in the United States. We are after New York and sometimes in second place or third place, depending on where San Francisco is, but we are one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. For one in four Social Security recipients, that is all they get--$1,200 a month. Usually that will cover your apartment. That will not cover your electricity, it won't cover your utilities, it won't cover your food or clothing, and it won't cover your healthcare.

Today, most working households have little or no retirement assets at all, and many rely entirely on Social Security. This is partly because employer-provided pensions are becoming a thing of the past. So Social Security is more important than ever. It has become a pillar of our retirement system

that continues to work well. It is a universal guaranteed source of income that workers earn and depend on when they retire, but it is just not enough.

I will just add that it is only in Washington, DC, where entertaining the idea of cutting Social Security is considered moderate or mainstream or conservative, even, or adult. I mean, there is this sense that the way we ought to fix the challenges we have fiscally as a country is to take it out of the hides of people who get $1,200 a month to live.

Instead of strengthening the program, Mr. Mulvaney's ideas are very radical. He has said he wants to systematically alter Social Security by raising the retirement age to 70 years old. He wants to raise the retirement age to 70 years old. This is not an obscure person being appointed to an obscure post; this is a Member of Congress being appointed to be the head of the Office of Management and Budget. We are going to vote on him tomorrow, and everybody who says they are for Social Security is about to vote for a person who wants to raise the Social Security retirement age to 70 years old.

He has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. When he worked in the South Carolina State Senate, he voted to declare Social Security unconstitutional. Again, he voted to declare Social Security unconstitutional, and I predict he will get all of the Republican votes. And all of these folks who say they wanted to protect your Social Security, after they put Tom Price at the head of HHS, they are about to put someone who is dedicated to undermining the most successful anti-poverty program in American history.

When asked in his confirmation hearing--because, look, you are a Member of Congress; you represent a certain constituency; you have certain views. Some people are able to sort of pivot from their role as a legislator, as a politician, and into a role as an appointee, a Secretary, a nominee. So when he was asked in this confirmation hearing if he would recommend that the President break a campaign promise to leave Social Security alone, the Congressman said that he would recommend that the President make cuts to the program. So this isn't something he has recanted; this is something he stands by--up until and including through his confirmation and his service at OMB.

But why make cuts to the most successful anti-poverty program in American history? Why would we make cuts to a program that is financed by its own revenue stream and by law does not add $1 to the deficit? Why would we cut benefits now just because we may have to cut them in 20 years? If we are going to change Social Security, let's do it in a way that expands benefits for generations to come. Let's lift the cap on taxable earnings. Let's remove the wage cap that unfairly shelters the highest earning Americans from paying into the Social Security trust fund that the majority of hard-working Americans do.

Here is how it works. The cap is roughly $120,000. So you pay Social Security--almost everybody pays Social Security tax, up to $120,000 in income. That is mostly everybody, right. But if you make $120,000, all of that is taxed up to $120,000. If you make $70,000, it is taxed up to $70,000. If you make $120 million in income, your first $120,000 is taxed for Social Security purposes; everything else is taxed at zero for Social Security purposes.

My view is that every dollar of income should be taxed for Social Security purposes, and that does two things: First, we are going to be in a position to increase benefits--not massively, but every little bit counts. Second, we will be able to increase the solvency of the Social Security trust fund to the year 2049.

Most every family has a Social Security story, whether it is a grandmother who relies on the program's benefits to pay for groceries, a father who suffered a debilitating injury after decades of hard work and receives much needed Social Security disability benefits, or a widowed mother who relies on Social Security survivors benefits to bring up her children.

In my own home, we have three generations living together--my wife Linda and me; our kids, Tyler and Mia; and Linda's parents, George and Ping Kwok. George Kwok lived the American dream. He ran a chop suey house, a Chinese restaurant in Honolulu, Kwok's Chop Suey, and worked hard all his life to give opportunities to his kids, until his eyes gave out. Like 200,000 seniors across Hawaii, he now relies on Social Security--SSDI--Social Security disability.

I tell you about my family not because we are unique but because we are not, because we are like so many families in Hawaii and across the country. And with the number of retirees growing, we need to do everything we can to strengthen this program, not to weaken it.

After a lifetime of hard work, seniors deserve to retire with the dignity and the benefits they have earned. This is a promise from the Federal Government. The current generation of Americans must keep our promises to seniors, but given his record, I am convinced that Congressman Mulvaney will try to do the opposite.

The second issue I am concerned about is the basic operations of government. Whether you are a member of the military, a visitor to a national park, or a worker looking to retire in the near future, we all need for the government to fulfill its basic obligations. But Congressman Mulvaney voted to default on the U.S. debt several times, and he did it in the face of warnings from the U.S. Treasury that this would be unprecedented and catastrophic for our economy and that it could drive the world deep into another recession just as we were finally recovering from the last one.

Think about how markets would react if the U.S. Government declared that it would not make good on its financial obligations. The stock markets would go crazy, and not in a good way. That would be terrible for the millions of people who invest their savings in the market for their retirement.

The Congressman has also voted several times to shut down the Federal Government, all in the name of getting his way. I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous his approach to government is. It is one thing as a Member of the House Freedom Caucus, as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives--there are 435; you can take positions--but it doesn't have quite the direct impact that the Office of Management and Budget does. He has put party and partisan views over some of the most fundamental and basic principles of our government. To close the government, to stop paying our bills, to make people across the planet question the full faith and credit of the United States is beyond comprehension.

It should take a real crisis to pull Congress away from the negotiating table and all the challenges in front of us. But it actually wasn't a crisis that led the Congressman to vote to close our government; it was Planned Parenthood and the ACA. While we may disagree about the best approach on healthcare and even on reproductive choice and women's health, those disagreements should never get in the way of the U.S. Government going about its business. Yet Congressman Mulvaney's actions went against that basic principle.

With respect to our Democratic institutions, the procedural violence that was done to the U.S. Congress is hard to overstate in this case. The idea that a faction of a party would demand concessions--and I think we remember this--would demand concessions in exchange for satisfying their infliction of pain on the United States is unbelievable. And why? Because we are all Americans here. We all want to do right by our country. So the idea that one party would be willing to inflict terrible pain on the country, or else, was so beyond the pale that there is no rule against it, there is no law against it. And do you know why there is no rule and no law against it? It is because nobody contemplated that a major political party would behave in such a way. The assumption has always been that elected leaders would find a better way to stand up for their strongly held beliefs than by threatening to bring the American economy to its knees. Up until the shutdown led by the Congressman, that had been a safe assumption.

In 2011, Congress's delay in raising the debt limit forced the Department of Treasury to take what they call extraordinary measures to ensure that our government could pay its bills.

GAO estimates that this raised Treasury's borrowing costs by about $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2011. That is $1.3 billion in added government costs just for coming close to defaulting. The Bipartisan Policy Center projects that the full cost of that crisis to the Federal Government alone--not to the private sector economy, just the Federal Government-- was around $20 billion over the maturity of that debt.

There is nothing conservative about defaulting on what we owe. It cripples free markets. It is Russian roulette playing, with a bullet in every chamber. There is nothing conservative about that.

When the government closed in 2013, we paid Federal workers to stay home. I want everybody to understand what we ended up doing. Listen, it wasn't their fault. These government employees are not the ones who screwed up; it was the Congress that screwed up. We paid dedicated Federal workers who want to do their jobs, not to do their jobs. We forced them to stay home and paid them anyway. I defy you to find a conservative outside of the Halls of Congress who finds that to be a conservative proposition. It is one thing to shut down the government for a couple of weeks and accrue the savings. I think that is inhumane, I think that is bananas, but at least you would save the money. These folks ended up paying all the money out and just forcing government workers to not do their jobs. This is not the left or right; this is upside down. We prevented Federal workers from doing their important work, like assisting small businesses and combating terrorism.

Ultimately, the 2013 shutdown was a bad move for our economy and for our budget. It cost us money instead of saving us money. In just the first week, it cost the economy $1.6 billion in lost economic output, and it cost about $160 million a day on the private sector side.

Worst of all, the Congressman has not seen the error of this. There were a lot of Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who--in the heat of the battle, you sort of think the other side is going to back off and listen. We all learn lessons. We all make mistakes. There are a lot of Republicans who went through that shutdown and said: We never want to do that to the country again. But Congressman Mulvaney has not seen the error of his ways. He still believes the government shutdown was a good idea, and he said so at the confirmation hearing.

Senator McCaskill asked if he still thought the shutdown was the right way to go about things, and he answered yes. He answered yes. This kind of budget brinkmanship is not good for our government, to say the least, but it is certainly a bad fit for the person running the

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

Mr. President, I wish to tell a story about Evelyn, a young woman I met from Molokai, which is a small rural island in the State of Hawaii. It is the kind of place that has one radio station, one high school, and everybody knows everybody. Of course, everyone in town knows Evelyn.

They were all so very proud of her when she invented a pH sensor that can detect even small changes in the ocean's environment. Her device is nothing short of groundbreaking. It is actually more accurate than the devices that marine scientists at our Federal agencies have been using, and it is way less expensive. It is an estimated \1/42\nd of the price, and it requires half the maintenance.

This invention makes Evelyn an accomplished scientist, an innovator, an entrepreneur, and a passionate ocean steward, but she is also a junior in public high school, Molokai High School. She is proof that our public school students can compete and innovate at the highest levels and that public schools can be a path to just about anything, which is why public schools and public education are to be held up and supported and understood as the great equalizer, the bedrock of our democracy, our civil society, our country. You can trace back the history of public education in America to the Original Thirteen Colonies. In 1635, boys in Boston could get a free education, and by 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony

required every town to provide boys a basic education.

Some 340 years later, our public education system has come a long way, but some things don't change. Our communities still understand how public education lays a foundation for success. It gives every American the chance to pursue their dreams. But the nominee for Secretary of Education doesn't seem to understand that, which is why we see constituents flooding the phone lines, Facebook and Twitter, faxes, and the in-boxes of U.S. Senators.

In terms of pure volume, this last week has been the highest point for American interaction with the U.S. Congress in our history. Think about that. Think about what we have been through as a country together, and yet, this week and last, more people have called their Members of the Senate than literally ever before because that is the level of passion people feel for public education and because Americans across the country are concerned and worried about what will happen to public education under Betsy DeVos. My office alone has received thousands of messages about her nomination.

I just want to be clear about this. There are certainly advocacy organizations that make it easy for you to contact your Member of Congress. They have form letters. They have Web forms. They make it easy. They populate the thing. They pop off an email, and you just sign at the bottom. That isn't what I am talking about. These are organically generated, individual letters from across the State of Hawaii.

Talking with colleagues, that is what is happening. People are, on their own, calling because everybody has a story about public education. Everybody has a reason to be passionate about public education. Let me share a few of these concerns.

A parent on the Big Island of Hawaii wrote:

As a mother of two, and as a woman who went back to

graduate school in her 50s, I understand the importance of

free education in public schools as a fundamental American

right, one which can create a lifelong love of education and

learning.

A constituent from Kihei, Maui, wrote:

Public schools are not failing. We, as in our American

culture, are failing them.

Another one from Kahului, Maui, wrote:

Children are not a business, they are not a commodity.

Public education has its issues (of course it does), but

privatizing teachers and turning education into an

opportunity for the rich to get richer on one of the last

social services we provide to everyone in this country is not

the answer.

Here is one from a teacher on the island of Molokai:

The nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has

zero experience serving in public schools and is not

qualified for the job. I do not believe she understands the

needs of our students and what effort it has taken to move

our schools as far along as we have. Public education is a

great responsibility and cannot be left to those who have

never worked directly with children in need.

These are children who experience school as a safe place

when they are valued, fed and educated. This serious

responsibility of public education in no way can be left or

replaced by a voucher system.

Here is another message from a constituent on the Big Island:

My family has very strong ties to the education community--

many of which are or were educators. My husband is an English

as a second language teacher, and my mother-in-law is

currently a third grade teacher, so this issue cuts deep in

our beliefs. We at a minimum deserve a leader with some

experience and who knows at least some of the laws already in

place as well as how to enforce them.

Mrs. DeVos has never known what a child from Milolii has to

do just to get a good education. She has never had to make

the choice to go to college or to stay home, try to save

money while also helping to support her household. Neither

her nor her children had to question if she can afford out of

state tuition. She does not represent our plight and she does

not know our challenges.

I ask you from the pureness of my heart as a mom who wants

what is best for not only my child, but for every mother's

child, to please demand an educational representative with

experience and our values in mind.

Here is a message from another parent:

This is not about which side of the political arena you

fall upon. I believe there are many Republicans and Democrats

who are far more qualified and knowledgeable than Mrs. DeVos.

Our kids deserve better.

She is right--our kids do deserve better. But right now, not all of them are getting the education they deserve. A 2016 report found that half a million 15-year-old students in the United States haven't mastered the basics in any subject--not math, not reading, not science--and more than a million scored below the baseline level in science.

U.S. News and World Report noted that if we could pull those kids up to a basic understanding, our economy could grow by an estimated $27 trillion over the time period that these students are in the workforce. Set aside the human impact for a moment. Set aside the family impact. If all you care about is economic development, we are leaving $27 trillion on the table because we are not lifting up every child to learn as much as they possibly can and reach their potential.

In too many places, we are failing these kids. The impact is both negative and far reaching. Our failure impacts their ability to go to college or learn a trade, to make a decent paycheck, to provide for their family, and to pursue the American dream. But we don't have to fail these children. This Congress can make choices that will improve education for all. We can make, instead of break, the future for our kids. We can decide to increase funding for disadvantaged students. We can decide to protect our students from bullying, sexual harassment, and gun violence. We can decide to set up children for success with universal access to early childhood education.

There is abundant brain science now that confirms every parent's instinct, which is that the first 5 years of a child's life--of an infant's life into being a toddler, then to being a little kid--those first 5 years are the most important years for a child. Now we don't have to just use our instincts because there is abundant brain science and data that have come in that have shown, in terms of the efficacy of a Federal dollar spent, there is nothing that has a greater impact in terms of reducing social service spending, in terms of economic development, than investing in early childhood education.

We can decide to adhere to commonsense accountability standards to ensure a high-quality education to all children, regardless of who your parents are or where you live. We can decide to invest in wage-boosting apprenticeship careers and technical education. We can make college more affordable so our students can access higher education without taking on crushing debt.

But to accomplish these goals, we need an excellent Department of Education to make it happen because the agency is responsible for implementing Congress's decisions. It is up to the executive branch to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the Nation. That is literally the mission statement of the U.S. DOE--to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence. And that is the way I look at the Secretary nominee. Is she committed to ensuring access--equal access to education and promoting educational excellence?

The Secretary of Education is responsible for the mission of overseeing a $36 billion budget in K-12 and about $150 billion in higher education funding. This person is responsible for enforcing key civil rights protections for our students. This person advises the President on all things education in the United States, whether it is a policy that will affect a local public school or a policy that will impact millions of student borrowers.

Up until this moment, every Secretary of Education who has served in the President's Cabinet has had the resume required to take on these responsibilities.

Shirley Hufstedler was the first Secretary of Education to be in the Cabinet, serving under President Carter. As the daughter of a schoolteacher and a part-time teacher herself, she was also a trailblazing lawyer who was considered a favorite to be the first woman nominated to the Supreme Court.

Terrel Bell was a teacher, a professor, and then a superintendent of a school district in Utah before he served under President Reagan.

William Bennett was a professor at three universities who released research about higher education curriculums before heading the Department to serve under President Reagan.

Laurel Cavazos was dean of Tufts Medical School before becoming president of Texas Tech University. He would go on to be the first Secretary of Education for President George H.W. Bush.

The esteemed Senator Alexander served as Governor of Tennessee and president of the University of Tennessee before becoming President Bush's Secretary of Education.

Richard Riley championed funding and support for education as Governor of South Carolina before leading the Department of Education under President Clinton.

Rod Paige was a professor, a dean, an innovator in education, and the superintendent of the Houston school district before he served under President George W. Bush.

Margaret Spellings advised then-Governor George Bush on education in Texas before becoming his second Secretary of Education.

Arne Duncan served as the CEO for Chicago's public school system before joining the Obama administration as Secretary of Education.

John King, Jr., was the commissioner of education for New York and Deputy Secretary of Education before he led the Department as Secretary for President Obama.

Every Secretary who has led the Department came to the job with a history in government or in the classroom. They served as elected officials or as policy advisers in the executive branch or worked as administrators or educators. But now this administration is asking us to make an exception by confirming someone who really doesn't have any relevant experience. She has never served in the government, never taught in the classroom, never managed a school district.

One woman from Oahu wrote me to say:

She is supremely unqualified to lead the department. As a

retired public school teacher--30 years both in regular and

special education--I am aghast that she is even being

considered. When one is being nominated to uphold Federal

education laws and is ``confused'' by what IDEA entails, it

becomes very apparent that this person is a poor choice for

this position.

Another letter I got from an educator reads:

I taught in both public and private schools for 10 years on

the mainland before moving to Hawaii and teaching for more

than 15 additional years. Watching video clips on the news of

her Senate hearings, it is appalling to see how little she

knows about the topic of education. I worry for all of our

children. I worry for our country. Please, if you can, do

what you can do to see that we get someone more qualified to

help guide our children and our country. HELP!

Everything that has happened since Mrs. DeVos has been nominated has unfortunately only confirmed the concerns I heard from constituents. Because her hearing was so short, Senators followed up with written questions, and in some cases, her responses lifted language from other sources without citing them. In one response, she wrote, ``Every child deserves to attend school in a safe, supportive environment, where they can learn, thrive and grow.'' Fine. Well, an Obama official used the exact same language in a press release regarding the rights of transgender students, but she did not cite that official or the press release.

In another example, she answered a question about title IX investigations in the following way: ``Opening a complaint for investigation in no way implies that the Office of Civil Rights has made a determination about the merits of that complaint.'' That is the exact language the Department of Education uses in its own guidance. There is nothing wrong with citing a source, especially when that source is the Department you want to run, but it has to be cited. That is one of the first things you teach a child in seventh and eighth grade when they are trying to learn how to do research--cite your sources.

But the central issue isn't the lack of a seriousness of purpose during the hearings and in the questions for the record, although I think that was what caused the Nation to kind of wake up and rise up about the challenge in front of us when it comes to public education. This was not part of some master strategy on the part of Democrats. What happened in those hearings is that Michael Bennet, Al Franken, Chris Murphy, and Elizabeth Warren just did their jobs and asked questions.

If you told me that a clip about the distinction between proficiency and growth--I mean, that is the wonkiest thing in the world. But what happened was 2 million people or more saw that on Facebook. This wasn't part of our political strategy. What happened was that people saw the hearing and got very worried that we will have the wrong person in charge of public education policy at the Federal level. So you have people left, right, and center. You can ask the Senate Republicans whether they are getting phone calls too. They are getting phone calls too. This is not a Democratic strategy. What is happening is that we have the wrong person who may be confirmed as the Secretary of Education.

The central issue is that there remain concerns around Mrs. DeVos's basic understanding of education policy. During her confirmation hearings, there were several moments when she didn't seem to fully grasp the important parts of Federal law on education.

The Washington Post actually published an article called ``Six astonishing things Betsy DeVos said--and refused to say--at her confirmation hearing.''

DeVos refused to agree with a Democrat that schools are no

place for guns, citing one school that needs one to protect

against grizzly bears.

When Senator Chris Murphy asked her whether she would agree

that guns don't belong in schools, she said, ``I will refer

back to Senator Enzi and the school he was talking about in

Wyoming. I think probably there, I would imagine that there

is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential

grizzlies.''

This would be hilarious if it weren't so serious. This would be hysterically funny if this weren't the person who is about to become our Secretary of Education.

When asked whether she would support President Trump if he, as promised, moved to end gun-free zones around schools, she said: ``I will support whatever the President does,'' even if that means moving guns into schools, allowing guns in schools. She added: ``If the question is around gun violence and the results of that, please know that my heart bleeds and is broken for those families that have lost any individual to gun violence.''

DeVos refused to agree with Senator Tim Kaine that all schools that receive public Federal funds--traditional public, charter, or private schools that receive voucher money--should be held to the same standards of accountability.

A little background on this issue. I have a great charter school movement in the State of Hawaii, but the deal we have struck--and it is imperfect, and they are always arguing about fixed costs and capital costs and all the rest of it, but the basic bargain when charters work is that they are legitimately a public school. What does that mean? That means they are held to the same standards as traditional public schools because to the extent that you have two categories of public schools with different metrics, then you are basically playing a game, trying to divert money from one to the other.

OK, so Tim Kaine's question was exactly right. If public money is involved--whether it is vouchers to a private school, school choice to a charter school, or a traditional public school--shouldn't we measure each school's success in the same way, just to be fair?

Kaine said: If confirmed, will you insist upon equal accountability in any K-12 school or educational program that receives taxpayer funding--whether public, public charter, or private?

DeVos said: I support accountability.

Kaine said: Equal accountability?

DeVos: I support accountability.

Kaine: Is that a yes or a no?

DeVos: I support accountability.

Kaine: Do you not want to answer my question?

DeVos. I support accountability.

This is someone who either did not prepare for the hearing or is basically walking into this hearing saying: I have the votes. I don't have to answer your questions. I don't have to reassure the parents, teachers, and students who are desperately worried about what is going to happen to public education because I have the votes.

Kaine said: Let me ask you this. I think all schools that receive taxpayer funding should be equally accountable.

I mean, he is so polite, but he is also very lawyerly. So he asked the question 14 different ways, trying to get the answer.

Do you agree?

DeVos: Well, they don't. They are not today.

Kaine: Well, I think they should. Do you agree with me?

Well, no.

Kaine, interrupting her, said: You don't not agree with me. And then he moved on to another topic.

DeVos appeared to have no idea what Al Franken was talking about when he referred to the accountability debate about whether to use test scores to measure student proficiency or student growth.

I mean, there is a debate about student proficiency and student growth, and I won't bore you with the details except to say that I don't expect regular folks out there to be into the weeds about the difference between proficiency and growth. I get how wonky that is. I absolutely expect the Secretary of Education nominee to know about this.

I mean, even if you are brand new to the topic, if you just have smart people in the room who briefed you on it--10 hours maybe--you would be ready to talk about proficiency and growth. This is what I am talking about when I talk about a lack of preparation, a lack of humility around what advice and consent means, and the Senate has an obligation to take every nomination seriously.

Franken noted that the subject has been debated in the education community for many years and said, when she didn't weigh in and just looked at him without much of an expression on her face: It surprises me that you don't know this issue.

But it is not just issues like accountability or guns in schools that concern me. On a whole host of issues, Mrs. DeVos's views are far out of the mainstream of education policy.

I want to highlight four policy areas where Mrs. DeVos's views are beyond my line in the sand. Let's start with K-12 education. I think we can all agree that this country has work to do when it comes to public education. But I am worried that Mrs. DeVos would prefer to privatize our public schools instead of improving them.

Take a look at her track record. She has fought to strip away protections around K-12 education and introduce a profit motive into our education system. She has lobbied for vouchers and for for-profit schools. She has been relatively successful in her lobbying efforts. In her home State of Michigan, she had an enormous influence on the State's approach to education.

Now, I would point any Senator on the fence about her nomination to look at this case study because it speaks volumes. In 2000, Michigan fourth and fifth grade students had higher than average test scores in math and English.

Fifteen years later, students now perform below average. Last spring, the Atlantic published a fascinating article about Detroit's education system, which has been most influenced by the policies that Mrs. DeVos champions. I would like to read a few excerpts from it.

Three months into her son's first pass at third grade,

Arlyssa Heard had a breakdown. Judah was bright, but had

begun calling himself stupid. The chaos of Detroit's

precarious education landscape had forced him to switch

schools every few months, leaving him further and further

behind.

There was no central system to transfer Judah's records

when he moved, and according to Heard the school where he

started the 2014-15 academic year had a single teacher

assigned to 44 third-graders. Heard was virtually alone in

trying to deal with the fact that her boy, then 8, could

write only the first two letters of his name.

Heard says she was one of the parents Detroit Public

Schools turned to when it needed a strong family showing at a

rally or community members to serve on a task force. She was

running for the Detroit School Board. But when she needed

help, she had nowhere to turn.

``Here I was this advocate for education, and I couldn't

find a place for my son,'' she says. ``I was crying in the

principal's office and I said, `I don't know what to do.' The

principal said, `I don't either.'''

The scope of the problems plaguing Detroit schools--both

traditional district schools and charters--is almost

unfathomable. According to the most recent National

Assessment of Educational Progress, only 4 percent of

Detroit's eight grade students can read and perform math at

grade level, the lowest rate among the nation's big cities.

Schools aren't located where families need them--

Think about this--

and campuses often open and close with no coordination or

notice. Over the last six years, most schools in the city

have either opened or closed--or both. In one neighborhood in

the city's southwest quadrant, home to a large Latino

population and a number of industrial zones, a dozen schools

opened or closed in the span of 18 months. And when a parent

shows up to find a child's classroom abandoned, good luck

finding a new one. There are more than 200 schools with

roughly 50 different enrollment processes and almost no

standard for performance.

Some 44 percent of the Detroit students are enrolled in

charter schools, the second-highest rate in the Nation,

behind New Orleans. One of those schools is the Detroit

Leadership Academy, which two years ago was solidly at the

back of a flagging pack. Abutting a crumbling freeway access

road in the city's working-class Castle Rouge neighborhood,

several grades at the school's elementary campus did not

boast a single student reading or performing math at grade

level.

During the summer of 2015, a network of three charter

schools called Equity Education Solutions--which unlike most

of the city's charter operators is a nonprofit--was tasked

with turning the school around, a restart required under law

because of its consistently poor performance. Central

Michigan University, the authorizing entity that granted the

school permission to exist, told the fledgling network it had

8 months to fix things.

In reality, the operators of Detroit's charter schools

almost never close them because of poor academic performance.

So even a school where no child is achieving at grade level

can continue enrolling new students.

That is school choice for you. That is the charter school movement for you--not in every instance, but this is how it manifested itself in the State of Michigan, where Betsy DeVos played a major role.

And the higher-education institutions that authorize them,

often have financial incentives to keep the schools open;

charter networks give authorizers a percentage of the

funding.

So the agency, which is often a university or some other institution, actually gets a cut of the revenue for authorizing. So they have a problem saying: This charter must be shut down--because that costs them money.

In some States in exchange for that revenue, charter

authorizers are encouraged to provide support and

accountability, but not in Michigan, where the trustees of

the colleges doing the authorizing are appointed by the

governor. ``Not even the governor has the authority to shut

down chronically low-performing charter authorizers in

Michigan,'' Education Trust-Midwest noted in a report

released last week, ``despite the fact that such authorizers

serve nearly 145,000 Michigan children--and their charter

schools take in more $1 billion annually.''

Critics say this is especially problematic because almost

all of Detroit's charter schools are run by for-profit

companies.

Think about that. This is public education. Right? These are public dollars. Suddenly, they are going to for-profit companies. It would be one thing to have the old talk from Members on the other side of the aisle: We should run government like a business. Well, if the point is to run things efficiently to do more innovation, fine. If the point is to try to suck as much revenue out of the taxpayer as we possibly can and deliver a minimal service, you know, I don't think we should run the public education system like that kind of a business. In this case, it is not running it like a business; it is running a business with Federal and State tax dollars.

The private businesses aren't required to disclose their

earnings, but a 2014 investigation by the Detroit Free Press

suggests profits are huge.

During the 2012-13 school year, the paper found,

traditional Detroit public schools spent an average of about

$7,000 per student in the classroom. Charter schools spent

about $2,000 less per pupil.

They are getting the same amount of money, and they are spending $2,000 less per kid. Yet they spent double that rate on per-pupil funding on administrative costs. That is their skim. That is their profit.

Meanwhile, the oversupply of seats in for-profit schools

has arguably kept nonprofit charter networks with better

track records out of the market.

So they really are operating like a business, like an airline; right? They are operating like a credit card company, a financial services company. I mean, this is the private sector at work in public education. There are some private sector models where I think: Hey, let's have a partnership with the Department of Education to try to see how much clean energy we can develop. Let's work with the Department of Commerce on export promotion. But there are some aspects of what the government does that are not a good fit with the private sector. This

is one of them. This is not some ideological test. It is just not working.

We are ripping off our taxpayers, and we are giving a bad value to the students who deserve better.

The Senate bill under consideration at the Michigan

statehouse would have created a Detroit commission with the

power to change all of that. The leaders of the Michigan

Association of Public School Academies, the main charter

lobby association, and some of Michigan's for-profit

management companies have long lobbied against policies that

would have tightened accountability. The most influential of

them is Betsy DeVos, a major player in Michigan's Republican

Party and in the efforts to widen the for-profit sector.

They have argued that proposals such as that put forward by

the Senate bill disregard the needs of Detroit's children.

``Legislators should not give in to this anti-choice, anti-

parent, and anti-student agenda aimed at protecting and

maintaining the status quo for deeply entrenched adult

interest groups,'' Betsy DeVos opined in the Detroit News.

``After all, since DPS has lost 75 percent of their

enrollment in the past decade, haven't Detroit parents

already voted resoundingly by fleeing for higher quality and

safer schools elsewhere?''

But critics, including Stephen Henderson, the Detroit Free

Press's editorial page editor, says it's groups such as the

DeVos foundations that have an agenda.

``House Republicans, for instance, are also standing in the

way of [a bill] which would, quite simply, slow the spread of

mediocre or failing schools.''

The article ends with a few paragraphs about Arlyssa Heard, the advocate described in the beginning of the story.

After enrolling her son in two more schools that didn't

work, she found a small startup school that has strategies

for helping Judah compensate for his ADHD. He had to repeat

the third grade, but has rocketed ahead. Now he talks about

becoming a scientist.

The realization that better is possible has redoubled

Heard's willingness to make the trek to Lansing as often as

parent voices need to be heard. ``Who are these people who

are making the decisions and why aren't they in the

schools,'' she asks. ``Why can't we know? Why can't you just

be accountable to the people you are serving?''

Now, during the confirmation hearing, Senator Bennet, whom I greatly admire, and who is a former superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, asked Mrs. DeVos how the policy failures in Detroit might inform her leadership at the DOE.

She replied: I think there is a lot that has gone right.

Senator Patty Murray, a former school board president, asked if Mrs. DeVos would promise not to privatize public education or cut funding. A pretty straightforward question. A pretty mainstream question, right? I mean, if you get sort of a mainstream Republican nominee for Secretary of Education, they know how to answer this question. They may have a different view of common core. They may have a different view of the teachers' unions. They may have a different view on charter school choice. But everybody knows it is the third rail; you do not talk about privatizing public education.

Here is her response:

I look forward, if confirmed, to working with you to talk

about how we address the needs of all parents and all

students.

We acknowledge today that not all schools are working for

the students that are assigned to them. I'm hopeful that we

can work together to find common ground and ways that we can

solve those issues and empower parents to make choices on

behalf of their children that are right for them.

I don't know what that means. It is not a complicated question, right? I mean, certainly in the United States Senate, you get a lot of complicated questions, right, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the Education Committee. I happen to be the ranking member of the Communications Subcommittee on the Commerce Committee, and half of what I say is totally unintelligible to people who don't work in tech and telecom.

But this is a very straightforward question. The question is, Do you promise not to work on privatizing public education? And the answer is basically: No, I don't promise. I mean, it is a word salad, but it doesn't mean anything. And she was given a very easy opportunity to disavow her intent to privatize public education.

Privatization is not the answer. We should not be funneling taxpayer money into unregulated and unaccountable private schools.

We need to champion access to public education and the accountability measures that give all of our students a chance to succeed.

But in Michigan, Mrs. DeVos lobbied to block accountability standards for charter schools and lift the cap on charter schools. These actions pushed the number of unregulated, for-profit operators of charter schools from 255 to 805.

Now, this doesn't mean that charter schools are the boogeyman here, right? I mean, there may be some disagreements between people who support charter schools and people who support traditional public schools, but at the end of the day, the legitimate, mainstream charter school proponents will always want to be able to look you in the eye and say: Look, this is not about vouchers, and this is not about privatization. This is about the flexibility to innovate. They understand the basic bargain in the charter movement has to be: OK. It is public education dollars, and there are a couple of things that are mandatory, right? You have to comply with Federal and State law. You have to be subject to the same accountability standards, and you have to take all comers. So it is very important to the mainstream charter people--

I was interested to know because I have a good relationship with education reformers and with the charter movement, so when I heard about Mrs. DeVos, I was interested to hear what they had to say. They were, in a lot of ways, more alarmed than anyone because they believed this would be the death knell for real charters because, to the extent that charters are just cover for privatizing public education, well, now it is going to be a fight. Now it is going to be a fight.

We have some great charter schools in my home State of Hawaii. They are doing innovative things for their students, and that is something we should all support, but when Mrs. DeVos talks about charter schools, she is not talking about those schools. She is talking about privatization.

The rallying cry behind privatization is often school choice, but choice doesn't work as a practical matter in many places across the country. In a lot of communities, particularly in rural areas, school choice is not a practical response to the problems. There is no school down the road, right? There is no little Catholic school. There is no private charter school. There is no public charter school. There is just the school, right? Because the town is too small to have multiple options.

So when you talk about taking--and I heard a figure of $20 billion out of the K-12 budget which is not that--I mean, it is $20 billion out of $36 billion--and providing it for school choice and for charters, well, what about Alaska, right? What about Nebraska? What about the Dakotas? What about parts of Hawaii, where if you give a parent and a student a voucher, and they say: Well, I have this voucher for private education, for charter schools, and yet there is only one school left, all you did was eviscerate the budget of the only school in your neighborhood. That is how this is going to work as a practical matter.

I don't know if that is the intent or not. I honestly don't know if that is the intent or not, but that is how it would end up working. To drain money from traditional public education hurts people in small communities, in rural communities, and places where there is no possibility of multiple schools.

School choice can drain resources. When a charter school opens up, the public school has to divert resources from its students, and that is something I have heard about from people in Hawaii.

One teacher whom I heard from who has worked for two decades in both Hawaii and Michigan wrote this to me:

Ms. DeVos would be a disaster for public education. She has

never been a teacher to know what current educational

practices consist of.

Her advocacy for more unaccountable (often for-profit)

charter schools and greater use of vouchers so that students

could attend private or religious schools would take needed

resources away from local public schools.

Her mission, in short, is to privatize public education.

I've witnessed firsthand in Michigan what happens when

schools privatize.

DeVos should be opposed not only for what she could do, if

confirmed, but for what she's done in Michigan.

The DeVos family set up the Great Lakes Education Project,

which has played a leading role in thwarting efforts to

regulate charter schools in Detroit and, for the most part,

failed to deliver on their promises of a better education for

students.

I just want to pause for a moment and thank all of the people who write my office every day but in particular the people who have been writing my office on all of these nominees because it wasn't that difficult to pull these incredibly insightful, passionate, individually written letters, and this is happening across the country.

You know, you get the pundits as you leave the Senate. If it is the middle of the day and not 2:30 in the morning, the media kind of comes to you, and they stick the microphone in your face, and they ask you about: Is there a new tea party on the left?

All I can tell you is, there are millions and millions and millions of people who are rising up. I don't think they are all on the left. I mean, when I saw those marches, there were lots of progressives, lots of people who believe in liberal and progressive causes, but I also saw some people who have never marched in their lives. I also saw some people who just care about public education. They don't even know what their politics are, except they saw Betsy DeVos, and they said: No, this is not what I voted for. This is not what I want for my son or for my daughter or for my niece or my nephew. This is not what I want for the country's future, which brings me to the second policy area that I think we ought to consider and that is for-profit colleges.

What is happening with some for-profit colleges is nothing less than a national scandal. Students are being hurt, and we are wasting tens of billions of dollars. So here are the facts:

Almost 2 million students are enrolled in for-profit programs, and they have collectively taken on $200 billion in debt to attend, but they often leave with little to show for it. More than half drop out within a few months. At some colleges, fewer than 5 percent of their students ever graduate.

For those who leave without a degree, repaying loans is an incredible struggle. Students at for-profit colleges default on student loans at double the rate of students at nonprofit colleges. This is morally outrageous on its own, but it is particularly egregious to the American taxpayer because these substandard programs are financed almost entirely by the Federal Government, and the amount is staggering.

In total, for-profits receive over $32 billion a year in Federal financial aid. That is 20 percent of the total aid, and they serve 12 percent of the students--20 percent of the aid, 12 percent of the students, $32 billion in Federal funding.

There are several for-profit companies that each take in more than $1 billion in Federal aid a year and graduate fewer than 10 percent of their students. Think about that. We taxpayers are paying most of the bill a year, and these kids are not graduating. They take in more than $1 billion, and they are graduating fewer than 10 percent of their kids.

Not only are the education metrics on student performance awful, but many of these for-profit colleges are also under investigation for fraud and deception. Essentially, they have been lying to students and to State and Federal agencies to cover up how bad their record is.

Even while prosecutors go after these schools for fraud, they remain accredited, and they continue to rake in Federal funds.

Here are a few examples. Education Management Corporation faces charges of fraud and deception brought by prosecutors in 13 States and the Department of Justice and was facing a lawsuit to recover $11 billion in Federal and State funds. Yet EMC is still accredited and still received $1.25 billion from the U.S. DOE last year.

Ultimately, the Department of Justice secured a $100 million settlement, and a separate coalition of State attorneys general reached another settlement for $102 million in student loan debt relief for former students.

ITT Educational Services was investigated and sued by 19 States, the SEC, the CFPB, and the DOJ. It is also under scrutiny from U.S. DOE for failure to meet financial responsibility standards. They remained accredited until the day they shut their doors. Think about that. They were still accredited by the U.S. DOE, right, until they were shut down by the U.S. DOJ.

The year before, they received just under $600 million. Their closure has left thousands of students in the lurch, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.

Another 152 schools are under investigation by a working group of 37 State attorneys general. They too are still accredited. Collectively, they received $8 billion in Federal financial aid last year.

So what do these schools have in common? They never lose their accreditation, even when there are ongoing investigations of fraud and deceptive practices that harm students.

Accreditation is the key to the castle for accessing the spigot of Federal financial aid. It is supposed to signify that a program provides a quality education for its students, but here is the thing. This accreditation doesn't mean much. The Government Accountability Office released a study on accreditation in 2014, and its findings were shocking. Over a 4-year period, the GAO found that accreditors sanction only 8 percent of the institutions they oversaw and revoked accreditation for just 1 percent. They revoked accreditation for just 1 percent. So 99 percent of them, even if there is nothing wrong, they keep those Federal funds flowing in.

Even more troubling, GAO found that there was no correlation between accreditor sanctions and educational quality. In other words, schools with bad student outcomes were no more likely to be sanctioned by their accreditor than schools with good student outcomes.

Our accreditation system is totally broken. According to the Higher Education Act, accreditation agencies are supposed to be the ``reliable authorities as to the quality of education or training offered'' by institutions of higher education. That is the reason for making accreditation a core criteria for receiving Federal funds.

How are we following the law when accreditation reviews find that 99 percent of these institutions are providing an education of value? How can we say with a straight face that accreditors are acting as reliable authorities on educational quality?

Here is the problem--money. Incentives are lined up against being critical and against setting high standards. The problem can be traced back to the funding and the governance of the accreditation agencies themselves.

First, accrediting agencies are funded by the same institutions they accredit. Colleges pay an additional fee to become accredited and annual dues after that. They pay for site visits and other services.

Second, accrediting agencies are run by and are overseen by the institutions they accredit. The member institutions elect their own academics and administrators to serve on the board of the accreditation agency. So everyone is in on it, right? Everyone makes money pretending this is fine.

We have a system that is dysfunctional, if not corrupt, in which it is far too easy to become and remain accredited.

This is a very similar system to what we had with S&P and Moody's and all of these rating agencies that had financial incentives to determine that all of these derivatives and credit default swaps and crazy financial instruments that were clearly not creditworthy were getting AAA ratings. Why? Because the financial incentives over time had enmeshed the accreditors with the accrediting. This is supposed to be a sort of independent relationship because they are supposed to be certifying to the consumer that everything is all good, right? And what happened? The system came crashing down.

I don't think the system will come crashing down, except that the system is already coming crashing down on the students who are getting ripped off. You ask schools that are taking in more than $1 billion of Federal funds. There are several schools, every year with Federal funds in excess of $1 billion, and 5 percent of the kids are graduating. For the sake of students and taxpayers, the Department has to make this a top priority, but I am not convinced that Mrs. DeVos will do that.

She has no experience in higher education, a fact that does not bode well for the 6,000 colleges and universities in this country. When Senator Warren questioned her about this in her confirmation hearing, her response was concerning. This is what the transcript says:

Ms. WARREN. How do you plan to protect taxpayer dollars

from waste, fraud, and

abuse from colleges that take in millions of dollars in

Federal student aid?

Mrs. DeVOS. Senator, if confirmed, I will certainly be very

vigilant.

Ms. WARREN. How? How are you going to do that? You said you

are committed.

Mrs. DeVOS. The individuals with whom I work in the

department will ensure that federal moneys are used properly

and appropriately.

Ms. WARREN. You are going to subcontract making sure that

what happens with universities that cheat students doesn't

happen anymore? You are going to give that to someone else to

do? I just want to know what your ideas are for making sure

we don't have problems with waste, fraud, and abuse.

Mrs. DeVOS. I want to make sure we don't have problems with

that as well. If confirmed, I will work diligently to ensure

that we are addressing any of those issues.

Ms. WARREN. Well, let me make a suggestion on this. It

actually turns out there are a whole group of rules that are

already written and are there, and all you have to do is

enforce them. What I want to know is, will you commit to

enforcing those rules?

Mrs. DeVOS. Senator, I will commit to ensuring that

institutions which receive federal funds are actually serving

their students well.

Ms. WARREN. So you will enforce the gainful employment rule

to make sure that these career colleges are not cheating

students?

Mrs. DeVOS. We will certainly review that rule.

Again, this goes back to somebody who is kind of walking

into a hearing saying: Look, I got the vote. I don't have to

learn about public education. I don't have to listen to

Democrats' concerns. I don't have to listen to teachers'

concerns or students' concerns or the concerns of experts in

education. I don't have to learn about higher education,

which is, by money spent, about three-quarters of the U.S.

Department of Education.

Ms. WARREN. You will review it? You will not commit to

enforce it?

Mrs. DeVOS. And see that it is actually achieving what the

intentions are.

Ms. WARREN. I don't understand about reviewing it. We

talked about this in my office. There are already rules in

place.

And so on--Senator Warren's exchange there is very revealing.

I know Republicans care very deeply about waste, fraud, and abuse. I hear about it all the time, and I hope they will consider this nominee's tepid commitment to this issue as they talk with their constituents about how they are going to vote.

The third issue I am concerned about is college affordability. The rising cost of college is one of the biggest middle-class issues of our time, if not the biggest issue of our time. No generation escapes this problem. If you are a student or a parent, you worry about paying for college. I know plenty of grandparents who are worried about their children who are still paying off their college loans and are now trying to save up for their students.

The Federal Government is giving $140 billion in Federal aid to institutions of higher learning in grants and loans. That is a good thing, not a bad thing. That is Federal policy. We decided we wanted to make college affordable because higher education is the straightest line for us to develop the workforce we need and for people to move up the economic ladder. But with that $140 billion, we need to be making college more affordable, and we are actually getting the opposite result. Both in raw dollars and inflation-adjusted dollars, we are spending more in Federal grants and Pell grants, and the cost of college goes up and up and up. Average Pell grant awards have increased by almost 20 percent in the past 10 years. In the same period, Pell grants covered 25 percent less.

We are officially paying more and getting less. This is because college costs are growing faster than the cost of all other consumer goods--twice as fast as health care costs. It is impossible to get ahead nowadays without a college degree, but the growing cost of college is preventing some from getting a degree in the first place and leaving others with unmanageable levels of debt. It is clear that our system isn't working.

If we are subsidizing higher education with Federal dollars, we have a responsibility to incentivize institutions of higher education to become more affordable, provide access to lower income students, and deliver quality education. We want to reward those schools that are focused on affordability and give incentives for the rest to make affordability part of the mission. But based on Mrs. DeVos's testimony, it is unclear whether or not she agrees.

In 2011, the Department of Education sent colleges and universities a letter that made clear that sexual assault is prohibited under title IX. It advised schools to be responsive to reports of sexual violence and gave guidelines on how schools should process those reports. But during Mrs. DeVos's hearing, she had an exchange with Senator Casey that indicates she would roll back this progress. Let's take a look at the transcript.

Mr. CASEY. Would you agree with me that the problem, and

that's an understatement in my judgment, that the problem of

sexual assault on college campuses is a significant [one]

that we should take action on?

Mrs. DeVOS. Senator, thank you for that question. I agree

with you that sexual assault in any form or in any place is a

problem.

Mr. CASEY. I ask you, would you uphold the 2011 Title IX

guidance as it relates to sexual assault on campus?

Mrs. DeVOS. Senator, I know that there's a lot of

conflicting ideas and opinions around that guidance, and if

confirmed I would work with you.

And so on.

My concerns about Mrs. DeVos go to policy, to preparation, but most of all to a basic understanding of what public education is about. It goes to a basic commitment to the mission of public education.

Every Senator's office has phones ringing off the hook with people telling us that Mrs. DeVos is not the right choice. So, to my Republican colleagues, you don't have to take my word for it; you don't have to take the word of the other 49 Senators who know that Mrs. DeVos will not be the leader of the Department of Education that we all need. You only have to take the word of the people in your own State and the groups whom we look to and trust when it comes to our country's education system. These are the people whom we are here to serve. They are the parents, the grandparents, the teachers, the faculty, the school board members, and the students who count on us to make the right decision.

We may not agree on who would make the perfect Secretary of Education, but we can agree that people across the country are speaking out against Mrs. DeVos, and it is up to us to listen. I will be voting no on her nomination, and I ask Republicans to follow the advice of their constituents and join me.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

I thank the ranking member of the HELP Committee, the senior Senator from Washington.

You can trace the history of public education in America to the Original Thirteen Colonies. In 1635, boys in Boston could get a free education, and by 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required every town to provide boys a basic education.

Some 340 years later, our public education system has come a long way, but some things don't change. Our communities still understand how public education lays a foundation for success. It is still the great equalizer.

Senator Murray, during Betsy DeVos's hearing, you asked a very important question. You asked: Can you commit to us that you will not work to privatize public schools or cut a single penny from public education?

Mrs. DeVos responded by saying she would work to find common ground and give parents options.

I am wondering whether you were satisfied with her answer and her commitment to the basic premise of public schools and public education.

Mr. President, I am an institutionalist. I believe in this place. I love this place. People don't always like the rules or how they are interpreted, how they are administered, but the rules have historically differentiated the Senate from any other legislative body in the world, and I believe in that.

But what Senator Warren did earlier tonight was not over the line. And here we are worrying about decorum and rule XIX, which says that ``No Senator in debate shall . . . impute to another Senator . . . any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.''

And let's be really clear here. This would not be a problem if Senator Sessions were not a Senator.

In other words, anytime a Senator is nominated for a Cabinet position, you can be as positive as you want, but if you want to be as tough on a Senator who has been nominated as we have been on Rex Tillerson or Betsy DeVos, you run the risk of breaking the rules.

Now let's pause a moment to understand how divorced from reality this is. While debating Jeff Sessions as the next Attorney General, Elizabeth Warren crossed an invisible line, and a rule almost never used was invoked.

The rule was not invoked when somebody called another Member a cancer. The rule was not invoked when somebody called another Member a liar.

Now, this is ridiculous, but it is actually not the main point. Here is the

point. Lots of people--almost everybody in the world--everybody in this country does not have the luxury of worrying about decorum. What a luxury we have to debate if a stray comment crossed some theoretical line.

This place, this place of privilege, this place, the dome next door built by slaves, this place, where there were hardly any women or people of color or gay people out of the closet until very recently, yet we spent hours worrying about whether Elizabeth hurt Jeff's feelings or broke a sense of decorum. What a luxury it is to worry about that.

In the meantime, Muslim families in America are terrified. In the meantime, DACA kids are worrying about whether they have to go into hiding. In the meantime, LGBT youth are bullied in school. In the meantime, anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise across the country.

And we are here worrying about whether it is impolite to quote in full the statement of the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Look, I am for this body. I am old-school. I like the rules. I spend a lot of time talking with the Parliamentarian at this desk so I can better understand it. But this body and its rules have to be in service to the country. The country is not in service to the rules and the body of the Senate.

Before I go on, I just want to thank the stenographers who are such a critical aspect of the Senate and have been running marathon sessions-- literally marathon sessions. We rotate through. There are at least 30 of us doing about 30 hours of debate, but there are only seven of you, and your wrists are sore, your legs are sore. This is incredibly challenging. Yet without you, we have no Senate Record.

So thank you for your service and your contributions to the world's greatest deliberative body.

In his final speech as Attorney General, Eric Holder gave us a warning and one that remains relevant in the Senate today. He said:

Beware those who would take us back to a past that has

really never existed or that was imbued with a forgotten

inequity. Our destiny as Americans is always ahead of us.

Today our country faces a stark choice. Do we want to pursue an imaginary past or do we want to continue to follow the path toward progress? Do we continue in our struggle to form a more perfect union, to secure the blessings of liberty? It is hard to believe, but these are the dramatic choices before us as we consider the Cabinet nominations of this administration. And that choice is perhaps most clear in the nomination of our colleague Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.

The Attorney General is the highest law enforcement official in the country. He or she is the defender of American values, of human rights, and of civil rights, and this person needs to have an unbreakable commitment to fight for what is right and to lead that pursuit in making America more free and more just. That is the kind of approach we need because that is what the job demands.

The Attorney General leads the No. 1 watchdog for civil rights in our country. It is the Department charged with protecting voting rights and prosecuting human trafficking and hate crimes. They determine and defend the constitutionality of U.S. policies. Our next AG will face critical challenges that will test our justice system and our values. We need a leader committed to protecting the rights of every American regardless of race, religion, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation.

While I do like him as a colleague, Senator Sessions is the wrong person to serve as our Nation's Attorney General. In my judgment, his policies, priorities, and overall philosophy fall short of the standard our country has for the leader of the Justice Department. Throughout Senator Sessions' career, he has been on the wrong side of history. If you look at the key issues that this Attorney General will work on, it is clear that Senator Sessions' views fall outside the mainstream of America.

That is certainly true when it comes to criminal justice. Look at Senator Sessions' opposition to the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. This bill was a big deal. It would have reduced mandatory minimum sentencing for low-level, nonviolent crimes, while keeping tougher penalties for serious or violent crimes; it would strengthen drug addiction, rehabilitation and mental health treatments, and improve our efforts to help people who were leaving prison to settle into their communities and get back on track. Everybody liked it. Senator Grassley introduced it with cosponsors from both sides of the aisle. The bill had support from the House Speaker, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Major Counties Sheriffs' Association, the National District Attorneys Association, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, among many others. Even the Koch brothers liked this piece of legislation. That is because it tackled problems we all agreed needed to be solved.

No one wants to see excessively punitive sentences that expand the Federal prison population, which has grown by 734 percent between the year 1980 and 2015. No one wants to see unnecessary barriers that make it harder for formerly incarcerated people to stay out of jail. No one wants to see taxpayer money spent needlessly.

So we had a thoughtful, bipartisan bill, but we were not able to enact it into law. Senator Sessions personally blocked the bill from being considered after it passed the Judiciary Committee last Congress. And he said: ``Federal drug and sentencing laws have already been considerably relaxed.''

The failure of reform impacts the lives of people who are hurt by unfair and outdated sentencing rules. It especially affects the families and communities of color who have been ravaged by the overincarceration of minorities. The ACLU reports that sentences imposed on Black men in the Federal system are almost 20 percent longer than sentences imposed on White men with similar crimes. Think about that--the same crime, and you get 20 percent more time if you are African American. And while people of color are just as likely as White people to sell or use illegal drugs, they are more likely to be arrested. Think about how preposterous that is--equal for justice for all, equal application of the laws, right?

People of color and Caucasians use drugs and distribute drugs in the same percentages, yet they are more likely to be arrested. African Americans make up 14 percent of regular drug users but 37 percent of people arrested for drug offenses. This raises the question of bias in law enforcement. Senator Sessions opposes holding State and local law enforcement accountable for racial bias and policing or the excessive use of force. He has called the approach the Justice Department took to this accountability an end run of the democratic process. He has attacked bipartisan efforts to reduce the sentences of nonviolent, low- level drug offenders, and he opposed President Obama's initiative to address racial disparities in our criminal justice system and restore fairness by granting clemency. Senator Sessions was critical of a Justice Department initiative that reduced overcrowding in Federal prisons by 20 percent over just the last 3 years.

Senator Sessions' views on drug policy are maybe even more out of the mainstream. He has been one of the most outspoken advocates against the legalization of marijuana, both recreational and medicinal. In an April 2016 hearing, he suggested that the Federal Government must send the message that ``good people don't smoke marijuana.''

This is 2016. This isn't 1975. This is 2016. Our Attorney General nominee says ``good people don't smoke marijuana.'' Tell that to the cancer victim. Tell that to my good friend John Radcliffe, who has stage 4 liver and colon cancer.

But Senator Sessions supports aggressive Federal intervention in States that have legalized medical or recreational marijuana. He criticized the Federal Government's guidance on Federal marijuana regulation, which directed the Justice Department to respect the decisions of States to determine their own criminal laws. Because of this guidance, Federal prosecutors stopped targeting patients who rely on medical marijuana products for relief. They stopped targeting local dispensaries that are operating squarely within State law. Instead they went after criminal drug traffickers and violent drug crimes. That seems like a

smart prioritization of resources within the Justice Department--not going after people who want to utilize marijuana to alleviate pain but rather going after violent drug crimes. That seems smart, but Senator Sessions opposed that.

The respect for federalism reflected in the Justice Department's guidance should be right in line with conservative values. Under the guidance, as long as States are preventing the distribution of marijuana to minors, if they are preventing the growing of marijuana on Federal lands, and if they are stopping State-authorized marijuana activities being used as fronts for other illegal activities, then the Justice Department doesn't interfere.

I would like to quote from Senator Sessions' argument against this policy. He said:

I think one of Obama's great failures that is obvious to me

is his lax treatment and comments on marijuana. . . . It

reverses 20 years almost of hostilities in drugs that began

really when Nancy Reagan started ``Just Say No.''

But here's the thing. There is a bipartisan consensus now that the drug war is a failure. The drug war did not work. The drug war did not decrease the percentage of people utilizing illegal drugs. Every time the government succeeded in shutting down a drug trafficking ring, another would pop up. And a harsh penalty didn't slow addiction rates, it just incarcerated mostly young men. They didn't slow the flow of drugs; instead, they crowded our prisons, hurt taxpayers, and increased drug-related violence in other countries.

Now is the time to shift our strategy and focus on people who struggle with addiction. We also need to respect the decision in many cities and States to decriminalize drug possession. It is up to them as to how to ascribe relief to citizens who could benefit from using medical marijuana.

There is another area where I believe Senator Sessions is out of the mainstream, and that is his views on LGBTQ equality. Senator Sessions opposed the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, a bill that I was proud to support that would have ended workplace discrimination for LGBTQ people. Right now there are no Federal laws that explicitly protect LGBTQ individuals from discrimination. That is not because we haven't tried. Last Congress, I cosponsored a bill to prohibit this kind of discrimination, but even without a law on the books, the Justice Department has interpreted the Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity. That could change, however, under the next Attorney General.

As head of the Justice Department, Senator Sessions could choose to interpret the law differently, and his record gives us every reason to be concerned. Senator Sessions also voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. He voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act because of a provision that ensures that victims of domestic violence are not turned away because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. That is why he voted against VAWA, because there is a provision that says you have to provide services to individuals regardless of their sexual identity. He advocated for stripping that provision and ultimately voted against the bill. As Attorney General, he could choose not to enforce this nondiscrimination clause.

Think about this. If a gay person is a victim of sexual assault, are they not morally and legally entitled to the same humanity, the same protection under the law? Senator Sessions has repeatedly opposed hate crimes protections against LGBTQ Americans, even attempting to insert a poison pill amendment to stop the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act from moving forward. He has argued against Federal prosecution of hate crimes, saying on the Senate floor that there is no need for the Justice Department to get involved. As Attorney General, Mr. Sessions would be in charge of enforcing the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. It is not a stretch to ask whether or not his enforcement would be vigorous. In fact, Senator Sessions has repeatedly supported laws that criminalize the LGBTQ community. In the 1990s, he tried to block an LGBTQ student conference--a student conference for gay kids that ``promoted a lifestyle prohibited by sodomy and sexual misconduct laws.'' He argued against a conference for kids to give each other support and come up with strategies to survive bullying, to understand that what they are going through other kids are going through, arguing that it promoted a lifestyle prohibited by sodomy and sexual misconduct laws. And he sharply criticized the legal decision that put a rightful end to the criminalization of same-sex relationships.

He supported don't ask, don't tell, saying that it was pretty effective. And he opposed the repeal of that law.

On marriage equality, Senator Sessions has vowed to work again and again to amend the Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. We went through this in 1998 in the State of Hawaii. How unusual it is to enshrine in the Constitution the removal of a right.

I want you to just think about that--that you want to amend the Constitution, not to provide additional rights, not to clarify something, but to explicitly prohibit Americans from having a certain right.

I don't think there are many families who would agree on Senator Sessions' views here. People don't want their sons and daughters to have to hide their sexuality in order to serve their country. They don't want to go back to the days when our Nation failed to recognize the legitimacy of same-sex relationships. And they certainly don't want to see their friends and family lose a job or even go to jail because of whom they love, but that is the record that we are dealing with.

To be clear, these aren't views from the 1970s. These are his views as of last year. These are his current views on these matters.

The Senator has a similarly out-of-step approach on immigration. Mr. Sessions was instrumental in defeating the 2007 immigration reform bill, referring to it as ``terrorist assistance.'' He was a strong opponent of a 2013 bipartisan immigration bill, even though the bill had the strongest border security provision ever seen in an immigration bill. It was such a strong security border provision that I hated it. I had to think about whether I was going to vote for this thing because I felt it was too much of a militarization of our southern border. I thought it was a giveaway and a waste of money. But it had a strong border security provision, and it was voted out of the Senate by a wide margin.

If it were up to him, we would also limit legal immigrants coming to our country. During the markup in the Judiciary Committee, Senator Sessions offered an amendment to limit legal immigration, which failed 17 to 1. If you are wondering whether it is rhetorical to say his views on immigration are out of the mainstream, the record shows 17 to 1--17 to 1.

In addition, he promotes cutting Federal funding for sanctuary cities. Sanctuary cities is a brand. People aren't sure what that means. Let's be clear what we mean by that. Stripping funding from sanctuary cities is wrong because cities have decided that the strength of their relationship between their police and their citizens is more important for public safety than doing the Federal Government's job of enforcing immigration laws.

Senator Sessions, of course, is against the right of children born in the United States to be American citizens. He is against helping the many DREAMers in this country.

Let's have an honest discussion about immigration. We need to start talking about why people come to this country. Some of them come because they want to escape their own awful circumstances and live in freedom and opportunity. It is my grandparents escaping the Ukraine. It is my wife's grandparents leaving China. It is the Schatz; it is the Binders; it is the Kwoks. It is Albert Einstein; it is Madeleine Albright. This is who we are. We are people from all over the world who are united not by our ethnic extraction or our religious affiliation, but tied together by our love for America and our belief in this country as the beacon of hope, the shining city on the hill. The idea that we would shred that legacy in the face of some imaginary public desire for immigration reductions, frankly, is disturbing.

Look at the protests happening every weekend at our country's international

airports. Americans are not out in the streets demanding that we shut off the lamp outside the golden door. They are demanding that we stay true to our history and to our roots.

That is why we saw close to 100 companies file a legal brief earlier this week against the Muslim ban put in place by the President and implemented by a man who has been mentored by Senator Sessions. The brief they filed notes an important statistic about our country. More than 200 companies currently listed on the Fortune 500 list are founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, and this stands in direct contrast to the nominee's views. If immigrants are coming to the United States and starting businesses and hiring people, they aren't taking jobs from Americans. They are creating jobs for Americans, and that has been the story of our country since the very beginning.

Immigration is one of the cornerstones of our country, and the nominee's policy proposals would chip away at that.

The world is watching. History is watching. We have to ask ourselves: What do they see? Do they see Lady Liberty? Or do they see something else, something darker?

Our country is asking similarly ominous questions about the basic, most fundamental right in our society, and that is the right to vote. Our country's history books are filled with stories of the struggle for voting rights, of African-American men risking it all to go to the polls and women in white marching through the streets of Washington, DC, demanding to vote. But that struggle and that progress is in danger with the kinds of policies that are being promoted. It is on all of us to honor that history and make sure that whoever is eligible to vote is able to vote. This is the bedrock of all other rights, because it is what gives us the voice when incumbent leaders and our representatives fail to protect the other rights.

In his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Sessions said:

The Department of Justice must never falter in its

obligation to protect the civil rights of every American,

particularly those who are most vulnerable. A special

priority for me in this regard would be aggressive

enforcement of our laws to ensure access to the ballot for

every eligible American voter, without hindrance or

discrimination, and to ensure the integrity of the electoral

process.

But his record does not support that view. Senator Sessions supports voter ID laws that will disenfranchise many, many voters. He has called the Voting Rights Act ``intrusive,'' and he has praised the Supreme Court ruling that dismantled a key part of the Voting Rights Act. He has already had his nomination rejected by the Senate because of his views on this issue.

This should concern anyone and everyone who cares about our democracy because, at the most basic level, democracy is built on the ability of American citizens to go to the polls.

Let's be honest. Our right to vote is being restricted. It is being restricted even though the United States has some of the lowest voter turnout of any developed democracy on the planet, and it is being restricted based on a lie. There is no voter fraud. Voter fraud is not the problem. Voter disenfranchisement is the problem.

I talked with a buddy of mine back home who was watching FOX News and he was watching MSNBC, and he said: Democrats are saying there is voter disenfranchisement and Republicans are saying there is voter fraud, and I don't know what to believe. Well, here are the facts. There is a vanishingly small amount of voter fraud. You are more likely to be struck by lightning than to be convicted of voter fraud. This is a made-up problem. Why would you make up a problem such as this? Because it gives you a context and a pretext to do the systematic dismantling of voting rights. This is happening in North Carolina, this is happening in Wisconsin, and this is happening all over the country.

The final policy area I would like to raise is women's rights. The nominee's record is very clear on these issues. He opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which lifts the legal restrictions for people who may have faced pay discrimination. That, in itself, is extraordinary, because Lilly Ledbetter is from Senator Sessions' home State. She worked in a factory in Alabama for years, and then one day someone slipped her an anonymous note--what a story. Someone slipped her an anonymous note that said: You are paid way less than everyone else in this same job.

But when Ms. Ledbetter tried to address the pay disparities, she hit a brick wall and at every turn. When she turned to the justice system for help, she found that the laws had statutes of limitations that kept her from getting the pay she was denied for years and years and years, working side by side with men, doing the same job, and getting paid less in that factory.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act changes that. It makes it so that if women find themselves in an ugly, unequal pay structure, just as Ms. Ledbetter did--and we all know people, such as sisters, wives, children, and mothers who have a suspicion they are pretty much doing the same thing to them, especially in a factory setting, a blue collar setting, or a clerical setting. This is not impossible to decipher when you have the same job description.

Just as Ms. Ledbetter did, they can do something about it.

Senator Sessions voted against that law. He also voted against another equal pay bill called the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would go even further and try to close the gender wage gap.

On women's health, his record is similarly troubling. He has opposed funding for title X, which would ensure that low-income women have access to contraception, breast cancer screening, and other health services. He has voted time and again to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides health care to some of the most underserved women across the country. Finally, Senator Sessions voted against the Violence Against Women Act, not once but three times.

Senator Sessions' voting record should concern everyone who cares about fair pay, reproductive rights, access to health care, and access to services for survivors of domestic violence.

The last policy area I want to highlight is our environment and climate change. Just 2 years ago, the nominee voted for a resolution that would kill the Clean Power Plan. He also voted for a bill that would deny protections for streams that are the water source for hundreds of millions of Americans.

This is bad news for the world's race to address climate change, which is one of the biggest civil rights battles of our time. This isn't just a battle against fossil fuels. It is a battle to save the air we breathe and the water we drink. It is a battle to save the land we live on. It is a battle for things that we take for granted.

I worry that under an Attorney General Sessions, we are going to have a hard time. That is because even if we really don't have great laws on climate--and we don't yet--they are being rolled back as we speak. Even if Senator Sessions does not push back on those laws, he still has the ability to prioritize certain things over others. So it is not just his policies that we need to consider. It is also his priorities.

Every AG makes decisions about what problems the Justice Department should move to the front of the line. I have seen lots of reports that leave me wondering if Senator Sessions' priorities might be misguided.

The Web site FiveThirtyEight wrote a piece about Senator Sessions' confirmation process, and I wish to read a section of it now. ``I care about civil rights,'' Sessions said. ``I care about voting rights.'' Sessions has cited his record as evidence.

In 2009, he said he'd been involved in 20 or 30

desegregation cases as a prosecutor, and this year, he told

the Judiciary Committee that four civil rights cases were

among the 10 most important cases he'd worked on in his

career. Some committee members were skeptical.

Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota said Tuesday that

Sessions had overstated his role in the anti-segregation

litigation. This is an area where the administration's

priorities are clearly going to matter.

The number of anti-discrimination and voting-rights cases

brought by the Justice Department civil rights division

dropped sharply under President George W. Bush compared with

his predecessor, Bill Clinton. The Voting Rights Act recently

moved closer to Sessions' personal beliefs.

When a 2013 Supreme Court ruling weakened the law, Sessions

said it was ``good news . . . for the South.'' On Tuesday,

Sessions called the act ``intrusive.''

So what does this write-up say about what priorities an Attorney General Sessions might choose? Well, to me, it says that voting rights are going to be dealt a bigger blow than we have seen in the past few years. Again, we come back to the sense of being extreme. Senator Sessions' priorities and his policy views are not in the mainstream for the Justice Department.

I don't think the American people are comfortable with letting politics about policing trump data. I don't think they are comfortable with overlooking our history and our commitment to democracy. So why are we comfortable with this nomination?

The final area I want to touch on is Senator Sessions' philosophy. The Washington Post published a news article about a week ago that looks at the Executive orders we have seen out of this White House. It is called ``Trump's hard-line actions have an intellectual godfather: Jeff Sessions.''

I would like to read a few excerpts from the article.

In jagged black strokes, President Trump's signature was

scribbled onto a catalogue of executive orders over the past

10 days that translated the hardline promises of his campaign

into the policies of his government. The directives bore

Trump's name, but another man's fingerprints were also on

nearly all of them: Jeff Sessions.

The early days of the Trump presidency have rushed a

nationalist agenda long on the fringes of American life into

action--and Sessions, the quiet Alabamian who long cultivated

those ideas as a Senate backbencher, has become a singular

power in this new Washington. Sessions' ideology is driven by

a visceral aversion to what he calls ``soulless globalism,''

a term used on the extreme right to convey a perceived threat

to the United States from free trade, international alliances

and the immigration of nonwhites.

And despite many reservations among Republicans about that

world view, Sessions--whose 1986 nomination for a federal

judgeship was doomed by accusations of racism that he

denied--is finding little resistance in Congress to his

proposed role as Trump's attorney general.

Sessions' nomination is scheduled to be voted on Tuesday by

the Senate Judiciary Committee, but his influence in the

administration stretches far beyond the Justice Department.

From immigration and health care to national security and

trade, Sessions is the intellectual godfather of the

President's policies. His reach extends throughout the White

House with his aides and allies accelerating the president's

most dramatic moves, including the ban on refugees and

citizens from seven mostly Muslim nations that has triggered

fear around the globe.

The tactician turning Trump's agenda into law is deputy

chief of staff Rick Dearborn, Sessions' long time chief of

staff in the Senate. The mastermind behind Trump's incendiary

brand of populism is chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who,

as chairman of the Breitbart website, promoted Sessions for

years.

Here's a quote from Bannon:

Throughout the campaign, Sessions has been the fiercest,

most dedicated, and most loyal promoter in Congress of

Trump's agenda, and has played a critical role as the

clearinghouse for policy and philosophy to undergird the

implementation of that agenda.

Sessions helped devise the President's first-week strategy,

in which Trump signed a blizzard of Executive orders that

begin to fulfill his signature campaign promises--although

Sessions had advocated for going even faster. The senator

lobbied for a ``shock and awe'' period of executive action

that would rattle Congress--

I think we got that--

impress Trump's base--

I assume we got that--

and catch his critics unaware--

I don't know about that--

according to the two officials involved in the transition

plan.

Trump opted for a slightly slower pace, these officials

said, because he wanted to maximize news coverage by

spreading out his directives over several weeks. Trump makes

his own decisions, but Sessions was one of the rare lawmakers

who shared his impulses.

There are limits to Sessions's influence, however. He has

not persuaded Trump--so far, at least--to eliminate the

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, under which

children brought to the United States illegally are allowed

to stay in the country.

Sessions became a daily presence at Trump Tower in New

York, mapping out the policy agenda and making personnel

decisions. Once former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was out

of consideration for secretary of state, Trump considered

nominating Sessions because he was so trusted by the inner

circle, including Kushner, although Sessions' preference was

to be attorney general, according to people familiar with the

talks.

Since his nomination, Sessions has been careful to not be

formally involved even as his ideas animate the White House.

In a statement Sunday, he denied that he has had

``communications'' with his former advisers or reviewed the

executive orders.

I have no reason to doubt that he established a proper distance while he was the nominee.

Sessions has installed close allies throughout the

administration. He persuaded Cliff Sims, a friend and

adviser, to sell his Alabama media outlet and take a job

directing message strategy at the White House.

Sessions also influenced the selection of Peter Navarro, an

economist and friend with whom he coauthored an op-ed last

fall warning against the ``rabbit hole of globalism,'' as

director of the National Trade Council.

John Weaver, a veteran GOP strategist who was a consultant

on Sessions' first Senate campaign and is now a Trump critic,

said that Sessions is at the pinnacle of power because he

shares Trump's ``1940s view of fortress America.''

``That's something you would find in an Allen Drury

novel,'' Weaver said. ``Unfortunately, there are real

consequences to this, which are draconian views on

immigration and a view of America that is insular and not an

active member of the global community.''

Inside the White House and within Sessions's alumni

network, people have taken to calling the Senator ``Joseph,''

referring to the Old Testament patriarch who was shunned by

his family and sold into slavery as a boy, only to rise

through unusual circumstances to become right hand to the

pharaoh and oversee the lands of Egypt.

In a 20-year Senate career, Sessions has been isolated in

his own party, a dynamic crystallized a decade ago when he

split with President George W. Bush and the business

community over comprehensive immigration changes.

In lonely speeches on the Senate floor, Sessions would

chastise ``the masters of the universe.'' He hung on his

office wall a picture of He-Man from the popular 1980s comic

book series.

As he weighed a presidential run, Trump liked what he saw

in Sessions, who was tight with the constituencies Trump was

eager to rouse on the right.

``Sessions was always somebody that we had targeted,'' said

Sam Nunberg, Trump's political adviser at the time.

In May 2015, Nunberg said, he reached out to Miller, then

an adviser to Sessions, to arrange a phone call between Trump

and the senator. The two hit it off, with Trump telling

Nunberg, ``That guy is tough.''

The next month, Trump declared his candidacy. In August of

that year, Sessions joined Trump at a megarally in the

senator's home town of Mobile and donned a ``Make America

Great Again'' cap. By January 2016, Miller had formally

joined the campaign and was traveling daily with the

candidate, writing speeches and crafting policies.

That Washington Post article offers a look into the nominee's philosophy. Out of the gate, the President has pushed for all punishment and no mercy. The administration has shown a willingness to trample on rights to satisfy political objectives. This should trouble everybody on both sides of the aisle who cares about Executive overreach.

This week, John Yoo--the driving force of enhanced interrogation under the Bush administration, the torture man, the famous John Yoo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the John Yoo demonized by progressives for sort of being the key thinker behind understanding Executive power as more expansive than it had ever been understood before--this week, John Yoo came out saying that he thinks this President has taken Executive power too far. John Yoo is saying that-- not Sheldon Whitehouse, not the ACLU; John Yoo from George W. Bush's administration. If that is what John Yoo is saying, then we should all be worried.

Think of what the President might do with an Attorney General in place who shares his philosophy on immigrants, minority communities, gay Americans, voting rights, and women's rights.

The NAACP has pulled together a list of facts about the Senator that further flushes out this philosophy, and it is deeply concerning.

In July 2015, during the confirmation hearing of a district

court nominee from Maryland, Sessions made the nominee answer

for her career as a public defender and civil rights lawyer,

and invoked Freddie Gray, the teenager unlawfully arrested

and killed by Baltimore police in 2015, as a client

inappropriate for a lawyer nominated to the bench:

``Can you assure the police officers in Baltimore and all

over Maryland that might be brought before your court, that

they'll get a fair day in court and that your history would

not impact your decisionmaking?'' he asked.

``And I raise that particularly because I see your firm is

representing Mr. Freddie Gray in that case that's gathered so

much attention in Maryland, and there's lots of law

enforcement officers throughout the state and they want to

know that they don't have someone who has an agenda to bring

to the bench--can you assure them that you won't bring that

to the bench?''

In December 2010, Sessions took to the Senate floor to rail

against judicial nominees who have what he calls ``ACLU DNA''

or the ``ACLU chromosome.'' The ACLU ``seeks to deny the will

of the American people,'' he said, ``and has taken positions

far to the left of mainstream American and the ideals and

values the majority of Americans hold dear.''

In October 2009, Sessions opposed a district court nominee

and former ACLU staff attorney by saying, ``I think we're

seeing a common DNA run through the Obama nominees, and

that's the ACLU chromosome.''

I know people have mixed feelings about the ACLU. Sometimes I have mixed feelings about the ACLU. But remember what happened when this Executive order was issued: It was the ACLU that took them to court to protect every American's civil liberties, and they were the ones who won in court right away. So I say that we need to have special respect for the lawyers who protect our civil liberties.

These events should give us all pause because our country has long associated groups like the NAACP and the ACLU with the mission of the Justice Department, and now we may have an Attorney General who has, at least in the past, relished opposition to these groups.

Before concluding, I just want to say that I understand there may be a distinction between politician-elected official representing a certain State and a certain perspective Jeff Sessions, Senator Sessions, and Attorney General Sessions. This sometimes does happen as people move from legislative to executive or as they advance in their careers. It is entirely possible, and I sure hope that there will be an evolution, that he understands he may have his views or he may have been vigorously advocating for the views of his constituents, but now he has a different role as the chief law enforcement officer for the United States of America, somebody who is there to uphold equal justice for everyone.

So as critical as I have been of his record, I hope to be proven wrong. There are people on the other side of the aisle and one Democrat on our side of the aisle whom I respect greatly who really love Jeff Sessions. I hope everything they believe about him and the way he will conduct himself as Attorney General ends up being true. I just don't see any evidence for that yet, other than the word of my colleagues. That means a lot, but the record is too decisively against all of the things I care for and all of the things I believe are important in an Attorney General.

I know I am not alone in having these concerns. Millions of people have signed petitions, made calls, and posted online in opposition to this nominee.

I have received very thoughtful messages from people in Hawaii about Senator Sessions. I wish to quote a few of them.

I'm writing as a thoughtful voter and human being that Mr.

Sessions is not the right man for the job of Attorney

General. He may be a friend of the president and his inner

circle, but he does not represent the values of our

democracy.

Given his approval of the ban on immigration, I believe he

will help the president radicalize and destabilize this

country.

Another person mentioned the former Acting Attorney General, who was fired by the President because she was true to the word she gave Senator Sessions in her own confirmation hearing. Sally Yates said what so many people are thinking, which is that this Muslim ban cannot stand.

Here is another letter from Hawaii:

I'm writing to express my most heartfelt disappointment at

the direction our country is quickly taking with the Trump

administration.

While I accept that those with more conservative views than

mine are now in power, I find the actions being taken a gross

and crass disregard of our diverse and tolerant national

identity.

I want to end by making something very clear: We can respect Senator Sessions as a colleague while still believing that his policies, his priorities, and his philosophy are too extreme for the Justice Department. And there are too many issues that this country cares about to confirm him as Attorney General.

If you care about criminal justice reform, if you care about seeing fewer people go to jail for petty crimes, if you care about directing fewer taxpayer dollars to the prison industry, then you have to be opposed to this nomination.

If you care about the LGBT community; if you believe that people shouldn't be discriminated against or punished because of whom they love; if you believe that people, regardless of their identity, should be able to get married or wear our Nation's finest uniform, then you have to be opposed.

If you care about immigration; if you believe in immigration; if you are a business owner who wants to hire the best and the brightest; if your family came to this country to pursue the American dream; if you are a person of faith who believes in caring for those who suffer, for the stranger in our midst, you have to be opposed to this nomination.

If you care about women's rights; if you believe that women are not to be treated like second-class citizens, that our daughters are just as capable as our sons and that they have the right to make their own decisions about their own health care; if you believe they should be paid the same for doing the same job, then you have to be opposed.

If you care about our democracy; if you want people to raise their voices and take part in shaping the future of our country; if you are dismayed to know that millions of people are being prevented from voting not because they aren't eligible but because of senseless laws that restrict their rights, then you have to oppose this nomination.

The Senate must stand up for civil rights, for voting rights, for women's rights, for immigrants' rights, and that means we must vote no on Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.

I urge my colleagues to join me in opposing this nomination.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, back on the topic of the evening: the Congressional Review Act action to overturn the SEC's rule.

I am just kind of at a loss for words. There are people back home asking how politics is going, and they have a certain set of assumptions about the way Congress works. They watch ``House of Cards.'' They watch movies about politics. They have watched other TV shows on Hulu and Netflix, whatever it may be. I submit to you that what we are doing right now is so corrupt, so grotesque, so obvious, so trite that it wouldn't even make the cut as a plot for a TV show about politics because who would believe that the Republican Congress, as one of their first acts, would pass a law prohibiting the implementation of a rule that requires oil companies to disclose what kind of foreign payments they are making for the privilege of extracting resources.

So what does that mean? You have oil companies that in order to extract resources in places like Africa and elsewhere--mostly poor countries around the globe--they have to cut a deal with whoever is in charge of the government in order to have access to that resource. Whether it is in Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia, Africa, Myanmar, or elsewhere, they cut a deal with the governing despot, usually. That money very often makes it directly into the pockets of the family of the people who run the country. This is what Senator Cardin was elucidating, as was Senator Leahy and the ranking member, Senator Brown.

But this issue was new to me, and I came to the floor not as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but as a citizen. I can't believe we are doing this. This is one of the stinkiest pieces of legislation that I have seen in my now 5 years in the Senate and my 8 years in the Hawaii State Legislature, in my life in politics. I can't believe that we would have the gall to put a bill on the floor to prevent us from disclosing what kinds of foreign payments--that is a euphemism--are being made to despots and autocrats around the planet. These are American companies traded on the stock exchange, American companies making foreign payments, euphemistically, for the privilege of extracting primarily oil. Our ability as a country to be the world's lone superpower--as Madeleine Albright called us, ``the indispensable nation,''--to be the superior country when it comes to money, morals, and might is now in question. Everywhere you look, it seems like America is ceding global leadership.

China is set to outshine the United States on climate change policy--

China. Germany's Prime Minister is explaining international conventions on refugees to the President of the United States. We have insulted some of our closest allies in the fight against ISIS with a Muslim ban.

Now we are alienating ourselves from Australia, a country that has stood with the United States in every major conflict since the beginning of the 20th century. It is hard work to offend Australia. You have to go out of your way in a phone call between the United States and Australia to have it go sideways.

So the world is asking if the United States will still lead in the fight against ISIS. The world is asking if the United States will still keep its word, and they are asking if the United States is still the moral leader for the world.

I think everyone in the Congress would agree that the answers to these questions should be a resounding yes, but somehow one of the first orders of business in this Republican Congress is not a bill that demonstrates American leadership but one that concedes it, because that is exactly what we would do if we overturn the Cardin-Lugar amendment.

If we diminish our moral compass, the rest of the world stops looking at the United States as the leader among nations. The law we are voting to repeal set a new international standard in the fight against corruption. It requires oil and mining companies that are listed on the U.S. Stock Exchange to report any payments they may make to foreign governments. The idea is that the companies won't bribe dictators in mineral rich countries because they know they will have to disclose the payments.

After the United States passed this law in 2010, some 30 countries followed our lead, but we never got to implementing it. So today, more than one-third of the world's oil and gas companies have strong legal incentives to do business the right way. If Republicans get rid of this disclosure requirement, it will be bad for American consumers.

In 2004, a Senate subcommittee uncovered that oil companies, including ExxonMobil, have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the President of Equatorial Guinea, which is an oil-rich country in Africa. That money didn't go to the businesses and citizens. It went directly into the pockets of the President who has been called Africa's nastiest dictator. Instead of buying food or roads for people--by the way, most people who live there live on less than $1 a day--the President and his family bought real estate in Paris, luxury cars and life-sized statues--plural--of Michael Jackson.

Getting rid of this amendment will also be bad for national security. Senator Lugar is one of the Republican Party's most distinguished foreign policy voices and the former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He understood the risk. He understood how corruption fuels insecurity, poverty, and oppression in other countries and how that can contribute to the condition that breeds violent extremism. That is why he fought for the level of transparency required by this rule and to make it harder for dictators to steal from their own citizens. That means that getting rid of the Cardin-Lugar amendment is also bad for investors. If a company is operating in a risky, corrupt, unstable country, investors have the right to know. If a company is perhaps even adding to the region's insecurity, investors have a right to know that too. But that right is now in jeopardy.

The way Republicans are going about this, we won't be able to revisit this once it is all said and done. This is an important point. I said it last night on the stream protection rule, and I think it bears repeating. If you do a CRA action--we are now on the third in American history, and the second was yesterday. The first was sometime in the eighties, about ergonomics. The reason this never gets done is because, when you overturn a regulation using the Congressional Review Act, it is an incredibly blunt instrument. What happens under law is that the rule can't be promulgated again. You can't tweak this thing.

As to the concerns that were expressed by some of the Members on the Republican side about the modifications they would like, if we want to legislate, let's legislate. But what they are going to do is overturn this rule and the Securities and Exchange Commission from doing anything ``substantially similar'' ever again. Everybody who understands the CRA under the law understands that, basically, we can't touch this topic again. So this isn't about fixing a reg or being a check on runaway bureaucrats. These so-called bureaucrats, these civil servants in the Securities and Exchange Commission, had a statute. They were told to do something. Now, they took forever to do it, but that is not running away and going rogue. That is going a little slow, I will grant you, but they did the right thing pursuant to the law.

Now--I don't know why, but I have my suspicions; I don't know why, but I have my suspicions--we are overturning both a rule and a law that requires the disclosure of payments to foreign governments made primarily by oil companies. It is one of the most awful things I have seen done in the Congress--not just when I have been here but as I have observed it over the last 20 years.

I yield the floor.