Floor Statements

Madam President, on guns, the House this week will take up a measure to close the dangerous loopholes in the background check system used to certify firearms. For years, Democrats have tried to address these loopholes--the gun show, online, and private sales loopholes--only to be met with lockstep resistance by a Republican Congress beholden to the NRA. It is 90 percent of Americans who favor strengthening the background check system, not 51, not 52, 90--the majority of Republicans, the majority of gun owners. Any way you slice it, Americans are strengthening background checks. Americans believe felons, spousal abusers, or those adjudicated mentally ill should not have guns, but Congress is paralyzed because of the other side's obeisance to the NRA--not even after Newtown, not even after Charleston, not even after Las Vegas, not even after Orlando, not after Parkland.

On guns, the tide is turning. Make no mistake about it, a strong majority of the American people support these policies now. The NRA has been considerably weakened. They did not do very well in the last elections. Finally, there is a House in Congress that will listen to the American people and take action on guns--thoughtful, moderate action on background checks.

With each measure that passes the House, the pressure will build on the Senate to take up these reasonable, commonsense gun safety measures, and I hope my colleagues will join us.

On another matter, buybacks. This morning, the New York Times reported on an interesting facet of the recent stock market rally. Many investors, according to the Times, are selling off stock. Average investors are selling off stock. Pensions, and mutual funds, nonprofits, endowments, private equity firms, and trusts are all, in the aggregate, selling stock.

So then why is it rallying? The laws of supply and demand should say the stock market should go down. The Times reports that it is corporate self-investment buybacks. Companies are buying back their own stock at such a rapid clip that they are propping up the market and, to a great degree, themselves. It is another clear example of how the recent explosion of stock buybacks in corporate America is distorting the market--artificially, some would argue.

Some Democratic Senators, and even some Republican Senators, have begun to sound the alarm about the recordbreaking scale of corporate buybacks. Over the last decade, based on analysis of America's largest corporations, 466 of S&P 500 companies, 92 cents out of every dollar of corporate profit has gone to share buybacks or dividends.

Some say, well, they have already, before the profits, put money into their workers and into their communities. We are saying they should put some more, for the good of the country. Stock price, when so much of it is held up by buybacks, shouldn't be the only indicia, the only measure, of how well the country is doing, especially when 85 percent of the stocks are owned by the top 10 percent of Americans.

Most Americans would completely agree that there are more productive ways for corporations to allocate their capital than this borderline obsession with stock buybacks--the slavery to short-term rises in price to please investors--while not doing much for workers or for communities.

I hope corporate America will wake up. Income inequality, along with climate change, to me, are the two greatest problems America faces. We need corporate America to propose some solutions because when they say let government do it, much of corporate America then opposes government doing anything for workers or for communities.

Let's take a careful look at this, and let's see what the right solutions are. The status quo is not acceptable.

Madam President, on climate change, for decades we have known climate change is not only a major national challenge but an existential threat to our planet and to our future. Despite the gravity and scale of this challenge, one political party in the United States has largely denied the problem even exists, denied the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community, and denied most attempts in Congress to tackle climate change.

President Trump's record on climate change is one of abject failure: denying science, systematically rolling back environmental protections that reduce

carbon emissions, and announcing withdrawal from the Paris climate accords--Luddite, ostrich-like, if there ever were, actions that can be described that way.

Recently, we heard of a new effort by the Trump administration to once again push back against efforts to address climate change. You see, it was probably embarrassing for President Trump when his own administration released the National Climate Assessment last year, as required by law, which outlined the severe and immediate impacts of climate change. According to reports, the White House now has plans to set up a fake panel of cherry-picked scientists who question the severity of climate change in order to counter the scientific consensus on this terribly urgent problem, even within the administration. This new fake panel will reportedly be set up under the National Security Council, not the EPA, not NOAA, or any of the Agencies where real scientists work--real climate scientists.

This is maybe the most conspicuous symptom of the disease of climate denialism that has infected the Republican Party and the hard right. This is beyond willful ignorance. This is the intentional, deliberate sowing of disinformation about climate science by our own government. This cannot stand.

This morning, I am announcing that if the Trump administration moves forward with this fake climate panel, we will be introducing legislation to defund it. I will be doing it, along with several of my colleagues. It is long past time for President Trump and Republican leaders to admit that climate change is real, that human activity contributes to it, and Congress must take action to counter it.

So far, Leader McConnell and our Republicans, when we ask them, do you believe climate change is real? Silence. Do you believe humans cause it? Silence. Do you believe Congress has to act to deal with it? Silence. That will not stand, and they will not be able to maintain that position over a period of time.

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

Madam President, before Congress went out of session 2 weeks ago, President Trump announced that he was declaring a national emergency to redirect funds to the construction of a border wall. It was a lawless act, a gross abuse of power, and an attempt by the President to distract from the fact that he broke his core promise to have Mexico pay for the wall.

Let me give a few reasons why the President's emergency is so wrong.

First, there is no evidence of an emergency at the border. Illegal border crossings have been declining for 20 years. Just this morning, a group of 58 former senior national security figures, including Chuck Hagel and Madeleine Albright, released a statement saying: ``Under no plausible assessment of the evidence is there a national emergency today that entitles the president to tap into funds appropriated for other purposes to build a wall at the southern border.''

I ask unanimous consent that the full statement be printed in the Record.

Even the President himself, who is now declaring an emergency, halfway through his meandering speech proclaiming the emergency, said: ``I didn't need to do this . . . but I'd rather do it [build the wall] much faster.''

If there was ever a statement that says this is not an emergency, that is it. He said he didn't need to do this. So, my colleagues, my dear colleagues, if we are going to let the President, any President, on a whim, declare emergencies just because he or she can't get their way in the Congress, we have fundamentally changed the building blocks, these strong, proud building blocks that the Founding Fathers put into place.

Second, the President's emergency declaration could cannibalize funding from worthy projects all over the country. We don't even know yet which projects he is planning to take the funds from. I ask my colleagues to think about that--what important initiatives in your State are on the Trump chopping block? What military project will the President cancel to fund the border wall Congress rejected?

Third, and I made this point a little bit at the beginning, but it bears repeating. Far and away most importantly, the President's emergency declaration is a fundamental distortion of our constitutional order. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, not the President, and congressional intent on the border wall is clear. The President's wall has been before Congress several times, and not once has it garnered enough votes to merit consideration. In some cases it was with Republican votes. The President said that it was just the Democrats who blocked it. That is not true. There were Republican votes when the wall was on the floor for voting as well.

As the great New Yorker, Justice Jackson from Jamestown, NY, observed, the President's legal authority in the realm of emergencies is at its very weakest when it goes against the expressed will of Congress. In case the will of Congress was not already clear, soon it will be made so. The obvious remedy for President Trump's outrageous and lawless declaration is for Congress to vote to terminate the state of emergency. The House will vote on such a resolution tomorrow, and the Senate will soon follow suit.

I know my friends on the other side of the aisle fashion themselves supporters of the military, defenders of property rights, and stewards of the Constitution, as do Democrats. This vote on the resolution to terminate the state of emergency will test our fidelity to those principles.

Congress should come together to reject in a bipartisan fashion--we have come together before in bipartisan ways. If ever there were one moment that cries out for bipartisan rejection of an overreach of power, this is it. We should reject this naked power grab, this defacement of our constitutional balance of powers, for what seem to be largely political purposes.

Madam President, the President is on his way to Thailand for a second summit with Chairman Kim of North Korea. It is in all of our interests for the President to achieve a diplomatic resolution with North Korea that achieves a stable peace and the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Failing that, the Congress must continue to pressure a regime that permits gross humanitarian abuses and remains one of the most repressive governments on the globe.

We cannot tolerate the President making concessions without, in exchange, receiving verifiable, enduring, and concrete commitments from North Korea to denuclearize.

President Trump's first summit with Chairman Kim granted his regime the international legitimacy and acceptance that Kim has long craved while undermining our policy of maximum pressure and sanctions, seemingly so the President could have a photo op and make a speech.

Unsurprisingly, the results of that meeting were disappointing. The President claimed, bizarrely and wildly, that North Korea is ``no longer a nuclear threat'' right after the meeting, while the U.S. intelligence community has continually testified before Congress that North Korea has not been denuclearizing and appears unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons. So how can the President say it is no longer a nuclear threat when the same threat existed when he threatened North Korea earlier and after, when he seemed to make nice to President Kim? Meanwhile, the President suspended joint military readiness drills with the South Koreans--drills we have been conducting for 60 years for the safety of East Asia.

No one wants to see a repeat of the same movie. No one wants another summit that is more about photo ops and optics than progress. We are all rooting for diplomacy to succeed, but the President can't be too naive or too eager to reach a deal that gives him the photo op again but that doesn't achieve the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Madam President, in a similar vein, on China, President Trump announced he would be delaying the imposition of higher tariffs on March 1, in the hopes of coming to a larger trade agreement. This is all well and good if the Trump administration ultimately achieves a strong deal that makes progress on China's rapacious trade policies. But we are not there yet, and my message to President Trump is don't back down.

The President has shown the right instincts on China many times. I give him credit for that. I have praised him publicly for that, but at other times, I believe his eagerness for the appearance of accomplishment gets the best of him. Recent history has taught us that when President Trump makes unilateral concessions to China--as he did when he interfered in the sanctions against ZTE--China does very little for us in return.

President Trump must not make the same mistake again, whether by interfering in the U.S. criminal charges brought against Huawei or otherwise decreasing our leverage, until and unless China makes meaningful, enforceable, and verifiable agreements to end its theft of American intellectual property and other trade abuses.

Hopefully, that is where the negotiations are headed. If the President does

a good job, I will be the first to praise him. If he backs off or takes some temporary measure in decreasing the balance of trade but doesn't change China's structural rapaciousness against the United States and our intellectual property and our industrial know-how, he will be criticized by me and many others on both sides of the aisle.

Madam President, a word on today's vote on women's reproductive rights: The bill the Senate will vote on shortly is carefully crafted to target, intimidate, and shut down reproductive healthcare providers. Doctors across this country--Democratic doctors, Republican doctors--are lining up against the bill because it would impose requirements on what type of care doctors must provide in certain circumstances, even if that care is ineffective, contradictory to medical evidence, and against the family's wishes.

My Republican colleagues have said some incendiary things about opposing this bill. Let me be very clear. Many of these claims are false. It has always been illegal to harm a newborn infant. This vote has nothing--nothing--to do with that. Read the language. We are talking about situations when expectant parents tragically learn their pregnancy is no longer viable, and there is a fatal diagnosis. What happens in those circumstances should be decided between a woman, her family, her minister, priest, rabbi, imam, and her doctor.

It makes no sense for Washington politicians who know nothing about individual circumstances to say they know better than the doctors or the patients and their families. The bill is solely meant to intimidate doctors and restrict patients' access to care and has nothing--nothing, nothing--to do with protecting children.

Last Friday, the administration announced it was imposing a gag rule on U.S. reproductive healthcare providers and trying to restrict access to healthcare clinics that provide reproductive care. So this vote doesn't occur in a vacuum. It is part of a pattern of actions taken by President Trump and congressional Republicans to limit, deny, or circumscribe a woman's right to healthcare.

I urge the American people to do their own research, read the bill, and see what it says. Most of you will agree with it. Pay attention to the facts and not the false rhetoric. This bill is Washington politics at its worst. I will vote no.

Finally--and this time it is finally, I say to my good friend from Nebraska--I turn the attention of my colleagues to a harrowing fact: We are vastly approaching the point where more people will have died from exposure to toxic chemicals on 9/11 than were killed on 9/11 itself. These are the first responders, firefighters, police, and FBI agents who rushed to the towers that fateful day, ran into the fire, smoke, and twisted steel, risking their lives and, later, we learned, risking their health to get people out. These are the union members and construction workers who worked at the pile, breathing in a toxic blend of ash and dust in the days and weeks and months that followed. These are the people, the innocents, who lived downtown when the United States was attacked in the most dastardly attack on American soil.

Right now we have a problem. While these folks are heroes and, sadly, many are suffering--because of the alarming number who are suffering from 9/11-related illnesses, the victim compensation fund is running out of money earlier than expected. The Justice Department recently announced that it might have to cut compensation awards between 50 and 70 percent.

So today I was proud to join Senators Gillibrand and Gardner, as well as a group of our colleagues in the House, to introduce legislation to fix the shortfall of funding and put the victims' compensation fund on sure footing for the foreseeable future.

I urge all of my colleagues, Democrat and Republican alike, to sign on and help us pass this bill and give some hope to the thousands who were brave on 9/11 and who are suffering now.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Florida be given 3 minutes to speak on the resolution of his colleague from Florida, and then I speak on leader time, to be followed immediately by Senators Whitehouse, Schatz, and Merkley.

Madam President, later today we will vote on the agreement by the conference committee to keep the government open, as well as provide additional border security. Once again, I applaud the members of the conference committee and their staffs. They were the nub here, and they did outstanding work, nights and weekends, to reach an agreement. We knew that if the conference committee were allowed to work, they could bring this together. The agreement is a validation of the idea that when you put Members of both parties in a room to negotiate in good faith, when everyone is willing to give and take, progress is never out of reach. So, again, I thank the members of the committee.

The agreement is a reasonable compromise. It provides additional funding for smart, effective border security. It does not fund the President's wall, but it does fund smart border security initiatives that both parties have always supported, including increased security at our ports of entry and humanitarian assistance at our border. Most importantly, it will keep our government open.

Everyone, I believe, including the President, wants to avoid a repeat of what happened before Christmas. Everyone wants to avoid another senseless government shutdown. I expect Congress will pass this bill sometime this afternoon, and President Trump should sign it immediately.

Mr. President, the Senate will soon vote on the agreement by the conference committee to keep the government open. The agreement was a product of a lot of hard work and long nights and weekends by members of the conference committee and their staffs. I want to salute Senator Leahy and Senator Shelby. I want to salute all of the conferees.

When Leader McConnell and I met--as we moved to open up the government for a short period of time--I suggested that we do a conference committee because I had a great deal of faith in the members of the conference committees on both sides of the aisle, and that faith has proved to be vindicated. I thank Senator Leahy, Senator Shelby, their staffs, and all the members of the conference committee for the great job they have done.

The agreement will provide smart border security, increasing support for technologies at our ports of entry. It will not fund the President's expensive, ineffective wall. It will provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance--medical support, transportation, food, and clothing--for children and families in detention. It will provide funding to our neighbors in Central America to fight the actual root causes of migration--the violent gangs and drug cartels.

In short, it represents a fair compromise that includes priorities from both sides of the aisle. I expect the legislation will pass this Chamber with a significant bipartisan majority, pass the House, and be sent to the President with plenty of time to avoid a government shutdown tomorrow at midnight.

There is word that the President will declare a national emergency. I hope he won't. That would be a very wrong thing to do. Leader Pelosi and I will be responding to that in short order, but before that, I just want to say that in order to reach this point, in order to attain this bipartisan compromise, 800,000 public servants were forced to suffer without pay for over a month as President Trump put the country through a completely unnecessary shutdown that snarled airports, delayed loans for farmers and small businesses, trashed our national parks, and took billions of dollars out of our economy.

We still need to address the plight of government contractors who still have not been made whole. Regrettably, we were unable to include that in the agreement, but we are going to keep working and fighting for Senator Smith's proposal to ensure our contractors are made whole again.

The Senate was in the very same position just before Christmas, with a deal in hand, when the President reversed himself and engineered the longest shutdown in American history. After all of the pain of the shutdown caused by President Trump, we are basically right back where we started, with nearly the same parameters of a bipartisan agreement we were ready to pass around Christmas. Leader Pelosi and I, for instance, offered the President $1.37 billion for border security with the same language that would have prohibited the wall then as is in the agreement now.

Let this be a lesson. Government shutdowns don't work. I hope President Trump has learned that lesson once and for all. I hope we never go down the road to shutdowns again. The American people suffer and very little is accomplished.

President Trump should sign this bill ASAP.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, first, let me congratulate the Chamber on the overwhelming vote for the appropriations bill. It is good news that we passed it by a lot of votes, and I hope the House does it by a lot, too.

I need to comment on the news that President Trump may declare a national emergency in an attempt to build his border wall. If President Trump decides to go forward with a disaster declaration, he will be making a tremendous mistake.

Declaring a national emergency would be a lawless act, a gross abuse of the power of the Presidency, and a desperate attempt to distract from the fact that President Trump broke his core promise to have Mexico pay for the wall. It will be another demonstration of President Trump's naked contempt for the rule of law and congressional authority.

Congress just debated this very issue. There was not support for the President's position. Congressional intent on this issue is very clear. The President's wall has been before Congress several times and has never garnered enough votes to even merit consideration. For the President to declare an emergency now would be an unprecedented subversion of Congress's constitutional prerogative.

The fact is, this is not an emergency, and the President's fearmongering doesn't make it one. A policy dispute about our southern border does not constitute a national emergency.

Democrats support and have always supported strong border security, but the fact is, according to the CBP, apprehensions at our southern border are at historic lows.

President Trump couldn't convince Mexico, he couldn't convince the American people, and he couldn't convince their elected representatives to pay for his ineffective and expensive wall. Now he is trying an end run around Congress in a desperate attempt to put taxpayers on the hook for it. Make no mistake--Congress will defend our constitutional authorities in every way that we can.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, we have a clear and obvious way to avoid another government shutdown in 48 hours. The conference committee has

done its job. It has forged a bipartisan agreement that would keep the government open through September as well as provide additional border security.

As with all bipartisan agreements, it is the product of compromise. Each side gave a little; each side got a little. The conferees deserve our praise for their hard work, their commitment, and their success.

This agreement is the last train leaving the station away from another dreaded government shutdown. The last time we were all in this situation, the President signaled his support for a government funding bill, only for him to retreat at the last possible moment-- precipitating the longest shutdown in our history. It was the Trump shutdown, and he now seems to admit that again.

No one wants to see a rerun of that movie. The President must not repeat his mistakes of the recent past.

President Trump, sign this bill.

Neither side got everything it wanted in this bill, but both sides wanted to avoid another shutdown--Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate.

President Trump, sign this bill.

The parameters of the deal are good. It provides additional funding for smart, effective border security. Let me repeat that. It does not fund the President's wall, but it does fund smart border security that both parties support. It also provides humanitarian assistance and beefs up security at our ports of entry. Though it hasn't been discussed much during the negotiations, the passage of this agreement clears the way for the six bipartisan appropriations bills that have languished. These bills contain important priorities, including more support for infrastructure, housing, Tribal healthcare, the census, and money to combat the opioid crisis. I look forward to passing all of these appropriations bills, alongside the DHS agreement, this week.

One of the last things that has to be dealt with is the negotiating of a good compromise to fix some of the problems that have been created by the Trump shutdown. We are trying to get the conferees to approve a proposal to deal with Federal contractors. Thousands of Federal contractors have not been reimbursed from the 35-day shutdown. This issue is still hanging in the balance. The Republicans should join the junior Senator from Minnesota and the Democrats in approving this legislation as soon as possible.

The contractors, many of them just working people, are in the same boat as government employees, except they haven't gotten their backpay. They should. No one should stand in the way of that. It is just not fair to them. They were hostages, just like the government workers were hostages. So I hope we can include that in these final hours of negotiations. It is very important.

Now, the only remaining obstacle to avoiding a government shutdown is the uncertainty of the President's signature. So I repeat my request: President Trump, say you will sign this bill. Remove the ax hanging over everyone's head. To make progress in our democracy, you have to accept the give-and-take. You have to accept some concessions. You have to be willing to compromise.

Any American President who says my way or no way does a real disservice to the American people. President Trump, in politics, to quote the Rolling Stones, ``You can't always get what you want.'' It is time to put the months of shutdown politics behind us.