Floor Statements

Mr. President, Donald Trump is sending $20 billion not to America but to Argentina. Donald Trump is sending $20 billion to Argentina to bail out their economy, and he wants to spend $50 billion to clean up the mess that he made by starting a trade war that crushed American soybean producers.

Let's be clear about what happened. It is not that the market is temporarily suspended. That market, in some cases, is gone. And during this period of time with--$20 billion for the country of Argentina and $50 billion for a tariff bailout--Americans are paying more for absolutely everything. Healthcare premiums for tens of millions of people are going to go up by a lot--not 10 percent, not 20 percent, not 50 percent--114 percent; 24 million Americans, 114 percent.

The bailout for Argentina is particularly absurd. Argentina is not a key security or economic partner. It is an economy that is in such dire shape that there is no guarantee that we will ever get our money back. It is a terrible investment any way you look at it under any circumstances but certainly in the context of Americans seeing their healthcare premiums increase by 114 percent right now.

You then have a separate bailout for American soybean producers totaling close to $50 billion. And why? Because of the tariffs; because in one fell swoop, they wiped out half of the export market for American soybeans in China, and there is no way you can plug that gap. You can't come up with--I don't know what it would be--112 individual deals to kind of add up to the market-buying power of the PRC.

When you lose a buyer that also happens to be the biggest country in the world, you don't have a lot of options. At best, it is going to take you months or years to cut dozens of smaller deals, and it is not going to add up.

Just to recap, Trump is at the exact same time incinerating $70 billion of taxpayer money. But what is the one thing that there is not enough money for? You. There is not enough money for you. There is enough money for a $50 billion tariff bailout; there is enough money for Argentina; but there is not enough money for you.

They don't have enough money to help a family of four that is going to have to pay $300 more per month to keep their healthcare plan. They have the money to cover for Trump's economic incompetence, but, apparently, they don't have the money to prevent a small business owner or a taxi driver or an early retiree from losing their healthcare.

This is not complicated at all. Donald Trump's economy is already hard as it is because of his choices to create shortages of electricity, of lumber, of food, of healthcare. Electricity prices are going up at twice the rate of inflation. Vegetables are up nearly 40 percent. Grocery prices are at their highest in 3 years now. People are supposed to find hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to spare every single month or give up their healthcare coverage and hope they don't get sick.

We could end this shutdown right now if Republicans sat down and

worked with us to protect people's healthcare. By the way, the people who are being particularly hurt by these healthcare premium increases live in Republican States. Now, that shouldn't matter, but we are in politics. Just understand, we are standing here fighting for your constituents. If we were a little more cynical, we would let you stew in the most unpopular major legislation that has been passed in generations. But we want to solve this problem, not just for the 24 million people on the so-called exchange but for everybody who is about to see their premiums spike. Let's sit down and fix this.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, preventing people from losing their

healthcare should not be a partisan issue because outside of the four corners of this Capitol, it should not matter if you are a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent--we should all not want people to have spikes in their health insurance costs.

In a matter of days, tens of millions of people all across the country are going to get letters in the mail, saying: Your monthly premium, starting January 1, is going to be more than double what you pay now--more than double.

That is not my speculating. That is not my allegation. That is not a political talking point that was cooked up in some Democratic lab. That is what the Kaiser Family Foundation analysis shows, that premiums will increase on average by 114 percent per person--not 14 percent; 114 percent.

That is just the average. Some people's rates will be changed based on their income level. Say you make $35,000 a year. You are now going to be paying almost $1,600 more per year for coverage. And if you are a family of four making 75 grand, you are going to be paying more than 3,000 extra dollars.

I just encourage everybody who is watching--all of my colleagues, all of the staff, all of the members of the media--to talk to anyone in your hometown. Most people just don't have that kind of money lying around. If you are a family living paycheck to paycheck, if you are a young couple saving up to buy a home, if you are a small business owner already cutting back on costs because everything is more expensive now, what are you supposed to do?

This is not a crisis the Democrats have cooked up to score political points. The reason for the urgency is that October 1 is the day that people are going to get letters from their insurance carriers telling them that this is happening. Open enrollment begins in exactly a month.

People are scared about how they are going to pay for their healthcare or if they are going to have it at all. There are a lot of people who just can't absorb this extra cost. It is not like you can buy a little less of something. When you are at the grocery store--for instance, vegetables are now 39 percent more expensive. Well, you still have some money in your pocket. You are going to buy fewer vegetables and more of the cheap stuff, which is why, by the way, Hamburger Helper purchases have spiked.

So people are making these adjustments to the fact that everything has gotten more expensive, but with health insurance, you can't turn the dial like that. You can't buy a little less health insurance. You either can absorb the cost or you cannot, and if you cannot, you will go without health insurance.

Here is the thing that people need to understand: This directly impacts about 24 million people, OK? That is enough for us to, like, pay enough attention and try to come up with a bipartisan solution. But the truth is that we already know what happens when people lose their health insurance, right? They end up getting sicker and sicker, and at some point, they present themselves to emergency rooms.

Everybody understands--kind of intuitively, but there is plenty of data to back this up--that when you present yourself at an emergency room when you are already supersick, you require a bunch of very expensive interventions, and that cost is distributed among the rest of us who still have insurance.

So it is not just the 24 million Americans who are going to pay more for health insurance and some number of millions of those Americans who are just not going to have insurance at all, it is also a mathematical certainty that the increased stupidity of the system, the increased extent to which the system now makes even less sense than it does already--we are all going to eat the cost, whether you are on the so- called exchange or not.

Look, Republicans are in charge of Washington. We lost the election. Elections--consequences. I get it. When we had the trifecta, we did a bunch of things to reduce the price of prescription medicine, to build infrastructure, to fix the post office, to do the Respect for Marriage Act, to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. We did a bunch of stuff, and Republicans are doing a bunch of stuff, but we are trying to hand our Republican colleagues a lifeline because prices are going to spike everywhere.

I said this yesterday, and I mean this: If we were a little more cynical, we might just say ``This is your problem; why don't you guys just stew in it?'' because this is, frankly, electorally, a very powerful issue. People are going to be really pissed when they get these letters in the mail. They really are. So the supercynical, election-oriented thing for us to do would be simply to say ``Good luck with all that.''

But maybe it is the strength of the Democratic caucus, maybe it is the weakness of the Democratic caucus, but we just care too much about people to let that happen. So we are simply asking, in the context of this shutdown, to jump-start a negotiation about how to prevent a 114- percent increase in the cost of healthcare for 24 million Americans.

Look, the cost of electricity is not just up; it is double the inflation rate. The cost of groceries is spiking. The cost of raw materials to build a house--spiking. The cost of basically anything you want to buy at a Walmart or a Costco or a Target or a Safeway or a Food Lion or wherever you go is spiking. All of that is a consequence of both inflation and tariffs. But this thing is a public policy. This is intentional to spike these rates.

We are saying: Are you guys sure you want to do this?

We are about to find out whether they are sure that they want to impose a doubling of insurance costs on 24 million Americans.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Kansas. And at the risk of getting him into political trouble, I am a huge fan of his, but I want to address the question that he asked, which I think is a legitimate one, which is: What is the hurry on the Affordable Care Act premiums?

There is a really straightforward answer, which is that people are getting letters tomorrow from their insurance carriers. Around 24 million people are going to get letters anytime from now until mid- November, and they are going to pay. Now, 24 million Americans are going to be told that because of the last tax bill that was just enacted by Trump and the Republicans, people are going to be paying an average of 114 percent more per person per month.

It is not like we just went into a lab and cooked up an issue to try to hijack some unrelated moving legislative vehicle. The reason for this is that 24 million Americans are specifically on the ACA exchange, and they are absolutely going to get hosed. And because we are all in the same risk pool, it is not just people on the ACA exchange that are going to see massive increases in their healthcare premiums; almost every American is about to see a spike in their healthcare premiums, just like they have seen electricity rates going up at double the rate of inflation, just like they have seen the price of vegetables go up by 39 percent, just like they have seen shortages of lumber and labor.

We have an opportunity to do something because our Republican colleagues--at least some of them--understand the magnitude of this problem for their constituents. So the normal thing to do in a functioning legislative body, where the President of the United States does not believe that he is an elected Monarch, is to try to negotiate some accommodation. After all, these are all of our constituents. It is not like they are exclusively in urban areas or something. They are not exclusively Democrats. In fact, there are slightly more Republicans than Democrats on the ACA exchange.

So if this were a normal functioning time in American-style democracy, the President of the United States would convene what they call the four corners--majority and minority leaders of the Senate; Speaker and minority leader of the House--and we would try to figure out whether there was an accommodation to be made to save our collective constituents from all this pain.

When Democrats had the trifecta--when Democrats had the House and the Senate and the Presidency--we didn't have any shutdowns. It wasn't because there is more good will on the Republican side toward continuing resolutions than there is on the Democratic side toward continuing resolutions. The reason is because Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi sat down with Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy--or whomever it was--and the President, and they figured out a deal. Even to raise the debt ceiling, Kevin McCarthy said: Not for free.

So this idea that the minority party, only this minority party, only in this time in the U.S. Senate history--we are to shut up and do whatever we are told. What is worse is they are asking the majority party to do the same thing.

This President believes that he is a Monarch. This President finds the legislative branch to be a nuisance. And you know what? The legislative branch is a nuisance. That is the architecture of the Constitution of the United States. We are supposed to be in a struggle with each other. We are supposed to argue and fight. And then we are supposed to come to an accommodation.

But we can't come to an accommodation until there is a meeting. So we are going to be here fighting for healthcare, and we are also going to be here fighting to reopen the government. If the clock strikes midnight and we are not able to avert this shutdown, then we are going to be here, ready to deal.

We understand we are not going to get everything we want. We understand we are in the minority. We understand we are out of power. But understand this: We are not powerless. We still represent, pessimistically, 47 percent of the--certainly, 47 percent of the Senate seats. But something like half the country wants us to represent their point of view. And the point of view that we are representing, by the way, is shared by most of the constituents who are represented by Republicans too.

And so there is still a pathway, but it has to be pursued. So the onus is on the President of the United States and the majority leader and the Speaker to find that pathway.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, Donald Trump is powerful, but he is not all-powerful. It is true that he is trying to consolidate power in illegal and dangerous ways, but it is also true that he is often failing to do that because of public opinion, because of markets, because of institutions, and because of the law itself.

I want to give a couple of recent examples. Two weeks ago, shortly after Trump and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr threatened to punish ABC if it didn't suspend Jimmy Kimmel's show, the network announced that it was taking the show off the air indefinitely. So at first, the public coercion seemed to work. Brendan Carr had said, point blank:

We can do this the easy way or [we can do this] the hard

way.

And the network caved. But a swift and searing backlash quickly followed. Consumers revolted. People began canceling their subscriptions.

Disney's market cap fell by close to $6.5 billion in a matter of days. Artists, advertisers, and employees spoke out. Even Republicans in the Senate denounced the move.

My Senate colleague Ted Cruz called it ``dangerous as hell":

I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put

itself in the position of saying we're going to decide what

speech we like and what speech we don't, and we're going to

threaten to take you off [the] air if we don't like what

you're saying.

Criticizing your own party's administration is hard. I understand that. But this is not about whether you are left or right or whether you thought Jimmy Kimmel's comment was insensitive or not. It is about the basic question of ``Are we allowed to speak freely in the country without fear that the government is going to come after us?'' because, if not, that is not the America that any of us recognize.

Here is another example. Last week, Trump installed a loyalist with no experience as prosecutor as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and within days, the office indicted former FBI Director James Comey on charges without much evidence at all.

And the case is so absurd that they couldn't even get a single career prosecutor to take it on. So, instead, the newly installed interim U.S. attorney had to sign and present the indictment herself in a highly unusual move. One of the charges was rejected by the grand jury almost immediately.

Now, why does that matter? It is, without a doubt, a dark day for the country when the President of the United States uses the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents. But legal experts widely expect this case to fail before it even gets to trial. And that, too, will be a reminder that while this President is powerful, he is not all-powerful. This isn't a free-for-all. He doesn't get to just do whatever he wants.

That brings me to this debate about government funding. Democrats are out of power, but we are not powerless, and our price is not that high. We have been asking Republicans, for over a month, to sit down and negotiate. I have been here 13\1/2\ years. We have never passed an appropriations bill without negotiation.

But Trump literally told his party: ``Don't even bother dealing with them.'' And so it took them until today, on the eve of a shutdown, for a meeting.

And the House is out of town. The House adjourned until after the funding deadline expires. They were going to come back on October 1, which is already 24 hours too late. Now they are thinking October 7.

If you are serious about a deal, if you are serious about keeping the government open, why are you not in the U.S. Capitol?

Russ Vought, in July, the OMB Director, said: You know, the appropriations process should be less bipartisan.

The person in charge of the Federal Government in the executive branch is pretty explicit. He says: The appropriations process should not involve Democrats at all.

The only way to keep the government open is for both parties to negotiate a bipartisan agreement. If the Republicans want to listen to Donald Trump and say, ``Don't even bother dealing with the Democrats,'' then there is a very old adage and an iron law in politics, which is: If you don't ask for the vote, you do not get the vote.

We are ready to work together to keep this government open, and I want everybody to understand what we are fighting for--what we are fighting for. Tens of millions of Americans are getting letters in the mail, and they don't know they are on the Affordable Care Act exchange. What the hell is that anyway? They just sign up for healthcare on a website, right? You don't know if you are on Obamacare or some hybrid thing or employer or this or that. You just get a letter from your insurer, and they say: If you want to reenroll in your healthcare plan, here is how much it will be. It is usually like a small increase, year over year, to cover inflation.

So now they are going to get a letter that literally says: Your subsidies are gone, and your new price is x. The average increase is going to be hundreds of dollars per person per month. Add to that that we are hearing in some States, and maybe as a result of some job owning with the administration, they are waiting to send those letters. They are waiting to send those letters. Why? Because they are hoping we are going to resolve this ACA tax credit thing, and they don't want to eat, politically speaking, the fact that a bunch of people, tens of millions of people--Democrats, Republicans, Independents, nonvoters, but zero noncitizens--zero noncitizens--you are not eligible to be on the exchange if you are a noncitizen--are going to get a letter saying: You know it is going to be $3,000 or $4,000 more per year.

Like, go talk to a regular person. Some of us know regular people who are on that exchange and know: I just can't do it--$300 dollars more per month. And, by the way, if you get that letter in December and your first payment is due on January 1, you are extra screwed.

So I understand that the White House understands how big of a political liability this is because people are really going to get hurt. And now it is a question of sort of people wanting to not behave as though they are giving in.

But let's be adults here. There is a crisis that is about to happen to tens of millions of Americans, and we have an opportunity to fix it, and there is bipartisan desire to fix it. And Leader Thune and Speaker Johnson's view is: Nah, we will deal with that later. And Donald Trump was saying: Why don't we deal with that next year?

By next year, all of the rates are locked in, and people will be paying $300 or $400 or $500 more per person per month.

We can fix this, and we should.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, he is right. He is asking for unanimous consent, and we don't have unanimous consent. We do not have unanimity.

What we do have, and Senator Lankford is right, is now a critical mass of people who are willing to entertain changes to the way that we process nominees. That is a pretty big deal. That is a pretty big deal.

This would be the first major bipartisan rules reform, I think, in a political generation, maybe several political generations. And it is not your usual suspects of moderates who might be able to get you guys to 60 but a pretty wide swath of U.S. Senators on the Democratic side to try to reform the rules on a bipartisan basis. And we are achingly close to doing this like adults.

It is not lost on me on 9/11 and after the terrible political assassination of Mr. Kirk that we have a special obligation to demonstrate that politics is a substitute for violence and not a precursor to violence. We have to demonstrate that we can be adults.

So we were achingly close to a deal, but I am afraid that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have run out of patience.

I understand the overall argument about the number of nominees who are in a backlog. I understand that argument. I am not talking about that. I am talking about they just want to go today. They want to leave today. People have flights today. It is Thursday, and it is not 5 p.m.

So were we to work a weekend to try to land this airplane, that would be beneficial to the country, to the body, to Republicans and Democrats alike. We are actually very close, and Senator Lankford knows that. I think he is as frustrated as I am about how achingly close we are to behaving like adults.

I don't know who it is or what the dynamic was, but about an hour ago, everybody just said: Nah, I don't care how close we are. We are just going to do this because we are going to start to lose Members. We are going to start to lose momentum. The weekend is hard. Maybe we are going to get yelled at from the left; you are going to get yelled at from the right; and we can't withstand that so we just have got to go through with it. It is a damn shame.

Maybe this exercise builds a little muscle memory for at least exploring how to have a bipartisan negotiation. Maybe there is some silver lining to this. Maybe there is some understanding that this institution actually matters, especially in this polarized and divided time. But I have to tell you, I am deeply disappointed at the extent to which Members on our side of the aisle and your side of the aisle put themselves in a position of some political peril to try to stabilize the country and be the ballast that everybody needs across America.

We were trending well. We were trending well. I know how negotiations go. They go up and down. They go sideways. They stall a bit. People get a little irritated. But we really were trending well. And I am legitimately shocked that we are like 94 percent of the way there, and somebody just woke up and said: Do you know what? Never mind. We are going to do the thing we were planning on doing originally.

So hope springs eternal, but this is a deep disappointment. And it didn't have to be this way. All we had to do--and I am going to offer this consent later, but I want everybody to understand what this consent means. I am going to ask unanimous consent that the cloture vote upon reconsideration with respect to Executive Calendar No. S. Res. 377 be at a time to be determined by the majority leader, in consultation with the Democratic leader, no earlier than Monday; and that if cloture is invoked upon reconsideration, the postcloture time be deemed expired.

What does that mean? It means that you would have kept your optionality to go nuclear on Monday and not have lost a thing. The leader would have been able to go nuclear on Monday if negotiations never went anywhere, if they went sideways, if they tanked, and no time would have been lost.

So the imperative to kind of get this done on a certain timeframe, we tried to respect and said: Fine. We will just deem the 30 hours expired. We will accommodate your imperative to get this done if you needed to get it done by the end of next week. We said: Sure, keep negotiations open. And we ran a hotline on that, and it cleared our hotline.

We had some very difficult conversations with Members who hate this idea. But just to keep the aperture open to renegotiate and to preserve the majority's prerogative to move forward with some pace, we accommodated that.

I thought, Great. We are trending well. We are going to wake up in the morning; we are going to get on some conference calls; and we are going to see whether there is a pathway.

I don't know whether there would have been a pathway, but I know today that the majority party in the U.S. Senate decided to foreclose the possibility of bipartisanship, and that is a real disappointment to me.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object--and I won't belabor the point except to say, if you have 60, 65, 70 votes for something, just

file cloture. Right? That is what you do. If you have got the votes, you just sort of move through the process of taking the vote.

What they are asking for is unanimity, and we don't have it. And so if you are interested in enacting this on a bipartisan basis, there is a process for doing that. It is available to you. But, again, it is more a matter of running out of patience than running out of time. We are leaving probably this evening, and then we have Friday, Saturday, Sunday off--not off. I understand people work weekends. Whatever. But not here, let's say. And then our first vote will be 5:30 on Monday. There is time. There is just no desire to go through the process. Right?

So it is true--I am not actually sure that you would have 60 votes for that, but there is a way to test it, and that is to file cloture on a new standing order or a new resolution or whatever the procedural pathway is.

What Senator Lankford is asking us to do is to have unanimity for a rules change to have the Senate not vote on individual nominations. Right? That is 15 at a time, and you have to go yes on all of them or no on all of them. And I don't love that idea, but I was willing to entertain it as a sort of matter of principle to try to sort of stabilize this body. But they have run out of patience, not run out of time. So, therefore, I object.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the cloture vote, upon reconsideration, with respect to Executive Calendar No. 1, S. Res. 377, be at a time to be determined by the majority leader in consultation with the Democratic leader, no earlier than Monday, September 15; further, that if cloture is invoked upon reconsideration, the postcloture time be expired; finally, that it be in order for the majority leader to make a point of order prior to the cloture vote upon reconsideration of Executive Calendar No. 1, S. Res. 377.

This would buy us the time we need and not cost the leader anything.

Mr. President, I was listening to the majority whip, and I have got to say, I have a little whiplash. I mean, I was here. I was negotiating. It was late July. We were passing paper back and forth between the Democratic and Republican caucus. The cloakrooms were working together, and we had a deal. That is the way you get nominations confirmed in batches.

The majority party wants to get them all done, fair enough. It is their President. And the minority party has this really unique authority in this place, which is to slow things down. And the rhythm of this place is that the majority party goes to the minority party and says: What is it going to take for us to confirm a batch of these nominees? We have got a backlog. We have got to get some of these through.

And so there are a couple of ways that that normally happens. First of all, you pair Democrats and Republicans together so that each party is getting a little bit of what they need.

The problem with pairing in the Trump era, and it is different from Trump 1.0, is that President Trump hasn't even nominated Democrats to Commissions like the SEC, the FTC, the FEC, the CFPB. All of those Agencies usually have Democrats and Republicans nominated, and then they kind of languish on the floor until we cut a deal and we confirm them all.

We had no deal space because there were no Democrats to deal out. And by the way, many Republicans with whom I talked said: Yeah, that is a fair point. Let me go and talk to the Chief of Staff of the President. Let me go talk to the White House team. We should get you some Democrats so that we can do some nominations in what they call the wrapup script, right?

Second thing is on the ambassadorships, usually, we are able to confirm a bunch of the career State Department officials, people who work in the Foreign Service who are not political at all; and then it is the donors and the friends of the President. And I think the whole process of how we decide our ambassadorships is totally bananas, but both parties do this where donors and friends of the President are the political nominees for ambassadorships. OK.

So those are the ones that we usually require a vote on. And the civil servants--the longtime, some charge d'affaires for Mozambique or whatever it is--like, we are not going to fight over that, and we just confirm that. The problem is there were, like, I think, fewer than five career State Department people nominated to these positions. And so, again, not a lot of deal space.

But, still, we found 35 that we were willing to do in exchange for things--

and we did not ask for anything that was unreasonable in the sense of something that would be objected to by large numbers of Republicans. This was NIH funding and releasing funds for--even when we did that rescissions package, now about 6 weeks ago, on the foreign aid stuff. There were a couple categories on the foreign aid that everybody said they liked.

And so we just said: Why don't you release the previously authorized and appropriated funding because people are literally dying around the world? And you guys say UNICEF, PEPFAR, the World Food Programme, you are still for that. You didn't like the stuff happening at USAID, but there are categories of foreign aid that you are still in favor of. So we found these relatively small discrete things that everybody in this place--maybe 95 of us--are in favor of in exchange for 35 nominees. Great, looks like we have got a deal. We are trending towards a deal.

Donald Trump gets on the phone with the leadership of the U.S. Senate and says: Everybody go home. Everybody go home.

And so the reason we don't have all of these nominees confirmed is the lack of the ability to conduct business in the U.S. Senate. And there are a lot of talented legislators, but what they have done is removed their frontal lobe and just substituted Donald Trump's judgment for their own. And so they don't want to cut deals with Democrats anymore.

And that goes for the Big Beautiful Bill. That goes for their approach to appropriations. That goes for their approach for basically everything.

And so it is true that we put some sand in the gears on purpose. That is what minority parties are supposed to do. That is how the U.S. Senate is supposed to work. And the way you untangle that is through the hard work of negotiating across the aisle, and they just didn't want to do it.

Like, I have been in many bipartisan negotiations over the last 3 or 4 months, and they have mostly all failed because, in the end, we can only find a handful of people who are open to a deal. And this time we had everybody saying: OK, this looks like a reasonable solution. And then Donald Trump himself blew it up. Why? Because he doesn't want expediting the Senate's consideration; he wants to adjourn. He wants this place to adjourn.

Now, why is that a big deal? Adjournment sounds like something you just kind of do to, like, OK, we will see you tomorrow. No. Adjournment for the month of August would have meant that Donald Trump himself would have been in a position to appoint whomever he wanted to any Senate-confirmed position; by the way, remove any member of the Cabinet or sub-Cabinet; and then appoint that person, and then that person could serve till the end of the Congress without the Senate ever weighing in. That is what he wants.

And, you know, it is kind of part of a piece, isn't it? He finds the Senate to be a nuisance. And I remember this, I wasn't in the Federal Government executive branch, but I was in the State government executive branch. And once you are in the executive branch, you find legislators to be annoying, to be an impediment to the kind of stuff you want to do. But the architecture of the Constitution provides that we are supposed to be annoying, we are supposed to put sand in the gears, and then we are supposed to deal with each other.

And so what is going to happen this week or next with this rules change is the result of two things: It is an abject failure of the willingness to negotiate at all, of the willingness to interact with Democrats for fear of being seen as too soft and insufficiently compliant with Donald Trump.

The other thing I would just like to say is, it is a little rich, it is a little rich that we fly out at 1:45 on a Thursday, and our first vote is at 5:30 on a Monday. And I know Senators work hard. I am not trying to say it is terrible that people go home. They should go home. They should interact with their constituents. But these are 2-hour nominations. We should probably exhaust the possibility of working Fridays and Mondays before we go through with changing the rules on a partisan basis.

We should probably consider, Do we need a 5-week home work period in the summer, or could we do a 4-week home work period and plow through nominations?

And so it is true that there is a big backlog, and it is actually true that Democrats helped to create it. What is different about this year is that there is just no effort to untangle the backlog.

When we were in the majority, I would walk over to Chuck's nominations staffer, figure out what was stuck and walk over to the other side and try to make a deal every week to try to get some of these confirmations.

And as I had a blanket hold on State Department nominees, not a single person approached me once. Once, Jim Risch talked to me, that is fair. But I don't know if it is a muscle memory thing or if it is a Donald Trump thing but they have simply forgotten how to work with Democrats.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my remarks, the senior Senator from Texas Senator Cornyn be recognized.

Mr. President, the numbers do not lie. The job market is practically frozen. Unemployment is at its highest level in 4 years. Inflation is rising. Homebuilding is stagnant. The manufacturing sector is shrinking.

To top it all off, Trump is raising the price of everything. Vegetables are up 40 percent; coffee, 15 percent. Everything from toothpaste, to detergent, to shoes, to video game consoles costs more. More price hikes are on the way this fall and holiday season as businesses exhaust their inventories and give up on eating billions of dollars of added costs.

This is America's golden age under Donald Trump.

If it wasn't clear before, it is abundantly clear now that unless you are a billionaire getting enormous tax cuts and generous corporate giveaways, this economy sucks. Costs are piling up, saving money is nearly impossible, and just getting by, let alone buying a home or raising a family, is a lot harder.

The worst part of it is that there was actually no reason for any of this. There is no pandemic. We are not in the middle of a war. There is no ongoing emergency. This is a crisis of the President's own making, and we are all paying the price.

Donald Trump has made shortages the cornerstone of his economic agenda, and it is working. We now have shortages of nearly everything-- food, electricity, healthcare, workers. With less supply to go around, everything costs more. It does not take a genius to work that out. In fact, people have worked it out. Trump's approval rating on inflation and the cost of living is 24 points underwater. His approval rating on the economy overall is at negative 13. More than half of Americans think the economy is getting worse, and less than a quarter of Americans think it is improving.

We are on a speedrun to become Venezuela, and people can see it.

This is a deliberate economic program. There is this sense that he just wakes up in the morning and does whatever he feels like doing. And to some extent, he is improvisational, but make no mistake, he has a coherent economic theory, which is, we should shrink the supply of everything. He thinks it strengthens the dollar, he thinks it helps with manufacturing, and I think he thinks that the less there is of stuff, the more people have to go and petition the King for mercy.

This is a deliberate economic program predicated on shortages across American society. In turn, the United States is set to shrink for the first time in our history. Think about that. The United States--the greatest Nation that the world has ever known, the indispensable Nation, the leader of the free world, the leader of the world--is shrinking. We are becoming smaller and weaker in more ways than one under Trump. But in this way, we are quite literally following Donald Trump's plan, and there is no escaping the consequences.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I send an amendment numbered 3854 to amendment No. 3849 to the desk.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I join people on Maui and across Hawaii in honoring the life and service of Maui Police Department officer Suzanne O, who was tragically killed in the line of duty on August 15, 2025.

Over the course of her service with the Maui Police Department, Officer O protected the Kihei and Wailuku communities with honor and an abiding commitment to helping others. She went above and beyond to support her colleagues and neighbors, volunteering for duty during busy periods and supporting the dispatch team even on her days off. Fittingly, she was remembered by those who knew and worked with her as a compassionate and dedicated servant to her community.

In times of crisis, Officer O demonstrated remarkable courage and integrity. Her bravery was beyond measure, and she was duly awarded a Certificate of Merit for her heroic efforts during the fires in Upcountry Maui in August of 2023. Officer O's generosity and sacrifice were an example to everyone, and they will not be forgotten by her fellow officers whom she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with or the communities she so valiantly served.

I extend my deepest condolences and heartfelt aloha to the family and loved ones of the late Officer O. May her memory be a blessing.

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

Mr. President, people voted for Donald Trump for all kinds of reasons, but the main reason was that they thought he would bring down the price of goods, groceries, food, housing, gas. Whatever his other faults, he was good for your money, people thought.

But it has been almost 8 months now, and the persistent economic uncertainty and pessimism are no longer a temporary blip. It is now abundantly clear: Trump is not making anything cheaper; in fact, he is purposefully making everything more expensive--healthcare, groceries, toys, cars, housing, electricity, computers, clothes, booze, video games.

Whether you are shopping at your local grocery store or Walmart, prices are continuing to go up, and that reality is catching up with the President. He is underwater with the public on his handling of the economy with a 57-percent disapproval rating, according to the latest polling.

Now, Democrats learned this lesson over the last few years. Saying the economy is great or not as bad as it could have been while people struggle to afford basic necessities is not a winning strategy. So Trump is ruining the economy on purpose, but are people better off in other ways? Is the country better off in other ways?

The answer is no.

A month ago, Trump federalized the local police department in Washington, DC, and deployed thousands of National Guardsmen and Federal agents because of a so-called ``crime emergency.''

What does that look like? It looks like masked men with no identification walking up to people on the street, arresting them, and disappearing them into unmarked vehicles. Up until a few months ago, that would have sounded like a chilling scene possible only in a

Third World country, but now it is happening here in our cities, in our communities.

Now, whether you supported or hated the previous administration's immigration policies is not the point anymore. What possible justification is there for masked men showing up and abducting people without a trace?

Anyone who has encountered law enforcement in DC or Arkansas or Honolulu knows that officers are typically trained to identify themselves by face and badge as a standard practice.

So why should Federal agents be any different? Worse, the fact that you now only need a black T-shirt and a face mask to look like an ICE agent means that there are a bunch of vigilantes running around impersonating law enforcement and terrorizing communities.

This is exactly the kind of tyranny and government overreach that the people on the right worried about for many, many years, except they thought it would happen under a Democratic administration. They worried about socialism. They worried about the government impeding free markets. They worried about power concentrating in the executive branch.

All of that is happening now under Donald Trump.

We have the U.S. Government taking a 10-percent stake in a private company, picking winners and losers in one of the most important industries for America's future. We have the leader of the free world forming a secret police of sorts to kidnap people and send them to foreign gulags. We have the President of the United States making $5 billion in one day by launching a new crypto product on the side. We have an entire administration more focused on tormenting private institutions into submission--universities, law firms, media companies--than delivering public services and making people's lives better.

Here is the thing. All of this is part of the same project. There is this tendency, particularly among liberal pundits, to wave off parts of Trump's agenda as distractions. He may be decimating American foreign assistance and starving kids around the world, but that is a distraction. He may be sending armed troops and masked men into American cities without justification, but we are supposed to treat that as another distraction, but we don't need to outsmart ourselves here.

We can acknowledge that two things are true at once: Donald Trump is trashing the economy and creating shortages of everything--shortages of everything--electricity, food, workers, healthcare.

He is singlehandedly ruining people's personal finances and the American economy on purpose because he believes in shortages. He wants there to be not enough workers, not enough healthcare, not enough electrons, not enough food. He believes in shortages. This is his economic philosophy. And his illegal actions and brazen takeovers of the media and the private sector institutions and American cities are the stuff of authoritarians throughout history and across the planet.

These things are not intention. They work together. They are the same thing. They are the same project.

So the question for us, and especially my Republican colleagues, is: When is it going to be too much?

We have blown past redline after redline these past 8 months. And it begs the question: Is there any line that we won't cross? Because if not, we all know how this ends.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, on rollcall vote No. 493, I voted no. It was my intention to vote yea; therefore, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote since it will not change the outcome.

Mr. President, on rollcall vote No. 494, I voted no. It was my intention to vote yea; therefore, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote since it will not change the outcome.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, the mass starvation and death sweeping through Gaza is a moral tragedy and a strategic abomination.

What started as a war with a just cause--to go after Hamas for the unspeakable atrocities it committed on October 7 and bring home the hostages--quickly turned unjust and immoral.

Now, everybody knows how complicated and fraught the Middle East is. Everyone knows that navigating this generations-long conflict requires nuance and depth and a historical understanding in order to try to get it right. Everyone knows that smart and sincere and decent people can disagree on this issue. But what is happening today is entirely different. There is no excuse for this horrific suffering. It is not making Israel or Israelis or Jews any safer, nor is it helping to bring home the 50 remaining hostages who have been in brutal captivity for almost 2 years.

The fact that this catastrophe was preventable is precisely what makes it so indefensible. People have been warning for months that the Israeli Government's actions would result in exactly this kind of tragedy, where children are dying by the dozens and hundreds of thousands of people have been starving for days.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israel scrambled to set up 2 months ago, has failed. According to the BBC, where there used to be 400 U.N. aid distribution sites all across Israel and Gaza, there are now just 4 run by the GHF. As a result, a third of Gazans--a third of Gazans--are going multiple days in a row without eating.

The World Health Organization reports that at least 63 people--many of them children--have died from malnutrition this month alone, and more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid at GHF sites, according to the U.N.

In May, the GHF's first executive director resigned, saying:

It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan

while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles

of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.

Whether you believe this organization was set up to fail intentionally from the start or, more charitably, that the Israeli Government established it without understanding that it couldn't succeed, it doesn't matter. What is plainly obvious now is that it is not working.

You don't have to be some leftwing organization or get your data from the Hamas government to acknowledge that the GHF is failing at its fundamental mission of feeding people, which raises the question, why?

Here we have an Israeli security apparatus that can and did synchronize an attack of exploding pagers across an entire country. They can reach and gather intelligence from the high command of their greatest adversaries. The IDF is widely viewed as punching way above its weight in almost every way. Yet Israel is asserting that, given all of those capabilities, the one thing they can't do is facilitate aid distribution. That is too hard for them.

Food and medical assistance routinely get into conflict zones around the world--Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Gaza should not be any different.

What is different are the stated goals of the extremists in the Israeli Government:

The only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is

to completely stop the ``humanitarian'' aid, conquer the

entire Gaza Strip, and encourage voluntary migration.

That was the National Security Minister of the Government of Israel-- completely stopping humanitarian aid, conquering the entire Gaza strip, and encouraging migration. These are their words; these are not my words.

As the starvation takes hold, their response is to deny that it is even happening. There is no starvation in Gaza. Who said that? The Prime Minister of Israel.

Ben Gvir added--I have to collect myself before saying what Ben Gvir said:

If they were hungry, they would have returned the hostages

home.

``If they were hungry, they would have returned the hostages home.'' It is worth pausing on that for just a moment. Too many people in the Netanyahu government make no distinction between the actual enemy that is Hamas and innocent civilians.

The idea that a desperate mother, malnourished herself and out of breast milk for her infant, or a 7-year-old running to the front of an aid line to get whatever scraps he can for himself and his siblings-- the idea that these people are in charge of which hostages are released and when, that they suddenly are being held to account for the actions of Hamas on October 7, is preposterous. It is another example of the casual dismissal of civilian death and suffering as if it is an inevitable consequence--war is hell and all of that. But what possible explanation is there for letting infants and 2- and 3-year-olds starve? What tactical advantage is being gained?

Standing up for our shared humanity, whatever our other differences and preferences, should not be a matter of controversy, but too often, when someone is critical of Israel and they are a Jew, they are characterized as a self-hating Jew. And if someone is critical of Israel and they are not a Jew, they are characterized as anti-Semitic.

I want to be crystal clear. Anti-Semitism is among the oldest and most vile prejudices that exist. It is real, it is scary, and it is on the rise in the United States. It should be fought at every turn--left, right, and center. Anyone who simply waves it away or denies the urgency of addressing it is either not paying attention or lying.

But criticizing the conduct of this war; criticizing Minister Ben Gvir, who talks about ethnic cleansing; criticizing the withholding of aid; criticizing the excessive tolerance for civilian casualties; criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu's apparent willingness to cling to power at the expense of Israel, Israelis, and Jews everywhere--that is a separate matter. Everybody gets to do that, just like Americans get to criticize their President without hating America or the people within it. People are more than their governments.

The Government of Israel is behaving terribly. The conduct of this war is indefensible. And it is not in spite of my Jewishness and my Judaism that I say that; it is because of it.

There are a lot of people, including people I know personally--and I believe this--who believe in the sacred idea of Israel.

They are good people, and this cannot be about vanquishing one side of the political spectrum, whether that is the left and center left or the right and the alt right. This is about grounding ourselves in a very basic principle, which is, whatever else we are fighting about, can we please hold the children harmless?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, when it comes to one of the most basic necessities in life for people--housing--both political parties have failed. Both political parties have failed.

Housing costs more than ever today, with the median home costing five times as much as the median income for your average American. First- time home buyers are fewer and older than ever. One in four renters is being forced to spend more than half of their income on rent, and homelessness is plaguing more people than ever before.

This crisis was not inevitable; it is a problem that the government has created. There is not enough housing in this country because we have made it virtually impossible to build housing. Ask anyone who has tried to build anything--a shed, a patio, an accessory dwelling unit for their in-laws. They will tell you that the moment you try to do something, there are endless procedural hurdles and regulatory barriers that immediately get in the way--exclusionary zoning; minimum lot sizes; height restrictions; requirements for multiple staircases; environmental reviews; dozens of public meetings, where the grouchiest people in your neighborhood can stop the most virtuous project in your neighborhood; extensive permitting paperwork; years-long battles with community organizations and boards. And if you want to expedite your permit, you can pay a permit expediter. If you have 10 grand, they will put your thing on the top of the pile.

Nobody should like this system.

I cannot think of something so essential to American life--housing, whether you rent or you want to own--so essential to American life where the government has created the shortage on purpose, and then it strokes its chin, confused as to why there is a shortage. There is a shortage because of us. There is a shortage because of the government itself making it hard to construct the thing we all say we want.

But the good news is this: If the government got us into this mess in the first place, it can help to get us out. Mainly, that means getting out of our own way and not preventing the very things we say we like.

A lot of progressives in my own party like to say ``We are for housing. We are for clean energy. We are for transit and infrastructure,'' but you can't be for something if you don't want it near you. If you are for housing, you have to see the housing. If you are for clean energy, you are going to see a windmill or wind farm or a nuclear powerplant somewhere.

As we envision a just and sustainable and wealthy country, we have to actually make the things that make us more sustainable and wealthy. There is nothing progressive about preventing a nurse or a firefighter or a teacher or a small business owner from actually living in the community in which they work. There is nothing progressive about making people drive an hour to work or, in Hawaii, forcing people to leave the State.

Lawn sizes and building heights don't make neighborhoods; people do. Yet you will often hear people who oppose new housing say things like: We want to preserve the unique character of the neighborhood.

And this is something that I am embarrassed to say I didn't know until I came to the U.S. Senate. I didn't understand what those words mean and where they came from. They are echoing a dark time in American history of the Jim Crow era. It was a time when communities specifically codified into law language that prohibited Black people and other racial minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods. The racial covenants would literally say:

No lot covered by this indenture, or any part thereof,

shall ever be sold, resold, conveyed, granted, devised,

leased or rented to or occupied by, or in any other way used

by, any person or persons not of the Caucasian Race.

That is from a covenant in St. Louis from 1949. And there were contracts just like that one in neighborhoods all across the country. Then, racial covenants were outlawed, but their legacy continues today because what happened was the racists, after this was outlawed, figured out a proxy for race. They figured out a way to keep people separated, figured out a way to keep people out of their neighborhoods, figured out a way to make housing more constrained. And that is exclusionary zoning. That is minimum lot sizes. That means you need interior staircases. All of these things that sound virtuous--safety, sanitation, environmental review, historic preservation--all of those things actually matter, but understand that they are being weaponized against the working class. They are being weaponized against the working class.

I am not sure if this is permissible under the rules, but I am looking at a bunch of Senate pages, all 16 years old, trying to figure out: Where am I going to live when I get a job? Do I have to live with my folks and for how long? Am I going to be able to move to a suburb or a city or stay in my hometown? Where am I going to live?

So how do we fix it? First of all, government has a role that is not just getting out of the way. On the financing

side, on the public housing stock side, on vouchers, on section 8, on HUD-VASH, there are lots of programs that work--on the low-income housing tax rate. There are a lot of government things that we do that have helped and can help more.

But the truth is that the throughput capacity of the system is being constrained by the government itself. We could allocate $3 trillion to affordable housing, and if it is still hard to build a house in an individual neighborhood, all that money would get stuck. Actually, the State of California tried that. They allocated an enormous amount of money to housing, and they didn't get very much built.

The county of Maui, many years ago, said: No new housing unless it is affordable--which kind of lands on the ears in a wonderful way, right? No new housing unless it is affordable. Do you know what happened? There was no new housing at all for a full decade.

So we just have to embrace, on the left--the reason I care about this is because I think it is the single most impactful economic policy that we could implement, to make it easier to build housing for working people, for students, for the disabled, for the elderly, for the entrepreneurs, for cities, for towns, for rural neighborhoods. This is important because I care about that.

Now, if you are a conservative, the basic principle is almost even more simple, which is: It is your damn property. You should be permitted to do what you want with your property within certain safety boundaries and all the rest of it.

But if it is your property and you have a quarter of an acre and you want to build an accessory dwelling unit for your kids because they are adults and they just had a baby, you should be allowed to do pretty much whatever you want with your property. But we have inverted the presumption so that it is your neighbors that get to decide what you get to do with your property.

So if you are a private property rights person, you should love the idea of deregulating the housing market. If you are a progressive and you see how much people are struggling right now, you should love the idea of deregulating the housing market.

We need to reform land-use laws for upzoning to allow higher density, reducing minimum lot sizes, deploying manufactured homes, enabling single-room occupancy development wherever multifamily housing is allowed. We know all this works because it is working in certain places.

It is hard to keep any issue out of the partisan crossfire. It really is. It is hard to keep anything out of the partisan crossfire. Everyone retreats to their own corner and starts talking past each other and trying to light the algorithm on fire.

Our ability to come together, use common sense, and find a way forward will affect how people live and succeed for generations to come.

Just this week, Senator Banks and I introduced legislation to incentivize local governments to build more housing near federally funded transit projects. Senator Young and I introduced the YIMBY Act, the Yes in My Backyard Act, which encourages localities to cut onerous regulations and adopt pro-housing policies.

We can and we do disagree about almost everything, but on this, we should all be able to agree that in the richest country in the history of the world, people should not have to worry about having a roof over their heads. We can fix this, and we must.

I yield the floor.