Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be rescinded.

Colleagues, the story broke today that the Trump family has confirmed that a Russian oligarch, a close ally of Vladimir Putin-- a man whose fortune was gifted to him by Putin--paid for the private island wedding of the President of the United States' son.

I am here on the floor because I am scared to death that this is all going to start just feeling normal. Let me say it again. A Russian oligarch, a close ally of our enemy Vladimir Putin, a man whose fortune was gifted to him by Vladimir Putin, paid for--secretly--the private island wedding of the President of the United States' son.

The President's son Donald Trump, Jr., tried to hide this fact. He posted pictures of his wedding celebration online. There was a public conversation about whether the President was going to attend or not. But the President's son made no mention that the whole thing, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, a private island, was bankrolled by the Russians.

In fact, the only face of the 50 guests that is hidden in the group photo that you can look at right now online, the only person's face that is hidden, is the oligarch. But he is there because he secretly paid for the celebration.

The Russians paid for the private island. The Russians paid for the fireworks show. The President's son even put this oligarch in charge of planning the logistics. This was a Russian party, organized and paid for by someone in Vladimir Putin's inner circle.

This has never happened before in the history of the United States of America. Never before has a foreign enemy of the United States paid for the family wedding of the President. Why? Because it is naked corruption, in plain view. It is as close to treason as you get, accepting lavish gifts, millions of dollars in gifts perhaps, from the enemy of this Nation.

Let us spend a minute on this oligarch. We just learned this today, so forgive me if we have scant details. I think we are going to find out a lot more about this guy in the coming days and weeks. But his name is Umar Kremlev. He is a convicted criminal. He runs a boxing company that is funded by Putin. More specifically, by Gazprom, Putin's state-run gas company.

He is not just some ordinary oligarch. He is one of Putin's favorites. In addition to running this boxing association, he runs the Russian lottery. He has a monopoly on Russian sports betting.

Shortly before financing and attending the Trump wedding, Kremlev and Putin were together in China. Putin brought him on a really important state visit to China. Putin has given Kremlev the highest Kremlin honor, The Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has sanctioned Kremlev because he is part of Putin's inner circle. All of Kremlev's money is Putin's money. He operates as an arm of Putin, as do all the Putin-made oligarchs.

Before today's disclosure of his secret financing of the Trump wedding, there was no record of Donald Trump, Jr., and Kremlev being great best buddies because they aren't. It appears that they just recently met. And shortly after meeting, this close ally of Vladimir Putin offered to pay for Donald Trump, Jr.'s wedding.

Here's what Eric Trump said today, when a reporter asks his office about Umar Kremlev, this close friend of Donald Trump, Jr.'s.

Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has [he

ever] heard his name.

This is Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Jr.'s brother, his business partner, has never heard the name of the close associate, the close friend of Donald Trump, Jr.'s who paid for his entire wedding. Why? Because they are not friends. This is a business between the Trump family and the Russian Government.

This all fits two patterns. The first is the Trump family's reliance on Russian support for their business empire. Donald Trump, Jr., said this, prior to when his father became President. He is talking about his family's business.

In terms of high-end product influx into the United States,

Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a

lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our

project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of

money pouring in from Russia.

More recently, those who have looked at the individuals who are buying Trump's cryptocurrency have noted that there is evidence that the Trump family's cryptocurrency is backed perhaps heavily by Russian buyers.

But the second and more significant pattern is this: Trump's sons, particularly Donald Junior, just brazenly profit off of their access to the White House. Donald Junior, he just basically stuffs money into his pockets from anybody who wants a favor from his father, and he just gobbles up government contracts as fast as he can.

Don Junior's net worth was $50 million before his father's second term.

In the first year that Trump was President, in his second term, Don Junior's net worth didn't double; it didn't triple; it didn't quadruple; it grew by six times in one year--$50 million. A year later, $300 million.

At least 13 companies tied to the Trump brothers have captured $1.8 billion in long-term Federal contracts and commitments and $103 million in direct cash from the Trump administration. Five of those companies got their first government contracts ever after the Trump sons invested. That is corruption. It doesn't matter whether this is a Republican administration or a Democratic administration.

Now, you could be offended at all of that, but you might say: Well, this isn't that. This isn't Trump Junior taking money from the taxpayers. This is just his taking money from the Russians. Isn't that better than his taking money from taxpayers?

Of course, it isn't because Putin doesn't pay for a wedding just to be nice. This is an arrangement in plain sight.

Donald Trump has done a 180-degree turn in U.S. policy on the Russia- Ukraine war. He has cut off funding from Ukraine. Even after we appropriate money, he refuses to spend it, which is illegal. As recently as this weekend, he said publicly that it is Ukraine's fault that the war continues, not Russia's. In addition, Trump has suspended sanctions on the export of Russian oil and gas, which, by the way, specifically helps Gazprom, the company that funds Kremlev. Trump has become one of Putin's most important allies.

And so, like everything else in Trump's corrupt world in his second term, it just becomes this mutually beneficial deal. Trump withholds support for Ukraine and pads the pocket of the Russian Government with sanctions relief, and the Russians funnel money to the family.

Doesn't everybody see this? Shouldn't everyone here be outraged today that the President of the United States' son just had his wedding--his multimillion-dollar wedding--paid for by the Russians, and he admits it?

I know that there are a lot of Republicans in the Senate who are aghast at what Trump has done to abandon Ukraine, and I know there are a lot of Republicans here who are furious at this spiraling corruption. I don't know that there is a single Member of this body, Republican or Democrat, who would go on TV tonight and defend the Russian Government's paying for the Trump family's private island wedding.

But at some point, there just has to be a bottom that the U.S. Senate unanimously recognizes. Does any Republican here think that you would say nothing if Hunter Biden's wedding or Malia Obama's graduation party were financed by Iranian allies of the Ayatollah? You guys would shut this place down if that were to happen.

And, of course, you can't even imagine that happening under a different administration because, despite all the histrionics over the ``Biden Crime Family,'' never before in the history of this country have we had a White House where the financing of a family wedding by a foreign adversary would pass as a minor scandal that barely makes the front pages.

Just because the corruption happens so routinely that, to some, it feels normal doesn't mean that it is. If we don't, on a bipartisan basis here in the Senate, draw a line in the sand soon, it will be the end of our Republic. It just will be.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, colleagues, the Trump administration has us stuck in a humiliating quagmire, a total deadlock in Iran. We are wasting billions of taxpayer dollars dropping bombs and firing missiles at Iran.

Iran responds with escalation. They keep the strait closed. They attack our bases. They attack our allies in the region. The war just expands and expands and expands.

In the last week, for instance, a new war is threatening to break out between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which would likely result in the other strait at the bottom of the Red Sea being closed as well.

Trump personally pays no price for this stalemate. His corruption schemes, his cryptocurrency, his insider trading, the contracts to his sons, all of that has practically tripled his net worth in just 18 short months in office.

No, the price of this war is being plainly paid, first and foremost, by our soldiers who are being put in harm's way for a war that is making America weaker every day.

They are getting killed. They are sustaining life-altering injuries. Many of our soldiers and sailors and airmen have been in the region far past their scheduled deployment. They haven't seen their families in years.

And, of course, American consumers are paying the price as well. Here is the most relevant chart. This is familiar to you. This is what gas prices were doing until the war. They are creeping back well above $4 a gallon right now. That is not affordable for regular Americans, especially Americans who have to travel great distances for work, especially small business owners who rely on reasonable gas prices in order to be able to make their bills work.

Diesel prices are through the roof as well. Fertilizer prices are through the roof as well, all because of this war. No other reason--the war. The prices are this high because of the war. It is farmers, it is small business owners, it is the American public who are paying the price--not Donald Trump.

And so that is why the war is just wildly unpopular, like except for Trump's sort of hard-line supporters, the folks who just don't believe he can ever do anything wrong, nobody wants this war. If you are in a red State or a blue State, this war is deeply unpopular. The American public is smart; they are smarter than a lot of my colleagues give them credit for. They know a war with Iran is unwinnable. They don't want America stuck again in a quagmire, a stalemate in the Middle East.

So how does Trump handle this, a deeply unpopular war, a war that he is losing, a war that is driving up prices for the American public? Well, this is how he handles it: He gaslights.

He tells lies. And the essential gaslight is that: The war is about to end, don't worry. Yes, it appears that there is no end. It appears that you are going to have to continue to pay these prices forever. It appears that America has no endgame, but, don't worry, the war is about to end.

And so I just want to go through this pattern with you because it is really important to talk about the fact that the White House is just not being straight with the American public about what is going on in this war.

Over and over again the President declares that the war is about to be over. He is not telling the truth. He normally declares that the war is about to be over on Sunday night or Monday morning, right before the markets open. But now that we are 6 months into this war, we can see the pattern.

Let me go through it with you quickly. On March 23, Trump announces a deal. I am just going to give you his quotes, these are his words. He says:

The United States of America, and the country of Iran, have

had, over the last two days, very good and productive

conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of

our hostilities in the Middle East.

The market impact is immediate. That post sends oil prices tumbling nearly 11 percent, but there is no deal. He just made it up. Two days later, the U.S. military is back to conducting strikes.

USS Abraham Lincoln continues flight operations against

military targets in Iran while sailing in regional waters.

On March 30, Trump announces another deal. This is Monday morning right before the markets open. He says:

The United States of America is in serious discussions with

A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end--

end--

our Military Operations in Iran.

Great progress has been made . . .

One week later, there is no deal. The opposite. One week later, Trump posts that he is going to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, ``A whole civilization will die tonight,'' he posts, ``never to be brought back again.''

That is a war crime. The President is promising to kill millions of civilians. He tries to dial it back, but later on that same day he is back to announcing a deal.

Literally, ``I am going to wipe out a whole civilization,'' that morning.

That night, on April 17, he says:

We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it

is a workable basis on which to negotiate . . . a two week

period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and

consummated.

Five days later, there is no deal. Trump announces a resumption of the war with Iran.

Now let's fast-forward 10 days later to April 17. He posts that a deal with Iran is imminent. ``THIS PROCESS SHOULD GO VERY QUICKLY . . .

MOST OF THE POINTS ARE ALREADY NEGOTIATED,'' he posts.

Two days later, the strikes start again. On May 5, Trump says:

Great Progress [being] made toward a Complete and Final

Agreement [with the Representatives of Iran.]

Complete is capitalized; final is capitalized; agreement is capitalized; representatives is capitalized; Iran is capitalized.

Two days later, the deal is off. Surprise, surprise. Every time Trump announces a deal is imminent, it just disappears.

``U.S. forces intercepted unprovoked Iranian attacks and responded with self-defense strikes,'' CENTCOM announces 2 days later.

On May 25, right before the markets open: A deal is imminent.

Negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran are

proceeding nicely!

Right before the markets open. That same day the U.S. military conducts strikes on Iran:

U.S. forces conducted self-defense strikes in southern Iran

today to protect troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.

Next Monday, right before the markets open, Trump posts:

Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one

. . .

Just sit back and relax, it will work out well in the end--

It always does!

How is this working out well for the American public? How is that working out well for the American public? The next day there is no deal. The United States conducts strikes against Iran.

On June 17, Trump actually signs the deal, but it is not a real deal. He does this whole pomp and circumstance signing ceremony in Versailles. That deal was negotiated by diplomatic amateurs. There was nothing actually agreed to. There were words on a page, but from the literal moment the ink was dry, nobody could explain what they had agreed to. Most significantly, Iran thought that the agreement obligated Israel to stop its military operations in Lebanon. Israel did not agree to that.

Iran thought that it had been given control of the strait in that agreement; apparently the American delegation didn't think they made that concession.

Anyway, that agreement lasts 10 days. On June 27, Trump posts that strikes on Iran have resumed.

Let's just fast-forward to the last week because Trump is doing it again. On August 1, Trump posts--I am not sure that I transcribed this wrong or not, but it looks like it says:

[T]he [perimeters] of a deal has been agreed to.

I will give him credit he said parameters.

``[T]he parameters of a deal have been agreed to,'' on

August 1.

On August 2, ``The deal is imminent, having to do with the [Strait of Hormuz] and also, ultimately, the denuclearization of Iran.''

The deal is imminent on the denuclearization of Iran.

August 4, just a night or two ago, Trump tells Fox News:

We're having very good discussions.

Meanwhile, there were reports that Iran isn't even talking to the United States. Trump is saying a deal on the denuclearization of Iran is imminent, and Iran is saying: We are not even in the room.

I mean, we should not accept this level of gaslighting. The word of the President has to matter. Over and over again on 11 different instances, Trump says: A deal is about to happen, don't worry; the war is about to be over.

There is no deal. None of it is real, these promises. I wish it were real. I want to be clear about that. I want the war to end. I would basically support any agreement at this point to end this war.

I was glad that the President got a cease-fire, but I could tell by the terms it wasn't going to last. It wasn't a real agreement. But at this point, many of us are willing to support almost any agreement. It will be a humiliating agreement. It will be one in which Iran will essentially declare victory.

But this war is a disaster. America is losing. Consumers can't afford to pay these prices. Businesses are going under.

We had a record of farm bankruptcies in the last year. We look like a laughingstock, and we are running out of munitions. We don't have what we need to protect ourselves anymore.

Reports are that we have gone through half of our Tomahawks. Our allies in the region have fired 70 to 80 percent of their Patriot missiles. This is a crisis. It has to end.

But maybe there is an explanation for why Trump continues to do this gaslighting, particularly right before the markets open.

Trump announced now a week or so ago that if you pay him $100,000 a month, he will give you advance notice of American foreign policy decisions.

I don't understand why that is acceptable to anybody in this Chamber. If you pay Donald Trump $100,000, he will give you advance notice of America's foreign policy decisions.

If we are about to sign a peace treaty, and you give him $100,000 a month, he will give you advance notice of that. If strikes are going to resume against Iran, if you pay him $100,000 a month, he will give you advance notice of that. That is a subscription service for insider trading, and it is unquestionably lucrative.

On August 1, Trump posts that a deal is imminent. Remember, people still take him seriously. Not everybody knows about this history of gaslighting.

On August 1, Trump says that a deal is imminent, and the market impact is immediate. Oil prices fall by 5 percent right as the markets open.

The next day, right before the markets open, Trump says again ``The deal is imminent''--another 5 percent drop.

And so you see how his statements move the market, and you can see how if you get advance notice of those statements, even by a few seconds, you can capitalize on that market movement. You know that if Trump says a deal is imminent and the markets are going to move 5 percent and you pay $100,000 to Donald Trump to get that information early, you can make a boatload of money.

And so maybe the war continues because Trump has found a way to monetize the war in a disgustingly corrupt way. I get that at some point we become immune to all of this, but can any of my Republican colleagues defend the President selling announcements from the White House for $100,000 a month in the middle of a war?

Is any Republican Senator willing to come down to this floor and defend the President of the United States setting up a subscription service for public policy announcements from the White House so as to advantage certain players in the marketplace who are willing to pay that amount of money?

Of course not. And if you know in your heart that it is corrupt, that it is wrong, then you should say something about it because the war might be continuing--not just because of incompetence but because the President has found a way to make money. More people are going to pay him $100,000 for these announcements in the middle of a war. Frankly, people would be willing to pay it absent a war, but he will make more money during a war because his announcements clearly move the markets in the middle of a very complicated conflict where the decisions of the U.S. Government immediately change oil markets.

The reason this war is dragging on endlessly--it does matter, and my colleagues should care about Trump's insider trading subscription scheme. It is just so discouraging that nobody on the other side of the aisle says anything about this when the credibility of the White House and of our country is just getting destroyed and sullied. But my Republican colleagues should also care that the war is being waged with a level of embarrassing incompetence that is making America weaker, that is getting us nowhere.

This body works best when the President's party stands up to him and says ``enough,'' whether it is corruption or incompetence. That is what Johnson's party did during the Vietnam war. It is actually what the Democratic Party did with President Obama during the late stages of the Afghanistan war when many of us decided that America had to withdraw and opposed President Obama's party. It is what many of us did here during the early stages of the war in Yemen that President Obama was bringing the American military into. Many of us opposed it, got up on this floor and explained why we opposed it.

Republicans can do that too. You can say that this war has to end. You can

say that the President should never ever personally benefit from a conflict overseas. You can say that the President of the United States should not sell access to White House statements. It would make a big difference for our democracy and for the American people, who are paying through the nose for the cost of this war, if you did.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, in a few moments, we are going to vote on a resolution to end the President's illegal, disastrous war with Iran. We should pass this resolution.

This is day 146 of a war that has no achievable objectives and no ending, a war that has ruined American families as gas prices are back over $4 a gallon, unaffordable for many working-class Americans. We have sky-high diesel and fertilizer prices. We have seen record numbers of farms going into bankruptcy.

This is a war that has made Iran stronger, a war that has depleted American munitions so dangerously that we are now exposed, without the munitions and interceptors necessary if there was an actual threat posed to the United States elsewhere around the world.

This war has been an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. There is a reason why no American President--Republican or Democrat--prior to Donald Trump began a preemptive war with Iran, because everyone with even scant knowledge of the Middle East knew that a war with Iran was not winnable, knew that it would set off a series of other conflicts in the region that would result in chaos.

And that is what we have today--chaos--even worse, planned chaos, foreseeable chaos.

Every day, as we speak, Iran strikes its neighbors--Israel, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar. Every day, Iran strikes U.S. forces and our bases in the region. They have done billions of dollars' worth of damage to our forces and to our partners' forces.

Our war against Iran has set off other wars. Israel has invaded Lebanon. In that country, 4,300 people have been killed, 12,000 have been wounded, and 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced from their homes.

Let me say this again: The war with Iran has set off another war in which 4,300 people have been killed and 1.2 million people have been displaced from their homes.

And this week, a new conflict is breaking out between the Houthis in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Iran did not control the strait before the war, but they now effectively control it.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, connecting the Red Sea to global waterways, now appears also closed, and the Houthis--again, another Iranian ally-- have started to attack ships there.

There are 17 Americans who have died. There are hundreds of others who have been wounded. Almost 2,000 Iranian civilians have died, including 250 children.

The United States has depleted our munitions and interceptor stores to dangerous levels. Over decades, we carefully, methodically built up a stockpile of long-range stealth missiles--mostly in preparation for a possible future conflict with China.

Do you know what percentage of that stockpile has been fired at Iran in 146 days? Not 10 percent, not 30 percent--50 percent. We have fired half of our entire stockpile of long-range stealth missiles in 4 months.

And the situation is even worse for our allies and partners in the region. Reports suggest that the UAE and Kuwait may have burned through 75 percent of their Patriot missiles, just over the last 146 days.

This all sounds like a disaster--correct?--like an unmitigated five- alarm disaster. But the administration defends this reality.

They, frankly, can't object to the facts that I just laid out. They simply say that this is the cost of a just war. Lives lost, regional chaos, high prices, low stockpiles, taxpayers footing the bill--it is just all worth it, because the Trump administration says: We are achieving our goals, and the goals are worth the price.

And here is the most important thing to understand, as we approach this vote in a few moments: It is not worth it. Why? Because Trump has not achieved a single war goal, and Trump has no path to achieve any single war goal.

All of the costs, all of the chaos, all of the death that I just described are going to be for nothing because not a single one of these goals is going to be achieved.

Now, I will admit the goals have shifted over time, and so on this chart I am simplifying the set of goals. But the first goal has been articulated many times, in different forms, by the administration: regime change.

In Trump's video announcing the beginning of the war, he says:

When we are finished [with this campaign, the Iranian

people should] take over your government. It will be yours to

take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.

There is also extensive reporting on the plan, led by the Israelis but supported by the United States, to replace the old regime with leaders friendly to the United States and Israel.

But here is the reality. Yes, this war has taken out the previous leadership, but what has happened is that the old regime has simply been swapped for a new generation of revolution-era ideologues that are younger, that are more emboldened, and that are less compromising.

The new Ayatollah is well known to be a prominent hardliner. He has surrounded himself with other hardliners--leaders of the Quds Force and those with a history of brutal repression of dissidents inside Iran. And they feel emboldened because they have survived this war. They have emerged controlling the country. They have taken America's best shot, and they are still in charge.

The President, at one point, tried to claim that this goal had been effectuated--that because the old Ayatollah is dead and there is a new Ayatollah, by definition, they had succeeded in regime change.

All we got is a younger set of leaders who are more confident they can beat the United States and are going to emerge from this conflict more powerful in the region.

The second war goal: destroying Iran's military capabilities.

Now, the administration, basically, as soon as the war began, claimed victory here on day 14 of this conflict. Nearly 5 months ago, the Secretary of Defense said that Iran's military had been ``destroyed'' and ``made combat ineffective.''

And 26 days into the conflict, Vice President Vance declared:

The Iranian conventional military is effectively destroyed.

But with our own eyes, every single day, we can see that that is a lie, as missiles are being fired at our troops and our partners in the region, as wars break out anew each week.

According to public reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post, U.S. intelligence suggests that Iran has retained as much as 70 percent of its prewar missile stock and 70 percent of its mobile missile launchers.

So $100 billion spent and 140 days of war, and we have dented their missile capacity.

Along the Strait of Hormuz, where the missiles probably matter the most, a new U.S. intelligence estimate--again, this is open-source reporting--says that, of the 33 sites, only 3 sites are fully destroyed or inaccessible. Thirty missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz are still operational.

Military intelligence Agencies have also reported that Iran has regained access to 90 percent of the underground missile storage that we have hit. Iran still has their missiles. They still have their drones. They are rebuilding capacity. We have utterly failed at destroying Iran's military capabilities, and there is no path to success in this war aim.

Finally, the third goal: Eliminate Iran's nuclear program and ensure that they can never acquire a nuclear weapon.

This is, of course, a goal that has been shared by Republicans and Democrats, and, as Trump has said, this is the only thing that matters.

Secretary Hegseth reiterated several times at the hearing yesterday that the primary objective of the war is now to make sure that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon. But let's just be clear about the facts. According to the IAEA, Iran still has a stockpile of about 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium. That stockpile still exists in the country. Reports suggest that they have moved their highly advanced centrifuges to a place called Pickaxe Mountain and buried them so deep that no airstrike can impact them.

Most importantly, because Donald Trump pulled out of the previous nuclear agreement which had frozen Iran's nuclear research program, Iran has gained the knowledge to enrich uranium up to 60 percent, which everybody knows is effectively weapons-grade. And there is no military strike that can erase that fact. This is a reality that Donald Trump created.

Now, Trump's theory is that this military campaign is going to push Iran to the negotiating table and that the result will be a deal--a nuclear deal--that is better than the one that Iran signed. But this is fantasy. There is no world in which Iran, after this war, agrees to more than they agreed to in the JCPOA. And you just can't avoid the facts here. The primary reason is that we will have less leverage in these negotiations than the Obama administration had.

Why is that? One, this regime is harder line, less willing to negotiate and compromise than the administration Obama was negotiating with. Second, there is no fear of U.S. airstrikes. That was always a sword of Damocles hovering over the negotiations during the Obama administration. Now Iran knows that they can survive, the regime can survive America's best shot. Our military leverage is just much weaker. Our primary leverage that we had during the Obama administration--the removal of oil sanctions--will not be available to us in these negotiations because we have already demonstrated that those sanctions will be released just to get Iran to reopen the strait.

So we won't have the military leverage. We won't have the oil sanctions leverage. We will be dealing with a regime that is harder line than the one we were dealing with prior. There is no world in which, at the end of this conflict, we are getting a better nuclear agreement than the one that Trump left.

Billions of dollars wasted; 18 Americans dead; thousands of civilians and children in the Middle East killed; our military stockpile is dangerously depleted; new wars in the region breaking out by the week; the Strait of Hormuz and possibly the Red Sea now closed, controlled by our enemies; gas prices skyrocketing; the global economy melting down-- all of this, for what? Nothing. Not a single war objective achieved. Not a viable path to achieve any of them in the coming months.

This war was a mistake from the start. Everyone except for Donald Trump knew it would be a disaster. It is a disaster, and we have a chance today to vote to end it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I come to the floor with good news. It is really important news, but it is news that not a lot of people in this country know about. We are experiencing, over the last 3 years, a dramatic decline in the number of people who are killed by guns. Gun violence rates in this country are plummeting, and they have been plummeting since 2002.

Let me just give you a couple of numbers. From 2023 to 2024--the last year that we have full numbers for--we saw urban gun homicides drop by 16.7 percent. That is extraordinary. And, in general, urban homicides have been dropping by double-digit percentages over the last 3 years.

Mass shootings are way down. That might actually make sense to you because, while we still hear about these awful mass shootings on the news, we have a sense that they are not appearing on our television screens with the rapidity and frequency they were a few years ago.

Now, in 2025, there were 400 mass shootings in America. That is unacceptable. There are still more mass shootings than days in the year, but that is a 41-percent decline from 2021.

Similarly, school shootings have declined over the last 2 years.

This is all good news. There are more people alive today because something is changing in America. And while it is still unacceptable that we are averaging a mass shooting every day in this country, the numbers are unquestionably heading in the right direction.

Now, there are a set of complicated factors to explain why that is happening, but it is not coincidental to the passage in 2022 of the most significant piece of anti-gun violence legislation in 30 years. And that is why I am on the floor today, because tomorrow will mark 4 years since this Senate passed and got signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that strengthened the gun laws of this country while respecting the constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to be able to purchase and own weapons.

Let me just remind you of what that bill did, because it is important to remember that we can come together.

There were, I think, 15 Republican Senators that supported this legislation. It received Republican votes in the House of Representatives as well.

This legislation said: Listen, we have got to be a little bit more careful before we sell an assault weapon to a 19-year-old or a 20-year- old--because we had seen, over and over again, that it tended to be, unfortunately, young men under the age of 21 who were carrying out these mass murders.

And so while legislation didn't take away the ability of someone under 21 to buy a weapon--because this is what we needed in order to get bipartisan consensus--we did put enhanced background checks for those individuals--just an extra check, most significantly, with the local police department to see if this was somebody that the police knew as being troubled. Well, since passage of the bill, 800 firearms purchases have been prevented solely because of these enhanced checks.

These were mainly purchasers that were prohibited from buying a weapon, but until you called the local police department, you didn't find out that they were actually prohibited. But sometimes it was that this was an individual that was in crisis. The local police department knew it, and the enhanced check caught them.

The second thing the bill did was just make firearms trafficking a Federal crime. It was crazy that it hadn't been. It made trafficking and straw purchasing a Federal crime. And since that bill went into effect, there have been 280 cases with 525 defendants who have been brought under Federal charges for gun trafficking. That is a big part of why there is so much urban gun homicide--because there is a pipeline of illegal guns that goes into places like Hartford, CT; New Haven, CT; or Chicago, IL. Now we have interrupted that pipeline of illegal guns.

What is something else that that bill did? It said that if you have a history of domestic violence, you can't buy a weapon, regardless of whether that violence is against your wife or your girlfriend. There used to be something called the boyfriend loophole. If you had committed domestic violence against your girlfriend, you could still purchase and have weapons. Well, we closed that loophole on a bipartisan basis. And since that law passed, there have been 10,000 firearms purchases that have been denied because the individual had a history of domestic violence.

Now, the way that we got that bill passed, with Republican votes, was to give the ability of that individual to reapply for the ability to buy firearms. We didn't take that right away permanently. Some of us might have wanted that prohibition to be permanent after you have a domestic violence conviction on your record, but that is how we got the bill passed--an example of how we can find common ground.

And then the last thing I want to mention is that the bill put about $1.4 billion into funding existing and new community anti-gun violence measures--and this is maybe the secret sauce. This is maybe the biggest explanation as to why numbers are going down.

What we find in community after community that is plagued with high rates of gun violence is that it is normally a very small group of people--again, largely young men--that are committing these acts of violence and that if you engage in targeted interventions aimed at these small groups of young men, you can very quickly get gun violence rates down, and it doesn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars, especially in a small community like Hartford.

Hartford has a number of really impactful but small organizations that do this community anti-gun violence work. We gave them a small amount of money from this legislation, and they have made a big, big difference in Hartford. These are groups like Hartford Communities That Care, Compass.

Hartford had 37 murders in 2022, the year that we passed this bill. In 2025, Hartford had 10 murders. That is an extraordinary decline, 37 to 10.

In 2020, there were 223 shootings, a reminder most people don't die in shootings. They get badly wounded. Their lives are altered by the shooting even though they don't die.

Mr. President, 223 shootings in Hartford in 2020--89 last year. That is a 25-year low. And all the laws we passed made a difference in Connecticut, but Connecticut already had pretty strict gun laws so a lot of the stuff we passed didn't have a big impact on Connecticut, but the community anti-gun violence money did because those groups are now well-funded.

Again, these aren't groups with $10 million-a-year budgets. These are often very small organizations that have four or five people on staff. For instance, one of the things that these groups often do is when there is a shooting, they rush to the emergency room because there are often cycles of retributive violence that play out: Somebody gets shot. Their group of friends congregate at the emergency room. They make a plan to engage in retributive violence. Well, these community workers can often get to the emergency room and interrupt that cycle of violence, and they have been enormously successful.

Now, there are threats to the progress we have made. I don't want to make this a speech about President Trump, but it is just true that he has stopped funding the programs that support community anti-gun violence initiatives.

There are also billions of dollars in that bill that we passed for school-based mental health, and he has also suspended many of those accounts. That is bad news.

He has also issued new regulations that undermine other parts of the bill,

but there is nothing President Trump can do to stop the enhanced background checks or the ability of prosecutors to go after gun traffickers or the denial of weapons purchases to individuals convicted of domestic violence.

And so I don't want you to hear me say that the President is unwinding all of our progress. He is unwinding some of our progress-- our bipartisan progress--but much of the statute can't be unwound.

And so I just want to give us a little pat on the back because 4 years ago, after the awful shooting in Uvalde, four Senators got together--supported by another bigger ring of bipartisan Senators--and we were able to come up with a bill that was not perfect, was not everything that I wanted or that many other Democratic Senators wanted, but it was progress.

And we have seen the impact of that bill: literally extraordinary declines in mass shootings and homicides, all happening, not coincidentally, as soon as we passed that bill.

The gun lobby has a habit of arguing that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. The gun lobby says the answer to gun violence is more guns. Well, we proved that if you pass legislation that just makes it a little bit harder for the wrong people to get their hands on weapons--people who have serious criminal convictions, people who are mentally ill--you make it a little bit easier for prosecutors to go after the gun traffickers, you give a little bit more resources to the people who do anti-gun violence work in our communities, that you can make a big difference.

I live in one of these traditionally high-gun-violence-rate neighborhoods. I live just south of downtown in Hartford, and my home is on the route to the primary critical care hospital in the south end of Hartford--Hartford Hospital. And I will just say: There are far fewer ambulances passing my house with victims of gunshot wounds. In fact, it is an extraordinary reduction.

In 2020, I think the year that I bought that house, there were 223 shootings--223 gun violence victims being rushed to Hartford Hospital or Saint Francis Hospital. In 2025, there were 89. So I know we are often consumed with the bad news here, but that is really good news. That is really good news. And it is evidence of the fact that this place is not fundamentally broken. There are these moments when Republicans and Democrats can come together and pass laws that save lives--4 years since the passage and signature of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, something that this Senate should be proud of.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I believe there is an order that we recess at 12:30, and I ask I be allowed to finish my remarks before we recess.

Mr. President, colleagues, over the last year and a half, our President Donald Trump has turned the White House into a 24-7 corruption operation. This is a national crisis, and we should start acting like it.

The President's goal is to engage in so much corruption, so much self-enrichment--to hand out so many favors to his friends, his family, and his political allies--that it just becomes the pitter-patter of rain. It is normal. It is constant. It is never-ending.

Trump's bet is that if there is a new story of corruption, of self- dealing every few days, that the press will stop covering it or the public will just stop paying attention. To an extent he is, tragically, succeeding.

But he is also betting that the public will just come to the conclusion that this is normal because all of our politics are this corrupt, that every Senator, that every previous President is this corrupt. That is not true.

While I disagree with my Senate Republican colleagues' decision to largely remain silent in the face of this misconduct, it is true that not a single Senator on either side of the aisle engages in the behavior that our President does.

Senators--Republicans and Democrats--do not trade our votes for cash or for political contributions. We don't run side hustles like crypto companies. Senators don't give contracts to their kids just because we can.

And no President in the history of this country has done what Donald Trump has done. No President has done 5 percent of the self-dealing that Donald Trump has done in the last year and a half.

This moment is exceptional. It is a one-of-one moment. And if it becomes normal--if people stop being outraged at what he is doing to enrich himself--then I fear there is no going back. The White House will just become a place to get rich.

So I think it is time to pull back and see the full picture, to not view this as just one isolated scandal after another--every single one popping up each week or every few days--but to understand the full scope of this illegality.

Last year, I came to the floor to document the first 100 days of Donald Trump's mind-blowing corruption. Since then, especially in 2026, the pace of his misconduct has quickened dramatically.

And so I am here on the floor today--and I am going to spend more than a few minutes doing this--laying out what has happened since I gave that last speech. This is the story of 500 days of corruption.

And I am going to start on April 7, 2025. This is when the current Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issues a memo ordering the termination of several Biden-era DOJ investigations into crypto companies.

Now, here is the problem. The then-Deputy Attorney General is a major investor in crypto companies, and he works for a President who is a major player in the crypto industry. But the DOJ just drops these investigations, signals that the Department of Justice is no longer going to hold crypto companies accountable. But Blanche owns major investments in crypto stocks. The President is one of the biggest players in the industry.

Blanche doesn't actually stop there. He eliminates the entire enforcement team at DOJ dedicated to rooting out crypto-related fraud and money laundering schemes. This is a crypto investor, who works for a President who owns crypto companies, shutting down the unit at DOJ that holds this industry accountable.

Let's move to 3 weeks later on April 30. Later in the month, a curious announcement from the Department of Agriculture: They are reversing a rule that would require poultry companies to limit salmonella bacteria levels in their product. This is essentially a rule to make it less likely that people will get salmonella poisoning. It sounds like a strange rule to eliminate.

We come to find out that one of the biggest donors to Donald Trump's inauguration was a poultry company called Pilgrim's Pride. They made a donation to Trump's inauguration that was bigger than practically any other company--bigger than Amazon, Meta, or Exxon--$5 million. And after they made the donation, they asked for one thing: the reversal of the salmonella rule. And they got it.

This is pay-for-play. You make a donation to the President or the President's political operation, you ask for a favor, and you get it. And we will see, as we wind through these 500 days, this happens over and over again.

In May 2025, the pardon racket starts. Every member of the Senate should be outraged at this. You all know what is happening. The President is pardoning people based on their ability to pay either him and his political operation or pay people who are close to the President.

On May 27, Donald Trump pardons a man called Paul Walczak. This is a really bad guy. He stole millions of dollars from the nurses and healthcare aides at the nursing home he owned, and he used the cash that he stole from his employees to buy a $2 million yacht.

He got convicted. He went to jail for fraud. But his mother paid $1 million to buy a face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump. And 3 weeks after that paid audience, her son was given a full and unconditional pardon that went so far as to relieve him of any duty to pay back the $4.4 million that he stole from his employees. This is a new pay-for- pardons scheme that begins in May.

In June of 2025, it is revealed that top administration officials are cashing in on government contracts that benefit their own investment portfolio. Stephen Miller is more than just the architect of the administration's hard-line immigration policies. He has a personal financial stake in them.

For instance, Miller owns up to $250,000 in Palantir stock. And just a month before Miller's holdings became public, ICE announced that it was awarding a $30 million contract to--you guessed it--Palantir to provide real-time surveillance information to ICE officers.

And you will be shocked to hear this: There was no competitive bidding process for that contract. And you will hear this over and over again. Competitive bidding basically doesn't exist.

If the President or somebody close to the President wants a contract directed to a friend or to a company in which they invest, Miller-- overseeing ICE--ICE gives a no-bid contract to Palantir. The investors in Palantir, which include Stephen Miller, get rich.

Let's move to September of 2025. In September, we start to learn the danger of Donald Trump's crypto corruption. I covered this in the first 100 days of corruption. This is maybe the most corrupt thing that Trump is doing.

He and his family own a crypto company that issues several cryptocoins. There is no disclosure on who is buying those coins. The President promotes them. He invites people to official events, who purchase the coins.

On September 18, though, we come to find out that Trump made $57 million selling crypto tokens to entities associated with the regimes in North Korea, Iran, and Russia: extraordinary investments being made by entities that are tied in with North Korea, Iran, and Russia into Trump's crypto companies.

It begs the question: As we are currently debating an Iran deal that basically exists on Iran's terms, why was there a flood of money from Iranian regime-backed entities into the Trump crypto companies? Why were they putting that investment in? What did they expect to get from the President?

We have never, ever before had this exist. We have never had a backdoor mechanism by which foreign governments could just shovel money into the pocket of the President. It exists because of Trump's meme coin and his stablecoin.

On September 23--this is a week later--it is now pretty obvious that it is--there is a pay-to-play regime in charge of the White House. A week later, on September 23, Donald Trump closes the books on a criminal investigation into one of his key advisors, Tom Homan. This is his border czar.

The FBI had caught Tom Homan redhanded, engaging in naked corruption. Undercover agents had handed him $50,000 in cash in a bag, and he agreed to give them government contracts. This was on video. This is the border czar getting a bag of cash in exchange for contracts on video, but the administration on September 20 just makes the investigation go away because that kind of bribery--that kind of naked graft--is okay in this White House.

We are moving on to October 2025 right now. Two weeks after Homan is left off--maybe the most nakedly corrupt partner--there is not a single Senator that could defend this. Changpeng Zhao built an entire business based on allowing terrorists, drug traffickers, and sex predators to use his cryptocurrency to evade the law. He went to jail for this, but he also helped Trump launch his crypto business.

So who cares about financing terrorists and sex criminals? Trump gives this guy a full pardon on October 7. It is as naked--this is a guy who built a company that allowed terrorists and sex predators to engage in private financing. He went to jail. He got out of jail because he agreed to help get Trump rich.

We are still in October. Later that month, the bulldozers arrive to destroy the East Wing of the White House--it is still amazing to think that actually happened--and the ballroom corruption racket begins. The word goes out: If you want something from Donald Trump, donate to his ballroom. It is all he cares about. We know that. Donald Trump talks about his ballroom all the time. As of this month, more than half of the publicly identified donors to the ballroom project have, since they made their donations, won new or expanded Federal contracts totaling more than $50 billion. More than half of the people who donated to the ballroom have, since they donated--and this just all kicked off on October 15. It has only been like 8 months. Half of the people who donated to the ballroom have gotten new or expanded contracts worth $50 billion.

Moving into November of 2025, it is not just Trump's corporate donors who are getting rich now. Part of the White House's daily operation is to find creative ways to funnel taxpayer money to Trump's kids. This one is wild. The Trump administration in early November announces a really unusual deal: The government--the Pentagon--is taking a $50 million stake in a single rare earth minerals company called Vulcan Elements and giving them a $620 million taxpayer-funded loan. That is big money. The Pentagon doesn't really do deals like this, but they do when Donald Trump, Jr., is one of the company's key investors.

We come to find out that civil servants in the Pentagon did not want to do this deal. They only did it because the White House told them to do the deal.

One official said:

The call came from the White House. We have to get this

done.

Before the deal, Vulcan was worth $200 million. Donald Trump, Jr., made an investment. His father got the Pentagon to give them the contract and buy the stake in the company, and the valuation jumped overnight from $200 million to $2 billion. Donald Trump, Jr., 10x'd his profits. I mean, how does anybody in this body justify that?

You have probably not even heard that story. It barely cracked the news. In normal times, that scandal alone of the President's son making an investment in a company and the Federal Government then making a massive investment subsequently--the Pentagon didn't want to do it and only did it because the President told them to do it after his son made the investment, and the value of the President's son's investment went up by 10 times. That scandal alone would take down a Presidency. This one barely gets noticed.

Three days later, news breaks that Trump has ordered all the markets in U.S. Coast Guard bases and facilities to stock his personally branded wine and cider--directly profiting from his control over the military. He tells the Coast Guard: Sell my products.

That is it. That is not a complicated one. That is just like ordinary, ho-hum corruption. Nobody even knows that happened or that it exists because this all feels normal now.

We are not out of November yet, fellas. Two weeks later--you feel this, right? The pace now has quickened--Trump releases the head of a nursing home empire, Joseph Schwartz, from prison. This guy, who is similar to the other guy, scammed his patients, his employees, and the IRS out of tens of millions of dollars. He was a tax cheat. People died in his facilities due to his negligence. He was stealing money from his nursing homes. But he paid $1 million to Trump-connected lobbyists, and Trump pardoned this fraudster after serving 3 months. There was no claim that he was innocent. There was no claim that the trial was rigged. No. This guy was convicted of massive fraud--he hurt people-- and he got out of jail because he paid the right lobbyists who were connected to Trump.

This is how it all works. It is not just Trump getting rich. It is not just Trump's sons getting rich. It is about everybody connected to the President getting rich--this pardon-for-cash scheme.

All right. We are into December now. Two weeks later, out of the blue, the Trump administration revokes a Biden-era rule--this is back to nursing homes--to ensure that nursing homes have sufficient staffing to meet the basic standards of care. We have a lot of evidence that understaffed nursing homes have higher mortality rates. But this rule is now rescinded, and guess what we find out. We find out that nursing home executives got together and paid to have a private lunch with Donald Trump--because, remember, you can pay millions of dollars to Trump-affiliated political entities, and you will get a private audience with him. At lunch, they asked him to revoke this rule, and he immediately ordered it done--no public discussion, no consideration of the merits. The nursing home executives paid the price to get a lunch, they asked for the rule to be rescinded, and the rule got rescinded--no process. They had the lunch. They paid the money. They asked for the rule to be rescinded. Trump called up, and the rule was rescinded.

We are now in 2026. On February 10, Trump announces--this one is wild--that he is blocking the opening of a bridge that is ready to open connecting Detroit to Canada. It is ready to open. This is a bridge that is going to help people on both sides of the border. Guess what we find out. The owner of an existing bridge, whose profits would be harmed by the competitor bridge, donated $1 million to get a meeting, this time with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. Within days this time--within hours--of the meeting with the Commerce Secretary--hours-- the owners of the existing bridge get what they wanted. Trump announced that he would block the opening of the bridge. One million dollars, a meeting, and donors get what they want within hours.

The next month, we start to see that Trump's inner circle knows that they can get in on the action. Very few people are closer to President Trump than Corey Lewandowski. He was at the time the special adviser to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Lewandowski was basically like: There are no rules anymore. I can do whatever I want.

So he literally starts to engage in mob-style extortion threats to contractors. He demands direct payments from companies that want DHS contracts for his protection.

If you pay me money, I will protect your contracts.

There is plenty of evidence here from the companies themselves that tell the

story of, when they refused to pay Lewandowski for protection--mob- style protection--suddenly, their contracts from DHS dried up. A DHS employee confirmed that he received direct instructions to not give a company that didn't pay Lewandowski any more contracts.

In April, there was another scheme to help Donald Trump's kids. For almost 100 years, it has been illegal to ship handguns through the mail because it is a lot easier for violent criminals to illegally access guns if they can just get those weapons shipped to their front doors. But Donald Trump, Jr., bought a huge stake in a company that was going to corner the market on the mail order sale of guns, so Trump's DOJ got to work and declared that this 100-year-old law is magically, all of a sudden unconstitutional, clearing the way for another company owned by or invested in by Donald Trump, Jr., to make big bucks by mailing guns.

We are still in April. As the war begins in Iran, Trump's inner circle finds a new way to cash in. They can place bets on prediction markets or on futures markets based on the inside information they have about the war. This is illegal war profiteering.

Hours before Trump announces the first Iran cease-fire, a bunch of investors--likely inside the White House--placed approximately $950 million on bets that oil prices would fall. When later that day Trump announced a cease-fire that sent oil prices tumbling by 15 percent, those investors got filthy rich. You can literally look at the pace of trades that day. There is this avalanche of trades that happens hours before Trump announces the cease-fire. That can only be because people had inside information. This practice would continue to happen over and over and over.

But why do they think they can get away with this? Why does anybody think they can get away with this? So much of this is illegal, right? You would say to yourself: Nobody would engage in that kind of naked illegal practice. Nobody would award contracts to the kids knowing that that doesn't pass legal muster.

On April 10, you figure out why they think they are going to get away with it. On April 10, Donald Trump makes an explicit promise that everybody engaged in this corruption will get away with it. Here is his quote on April 10 as the pace of this corruption increases:

I will pardon everyone within 200 feet of the White House.

So now you understand why people understand they can get away with it.

This is reported on April 27, so we are still in April: Trump wants to get all his friends involved in the grift now, so Trump gives a no- bid, $17 million contract to refurbish two fountains near the White House, including the Reflecting Pool. We are living with the consequences of this corruption right now as we have a green Reflecting Pool. This is a completely unqualified contractor who is already in over his head because he is involved in the ballroom, and he gets a new $17 million contract.

Does it really cost $17 million to clean up fountains? The answer from the National Park Service itself is no. In fact, the National Park Service was planning to bid that contract out for one-fifth of what Trump gave it to his friend for, but it was a no-bid contract. It just went to Donald Trump's friend. The value was wildly inflated.

So now Trump's buddy has an extra $14 million--more than the actual cost of the project. It is your money. This money doesn't grow on trees; this is taxpayer money. It is supposed to cost $3 million; he gave the contract for $17 million.

We are still in April. Big Tobacco has wanted for years to break into the $6 billion flavored vape and e-cigarette market, but the FDA, of course, has had regulations to say that you can't sort of run back this old playbook of the tobacco companies' marketing to kids, so we haven't allowed them to market these flavored vape products, these bubble gum- flavored vape products. I have two teenagers. I know exactly what is going on. They were marketing these products to kids, and they weren't allowed to do it.

But the tobacco lobbyists did the thing that we have talked about over and over again: They made a $5 million donation, and if you make a $5 million donation, you get a lunch with the President or a dinner with the President. So they get this lunch with the President, and they say to the President, just like the nursing homes executives said: I want the vape rule to be rescinded.

Surrounded by these Big Tobacco representatives, President Trump at the moment calls the FDA Commissioner and tells him to rescind the regulations.

He calls up Dr. Oz. Look, all this is happening immediately. He tells him to rescind the regulations. The FDA Commissioner resigns in protest. He said that, in good conscience, he couldn't do this; he couldn't be part of this kind of corruption.

But on Friday, the FDA announced that it was bypassing all traditional rulemaking to adopt the exact policy that the tobacco executives asked for the weekend before. Less than a week--less than a week--no rulemaking, the FDA Commissioner resigns.

We are now on to May. Not all of the stories of the corruption in this White House require deep journalistic dives into obscure public records. Sometimes, you can just log onto YouTube, where you can find Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy's family road-trip reality show.

Who is bankrolling this stunt? Who is paying for the gas, the hotels, the cameras; filming his vacation? Not Duffy. It is Toyota. It is Boeing. It is United Airlines. It is all the companies that Secretary Duffy is responsible for regulating.

Gas prices are going up, transportation costs are going up, and the Secretary of Transportation is riding in snowmobiles in Montana, paid for by the companies he regulates.

Decades ago, that scandal alone--companies you regulate paying for your vacations--would have resulted in a Cabinet member resigning in disgrace. My Republican colleagues know this. This didn't used to be acceptable. But in Trump's White House, everyone has their hand out for a payday. It is encouraged.

And then, finally, in May, we discover another monster corruption scheme. The market bets based on inside information have not, in fact, been limited to Trump's staff and friends. The entire time that Trump has been in office, we discovered, he has not been putting his money into a blind trust. He has been personally signing off on thousands and thousands of individual trades. No previous President has done this.

Here is an example of how it works. Early in the year, Trump buys a million dollars of Dell stock. A couple days later, from the White House podium, he boosts the company--Dell--that he just bought stock in. A couple months later, he gives Dell a $10 billion defense contract with the Pentagon.

That happens over and over again. The President buys stock. He publicly boosts the company. He gives government work.

I know all of this feels exhausting--500 days of corruption--but we have never ever seen this before. I only listed, like, half of the publicly disclosed incidents of corruption, and we just can't pretend that this is normal.

I am giving a half an hour to this because this is a serious, serious crisis--the pay-to-play schemes, the pardons for donors, the contracts for friends, the favors for Trump's children, the use of inside information to make money. This is not a disconnected series of scandals. This is a system.

The government is supposed to serve us. It is supposed to lower costs. It is supposed to protect our families, strengthen our schools, make life better. But Donald Trump believes that government exists to serve him, to make him richer, to protect his friends, to reward his donors.

This is why he doesn't have time for you. He doesn't have time to solve real problems because he is making money for himself and his friends.

And he is betting that the corruption will be so constant that we stop hearing it; that the outrage will just turn into exhaustion, and the exhaustion will just turn into acceptance. We can't let that happen because once corruption becomes normal, it becomes permanent.

The White House is not a business opportunity. The Presidency is not a license to steal from the American people. The Government of the United States doesn't exist to make Donald Trump rich. It belongs to the American

people. And after 500 days of corruption, Democrats and Republicans in this body, along with the American people, should start acting like it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have long wanted this war with Iran to end. Every single day, this war has become a deepening, cascading disaster for the American people as gas prices eclipse $6 a gallon in many places, as Americans are killed, as new wars break out in the region, as farms go bankrupt with the ballooning diesel prices. Every single day this war has gone on, it has become a worse debacle for the United States and the American people.

And so I have been prepared to swallow, basically, any deal to end the war, and my desire is still to stop this war. I knew the deal was likely going to be bad. I knew the deal was likely going to be humiliating for the United States of America. But I didn't know it was going to be this humiliating. I didn't know the deal was going to be this bad.

The war needs to end, basically, upon any terms, but it is important for us tonight, as we are reading the details of this agreement, to understand how the terms of this agreement are final, clear, and total proof of how calamitous this war was and how it should be a lesson for both Republicans and Democrats, for this administration and every future administration, to never make this mistake again.

So let's go through the terms of this agreement, which is all of two pages, negotiated by real estate developers cosplaying as diplomats. Let's start with the immediate commitments. What are the immediate commitments that Iran is making and the United States is making?

Iran is making no new commitments. They are agreeing to open the strait. The strait was open before the war began.

They are promising that they will not develop or obtain a nuclear weapon. They had already promised that before the war began.

And they are agreeing to talk about restraining their nuclear research program. They were willing to talk about that prior to the war beginning.

So Iran is making no new commitments that did not exist before the war. Before the war, they committed to keep the strait open. Before the war, they committed to develop no nuclear weapons. Before the war, they were willing to talk about the rest of their nuclear research program.

What is the United States committing to in this agreement? Well, it is a little hard to decipher because of the terms, which are either mistakenly or deliberately fuzzy, but we at least know that the United States is committing immediately to release all oil

sanctions and to let Iran trade oil for free all around the world. That is billions--billions--of windfall dollars to the Iranian Treasury.

The United States is agreeing to free up frozen Iranian money. It could be around $24 billion that will be going immediately to the U.S. Treasury.

Those are the immediate commitments that the United States is making. OK. Let's talk about what is not in this agreement--what is not included in the commitments that are being made in the short term.

Iran is making no commitments on reductions or controls on their missile program or their drone program or their support for terrorism.

In fact, you can see a video today of Donald Trump, saying: I think it is cool for Iran to have missiles. I think it is kind of unfair to say that Iran shouldn't have missiles if everybody else has them.

He literally said this on TV today.

For the last 100 days, Donald Trump and the administration have been telling us that the American people have to sacrifice and go to war and spend billions of dollars and have 13 Americans killed and suffer through $6-a-gallon gas prices because we have to stop Iran from having missiles. The Presiding Officer and I have sat in briefings in which we have been told that the point of this war is to destroy Iran's missile capacity, and now the President is saying: Eh, it just doesn't matter.

President Trump's goals shifted, but they seemed to be to get a regime that was more friendly to the United States and to Israel. We have a harder-line regime now in charge of the country than we did before. We had a doddering, 80-year-old Ayatollah. We now have a, frankly, much more capable and much more provocative hard-line regime.

He said he wanted to get rid of the drone program. The drone program is still there. There is nothing in this agreement about their drone program. He wanted to get rid of their missile program. There is nothing in this agreement about their missile program.

He wanted to get rid of their nuclear program, and he pledged that he would carry out this war in a way that got a better deal than President Obama did. Of course, he had to promise that because he pulled out of the JCPOA. He got none of it in this agreement. He got none of it in this agreement. Yes, in this agreement, there is a suggestion that there is now going to be a negotiation between the United States and Iran over their nuclear program, but that negotiation was available before this war began.

The President may argue that this war has given him additional leverage. That is nonsensical. There is fundamentally less leverage today than there was before the war began. Let's just go through it for a second.

When Obama was negotiating the nuclear deal, he had the oil sanctions in place. Those are the most serious sanctions, right? Iran runs on oil revenue, so the primary leverage Obama had during those negotiations was the oil sanctions. We are releasing all of the oil sanctions before the nuclear negotiations happen. That is malpractice. Overnight, immediately, the leverage available for nuclear negotiations essentially goes up in smoke.

We are also giving them billions of dollars in frozen funds.

In the earlier negotiations, President Obama had Russia and China on our side. Donald Trump has mishandled foreign relations such that now China and Russia are on the Iranians' side. It is fundamentally different leverage.

Maybe most importantly, President Obama had the threat of military action. If you don't get a deal, we can always take military action. Well, that leverage is gone as well because Iran took our best shot and not only survived but got the United States to sign an agreement where we are paying them billions of dollars in order to end the war, including a suggestion that we are going to create a $300 billion reparations fund. Guess what. If you have studied history, you know that the winning side doesn't pay reparations. The losers pay reparations.

So the Iranians don't have to worry about oil sanctions. They are gone. The Iranians don't have to worry about getting back their frozen funds. We are transferring them. They don't have to worry about an American military response because they have already seen it, and they have survived. And they don't need to worry about going up against the United States, China, and Russia because China and Russia are now on their side.

These nuclear negotiations are just destined to fail. I hope I am wrong, but on the backside of this war, the President has almost no leverage. What is left? This agreement drops the oil sanctions. It frees up the frozen funds. He has already played the military card.

There is a suggestion in this document that there is going to be a specific negotiation about the enriched uranium that Iran holds. Now, remember when Obama was negotiating with Iran, they had 15-percent enriched uranium. They weren't close to the enrichment capacity to make a bomb. Today, they have a 60-percent enrichment capacity. Because Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement, Iran now has 60 percent. Everybody knows that, to get from 60 to the quality you need to produce a bomb, it takes a matter of days.

Iran says in this agreement that they will talk about the enriched uranium, but they are willing to talk about the enriched uranium being degraded to 3 percent, which is the number in the JCPOA. So they basically signal in this agreement that, yeah, we will talk about getting rid of our enriched uranium or diluting it, but we are just going to talk about the same thing that we were talking to the Obama administration about.

All of this was predictable. All of this was predictable. I have listened to my hard-line colleagues argue that the only way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon or to destroy their missiles or to stop their support for terrorism is to go to war with Iran. Well, we went to war with Iran for 100 days, and on the backside of it, they still have their nuclear program, they still have their missiles, they still have their drones, they are still supporting terrorism. It didn't work, and most of us knew it wasn't going to work. Most of us said that, if you go to war with Iran, we will end up in a worse position, and here we are in a fundamentally worse position.

The entire scope of this agreement basically boils down to a multibillion-dollar payment to Iran so that Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz. What a disaster that is. To add insult to injury, the text says that Iran promises to open the strait--for 10 years? No. For 5 years? For a year? No.

Iran says: We will open the Strait of Hormuz for 2 months toll free. Then, after that period of time, we will consult with the Government of Oman on the tolling structure.

So open for 60 days and then Oman and Iran will talk about the new structure.

I knew it was going to be a humiliating agreement. I didn't know it was going to be this humiliating. I want the war to end, and I am willing to stomach a bad deal, but this agreement exposes what a colossal mistake it was--the biggest foreign policy blunder of 20 years--to start this war and why every hawk who cheerled us into war with Iran was wrong. We didn't get anything that you thought we were going to get out of this.

I am hopeful that I am wrong about these negotiations. I am hopeful that new leverage will materialize, but I don't see any leverage at all. It is given up in this agreement. It is given up in the way that this war has been perpetuated. I am glad the war is over, but I am furious that it has resulted in our Nation's humiliation and in Iran's becoming stronger and in America's becoming weaker, and everybody-- Republicans and Democrats--should be furious about that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am glad to join Senator Kaine on the floor today in support of his resolution. I have admittedly lost count on how many of these resolutions we have brought before the body. This must be our seventh, eighth, or ninth. That is extraordinary, duplicative, redundant, but necessary because, at least in my time in the Senate, never before has this country engaged in such a significant, consequential, deadly, and costly military operation overseas without the consent of the people and without the consent of Congress.

The Founding Fathers were really intentional in lodging the warmaking power not in the executive branch but in the legislative branch. There are few questions we confront that are more serious than about when we send our men and women to die overseas, when we decide to expend such a sizable amount of our hard-earned taxpayers' money on military operations. And it should not--it cannot--be simply one individual who makes those decisions. It has to be all of us.

So these are increasingly heartbreaking motions to make because it shouldn't be up to the minority party. The majority, who asked for the consent of the governed to lead this Senate, should do their responsibility under the Constitution and have a full debate on an authorization for military force.

Here is my guess: It would not pass. If Leader Thune brought an authorization for military force against Iran here in the Senate, it would not pass. I don't think it would even get 50 votes. It might not get 40 votes. It would fail, and the President would not have the authorization to continue these operations.

I am going to just talk about two, I think, important topics that I have yet to address on the floor. The first is the consequences of spending this much money on a war that is making us less safe. I have made this case before on the floor, and I won't go into it again, but this war is not making us any safer. This war is jeopardizing our security around the world. But at what cost?

In hearings last week, the administration suggested that the cost of the war is about $29 billion. To most military experts, that just didn't pass the straight-face test, the smell test. In fact, one group of experts actually did an accounting based upon what they know of the costs of an engagement like this, which has largely been an air campaign but has required a massive deployment of forces into the region. They said it looks to be about $15 billion in mobilization, administration, and combat cost, general operations costs; $41 billion when you look at all of the weapons that have been expended; about $12 billion in losses, damages, destroyed assets. And we are learning that there is a really extensive amount of damage that has been done to our fixed resources in the region. Then we probably spent another $3 billion or so supporting our partners in the region. That is about $72 billion that has been spent just in the first 70, 80 days of war.

And I get it. Even, I think, for my colleagues, you kind of lose the value of money when you are in this place and allocating tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on a regular basis for the operations of the Federal Government. And for my constituents, they even lose track of what is a big number anymore at the Federal Government.

What does $72 billion mean? Well, let me give you a little bit of context. What is the entire operations budget for the National Park System on an annual basis? Is it $71 billion? No. Is it

half that? No. Is it 10? No. The entire operations budget for the National Park System is $2 billion, just to give you kind of a sense of what we are talking about here. In 2\1/2\ months of war, we have spent $70 billion. The National Park System needs about $2 billion to operate. Their entire budget of deferred maintenance--if you wanted to fix everything that is broken in the National Park Service, how much would it cost? It would cost $33 billion. So half of what we have spent on the Iran war could fix up every national park in the country to tip- top shape.

How much do we spend on elementary education--elementary, middle, and secondary education? Every year, about $33 billion. So if you took the amount of money we spent on the Iran war and dedicated it all to K- through-12 education, we would triple the amount of money that our elementary, middle, and high schools get in this country. What an important investment that would be. What would it mean to your child's elementary school to have triple the amount of Federal funding? That would mean that you could reduce class sizes, you could hire more paraprofessionals. Urban school districts could hire guidance counselors and social workers for the first time. New school buildings would go up. Leaks would be fixed.

How about medical research? The total budget of NIH and CDC? About $60 billion. So if we had taken this money that we have spent in just 2\1/2\ months of war and applied it to medical research, we would double--double--this year's budget for medical research. If you doubled the NIH and CDC budget this year, I guarantee you we would cure at least one disease; we would find a treatment years ahead of schedule; we would save lives, thousands of lives. But, instead, we are spending this money on a war that is making us less safe and driving up costs for millions of Americans.

Again, I am just telling you the cost to the government of this war. Of course, we are seeing billions of dollars being spent by businesses, by farms, by consumers because gas prices are out of control. This week, they will probably hit $5 a gallon in Connecticut. That will put a lot of my small businesses out of business if gas prices remain at $5 through this summer. There will be lots of families in my State--who for the first 60 days were probably able to manage that extra cost--who are going to have to cancel a week or two or three of summer camp for their kids this summer because they are going to have to make a choice as to whether I fill up my tank to get to work or whether my kids get to go to basketball camp. Those are the decisions that families are going to make.

The second thing, very briefly, I want to talk about is another cost. The President is not spending his time right now trying to end this war. Reports are that the President has become bored of the Iran war, and that is why we are in a stalemate. Nothing is changing. Nothing is happening. We are blockading the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians are blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Peace negotiations are stuck. And so day, after day, after day, grocery prices climb, gas prices climb, and the reports suggest it is because President Trump has lost interest in the war.

What is he interested in? Well, we found out this week. Instead of spending his last several weeks trying to end the war and bring down costs, the President has been engineering a novel, new corruption scheme to pad his pockets and his supporters' pockets. We learned this week that the President is settling a lawsuit that he lodged against himself for $1.7 billion. The President sued himself. He sued the IRS-- but essentially he was suing himself--and then he settled with himself for $1.7 billion to be deposited into a slush fund that the President can use at his discretion to reward his political supporters.

We found out just hours ago that in that settlement is included a provision that stops the IRS from auditing the President or his family. So instead of ending the Iran war, instead of trying to do something about these spiraling prices and costs that are being borne by families and the Federal Government, the President has spent the last few weeks reaching his hand into the Treasury, stealing from the American people $1.7 billion to be put into a slush fund that he controls, to reward his political supporters, and securing an agreement with the IRS that no matter how much fraud or illegality he and his family and his business entities engaged in, they are getting off scot-free. Everybody else in this country plays by the rules, can be audited by the IRS, and is subject to the Tax Code. The President, as of today, is no longer subject to the Tax Code. His past fraud, his past illegality has been immunized, and he is getting $1.7 billion of your money to give away to his political supporters.

That is why the war is still happening. That is why these costs-- right now, likely $70 billion to the taxpayer, billions more in increased costs--that is why they continue to go up and up and up-- because the President has become bored by the war. He doesn't pay the cost of the war. In fact, every day, he gets richer because, instead of ending the war, he is spending his time finding new, novel, and corrupt ways to reach his hand into the Federal Treasury and get paid by the taxpayers of this country.

I am glad that we are getting closer to 50 votes. I imagine that when we come back from recess, after many of my Republican colleagues have heard about the misery that is being visited on this economy because of these high prices, we will reach enough votes to pass this resolution. But we will not stop bringing these measures before the Senate until that day comes.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am glad to be on the floor--sixth, seventh, eighth week in a row; I have lost count--this week to support Senator Merkley's resolution to end the war in Iran.

It is simple: This is a war that is making America less safe. It is a war that is costing the people of this country billions of dollars. It has resulted in untold numbers of civilian deaths in the region. The entire world economy is spiraling out of control. Prices for gas are through the roof--$6 a gallon in many parts of the country--and the cost of everything is going to go up very quickly.

But in my short remarks today, I really want to take the administration's war goals at face value and, 74 days into this conflict, assess whether we are closer to meeting those goals or further away.

Secretary Hegseth was before the Appropriations Committee today, and we really got very little information from him as to whether this essential question--the meeting of war goals--is answerable. Let me try to answer it.

The first thing that the administration said they wanted to do was to annihilate Iran's navy. Well, they have essentially destroyed Iran's conventional navy, but they have not destroyed Iran's fleet of speedboats and so-called suicide skiffs that effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, and it goes without saying that that feat is impossible. The administration will never be able to eliminate all of Iran's small speedboats that drop mines in the strait or threaten to drop mines in the strait and these suicide skiffs, which run these suicide missions at tankers and boats in the strait. So as long as that fleet of small boats is able to harass traffic in the strait, effectively close down the strait, you have not annihilated Iran's navy, and you will never annihilate Iran's navy. So you can claim that you sunk some big boats, but it is the small boats that have closed the Strait of Hormuz and created a global catastrophe.

The second goal that the administration states is to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles. Now, Trump recently claimed that Iran only has 18 to 19 percent of their ballistic missiles left, but according to public reporting, a CIA assessment has found that Iran actually retains 70 percent of its missiles. So we

have expended tens of billions of dollars, we have dramatically depleted our munitions stores, and Iran still has 70 percent of its missiles. That same public reporting suggests that Iran is already starting to dig out from the damage we did and rebuild some of the launchers and the missiles that we damaged.

Similarly, another war aim was to destroy their drone fleet. The CIA assessment says Iran still has 70 percent of its drones. Realistically, drones are so easy to manufacture, there was never going to be a way through an air campaign alone for us to be able to eliminate their drone capacity. It is another reason the strait is closed.

There is no military mechanism available to the United States to open the strait because we cannot find all of their small speedboats, we cannot find all of their drones.

So 74 days of war and billions of dollars spent, over a dozen Americans killed, and Iran still has their drone fleet.

The last goal--and the President has doubled down on this goal--is to stop Iran from ever being able to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Now, we know for sure you can't actually achieve that goal through military action--not without regime change, not without U.S. boots on the ground. The administration has said we are not going for regime change. They seem very comfortable with the new regime, which is, by all accounts, more radical and more dangerous than the regime that they displaced. While Trump still keeps open the possibility of putting boots on the ground, as of today, it doesn't appear that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of American troops going into Iran to take their enriched uranium and their fissile material.

So the only way that you are going to effectuate this goal--stopping Iran from being able to acquire a nuclear weapon--is by taking the same path that we were pursuing under President Obama--a diplomatic path. So the question then is just: Are you going to get a better diplomatic deal today than you got when President Obama was in office? And all the evidence suggests that you are going to get a much worse deal today than you got when President Obama pursued this same path--for two reasons.

First, Iran has much more leverage today. I heard Secretary Hegseth say today in our hearing that America has all the leverage. That is just made up because the facts on the ground are pretty simple.

In 2013, when President Obama was negotiating this deal with Iran, their economy was crippled, but Iran didn't control the Strait of Hormuz. Today, Iran's economy is crippled, but they control the Strait of Hormuz. They have more leverage today than they had in 2013. In 2013, we certainly held open the specter of a military attack, but now Iran has the leverage of knowing that it can survive the best punch that America can throw. After 74 days into the war, the regime is still standing. Their missile program still exists. Their drone program still exists. Their nuclear program still exists. They control the Strait of Hormuz. They have more leverage today than they did in 2013.

The second reason you are going to get a worse diplomatic deal is that the stakes are lower for Iran because, once Trump pulled out of the Obama agreement, Iran pressed fast-forward on their nuclear research program.

Before the Obama nuclear agreement, Iran was enriching to 20 percent. The nuclear agreement brought them down to 3 percent. Since Trump pulled us out of that agreement, Iran has gone from enriching 3 percent all the way up to 60 percent. And we all know that, once you are at 60 percent, it is really just a political decision to get to 90 percent, which is what you need for a bomb.

So Iran now has the knowledge, in perpetuity, to be able to very quickly get to enough nuclear material--enriched at a high enough level--to be able to make a bomb.

Maybe, in this agreement, they agree to go back to 3 percent or maybe they even agree to pause, for a period of time, enrichment. That is a different calculation for Iran today than it was in 2013 because they can easily make that agreement knowing that the minute they decide to rush to a bomb, they can get there much faster now because of Trump's decision to pull out of the agreement.

You are going to get a worse diplomatic deal under these circumstances than you got in 2013.

So I just share that with all of you because, even if you take their warnings at face value--and they seem to be changing by the week--they haven't achieved a single one of them, and there is no hope of their achieving those objectives even if they were to restart the war.

So why are we doing this? Why are we doing this if we can't achieve any of our objectives and if the price of the war is being paid for by American citizens and by American farmers?

I understand that the President is full of hubris and pride. I understand my Republican colleagues, in having backed this war, are having a hard time squaring reality with their stated position of supporting the war.

But it is OK to change your mind. It is OK to look at the facts on the ground, come to the conclusion that the war didn't go the way that the President promised you it would go, and join us and vote to end this war. I know that is difficult for any political figure who has made it all the way to the U.S. Senate to admit that they were wrong.

But my Republican colleagues were wrong. Nobody can come to the floor and make an argument that there is a path through the continuation of this war to eliminate their ballistic missile program or their drone program. I think it would be hard for folks to suggest that the longer this war goes on, the better a diplomatic agreement we are going to get.

So we are going to continue to come to the floor and ask for our colleagues to join us because, out there in the American public, this isn't much of a debate. People want this war to end. They cannot sustain the costs of this war any longer. I appreciate the work of my colleagues in continuing to bring these motions to the floor. This is our one and only opportunity to debate war.

Our Republican colleagues--74 days into this war--have still not brought a resolution before the Senate to authorize the war. That is in violation of the Constitution. Every single day, we as a body are in violation of the Constitution. So it is left to the Democrats to force this debate on a weekly basis, which we will continue to do until this war ends.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object. I think Senator Cornyn and I share a goal--actually, multiple goals--one is to adequately protect children who are crossing the border by themselves to make sure that they are in adequate, humane, and appropriate placements; but also to vet individuals, including young unaccompanied minors who are crossing the border to make sure that they are not a danger to themselves or to others.

I am going to object to this bill today. It is a pretty comprehensive rewrite of a lot of the laws relative to the detention of minors. And while I think we can probably come to some common ground here, as I read this bill in preparation for the Senator's unanimous consent request, it looks as if it has a number of measures that would actually be seriously detrimental to vulnerable kids, kids who pose no threat to themselves or to others.

Let me just give you one example, and it is a pretty significant problem with this bill that maybe we could clear up. This bill does not allow for unaccompanied minors to be immediately reunited with their biological parent if their parent is a TPS holder, if their parent is applying for asylum, if their parent is a refugee, if their parent is here on a student visa. And so there are going to be a whole bunch of kids who are not going to be reunited with their parent--which I think we have always agreed is the proper course, if possible--because of some of the underlying provisions in this bill. So I just think that this has to go through another round of edits and work before it is ready to come to the floor.

I will also note that this administration sold us on their new immigration policy based on the fact that they were going to be going after ``the worst of the worst.'' They are going to be going after immigrants who pose a danger to the community. I think that is what Senator Cornyn's goal is here, to make sure that we aren't bringing into the country young people that might present a danger to others.

But, of course, the facts do not back up the administration's claim. What we have learned after a year and a half is that this administration is not going after ``the worst of the worst.'' Eighty- five percent of the people they are detaining have no criminal history at all; 95 percent of the people they are detaining have no history of violence at all. They are roaming American streets just looking for anybody with an accent.

So I am all for an immigration policy that tries to target the very, very small number of people entering this country who may pose a danger to Americans. The reality still is that immigrants commit crimes at rates lower than natural-born citizens.

But we are in league on the underlying goal. I just think this bill doesn't get there; and, in fact, this bill may do a lot of harm to kids who pose absolutely no threat to themselves or to others. And for that reason, I would object.

Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Schiff for bringing another War Powers Resolution before this body. I have lost count on how many votes we have had, but we are doing this for one reason and one reason only: The Republican majority refuses to do its constitutional and statutory responsibility.

The Constitution says we declare war. The President doesn't get to make war without the consent of Congress, and our Founders were very intentional, investing that power in us. They did not want an unchecked, runaway Executive being able to make war overseas without the consent of the people.

And I hear in Senator Van Hollen's voice his anger. I think we all are angry that our colleagues are not allowing this body to do its job, but we are also angry that the cost of this war is not being borne by Members of the U.S. Senate, is not being borne by Donald Trump's billionaire and corporate friends; the cost of this war is being borne by American consumers, by American small businesses, by American farmers.

And so I just want to spend my few minutes updating you on what the state of the American economy and what the state of the global economy--inextricably linked to the American economy--is today, 60 days after this illegal war began.

The scoreboard is gas prices. Americans today are paying, on average, about $4.30 a gallon. Gas prices are up 20 to 30 percent from the beginning of the war. The price of Brent crude is now over $120 a barrel compared to $70 before the war.

The only reason the gas prices have gone up by 20 to 30 percent is the war. That is the only reason that Americans are paying those extraordinary amounts at the pump.

And let's put this in real terms. If you are a commuter in this country who has a longer than average commute, you are probably buying somewhere short of a thousand gallons a year in auto fuel. And so when the price jumps by $1--and it may soon jump by $2--that is $1,000 to $2,000 out of your pocket.

Forty percent of American families are living paycheck to paycheck. Forty percent of American families have less than $400 in the bank in liquid assets ready to spend on an emergency like a car repair or an emergency medical bill. And so when you are spending a thousand dollars more every year just to fill up your tank, you go from being on the brink of financial crisis into financial crisis.

And, again, this isn't bad luck. This isn't a natural disaster. Donald Trump chose to increase gas prices in this country to $4.30 a gallon. Diesel prices are up even more. Diesel prices are up 50 percent. This is the fuel that America's farmers and America's trucking industry uses. And our farmers were already dealing with the consequences of tariffs. Seventy percent of farmers right now in this country say that they will not have enough money in order to plant the next crop because the tariffs and the diesel prices are putting many of them out of business. Bankruptcies of farms are up almost 50 percent from before when Trump was President.

Inflation was 2.8 percent before the war, well above the Federal Reserve's target. It is now 3.5 percent. That is an extraordinary increase, largely driven by fuel costs, but the cost of everything else--cost increases for everything else are coming very soon as well.

Airfare prices, up by 25 percent. So if you are online right now looking to book a ticket for your family's vacation, if you are planning far ahead and booking tickets for Thanksgiving or Christmas, you are paying 25 percent more than you would have paid before the war. Reason for higher airline prices? The war.

But this crisis is spiraling around the world because oil, $120 a barrel, is what fuels our fabrics and clothing industry globally. So the cost of polyester and nylon is going up and up and up. And so in the sewing hubs of Bangladesh and other countries that send products to Walmart, where a lot of Americans buy their clothes, we are starting to see production interruptions because of the high price--increasingly high price--of the components of fabrics.

In Singapore and Taiwan, it is becoming more expensive for companies to produce medical devices like syringes and catheters because of the high, increasing price of plastic. Aluminum prices have been rising ever since the war in the Middle East started because of attacks on aluminum smelters in Iran and other Gulf countries. Helium, a product that is produced in the Middle East, the price is going through the roof, and so the semiconductor manufacturing industry globally is facing shortages because helium is an important product for semiconductors.

So it is not just gas prices. You are about to see a spike in the cost of technological products, automobiles, fabrics, clothing, medical devices. Everything is getting more expensive because of one person's insane decision. No President, Republican or Democrat, prior to Donald Trump made the decision to invade Iran, to launch a full-scale war against Iran, because they were told the consequence of doing that is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and there is no military response by the United States that will reopen the strait.

And so every President prior to Donald Trump, whether they were Republican or Democrat, decided not to wage a full-scale war on Iran because they knew one of the consequences would be the meltdown of the American economy and the meltdown of the global economy. And it would not be billionaires and big corporations that would pay the price. It would be regular Americans, regular minimum-wage Americans, middle- class Americans who would pay that price.

And so as we head into the summer and the price of everything for American consumers gets higher and higher--their summer travel, their plane tickets, their clothing, their groceries--there is only one person to blame: Donald Trump. And there is only one party to blame: the Republican Party, which could choose to join us and vote for one of these resolutions to end the war, to allow us to get back to a point where prices are coming down instead of spiraling upward. This is a choice that our Senate Republican colleagues make every week, to vote

for continuing this war and for continuing this disastrous price escalation on ordinary Americans.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I was out in the hallways a week ago, and a reporter asked me a reasonable question. She said: Do you think Democrats overplayed their hand in the negotiations over the DHS budget? Did you ask for too much, thus prompting the moment that we are in today as we do something unprecedented, debate using reconciliation to appropriate money for the ongoing expenses of the Federal Government?

My answer was a confident no, for a few reasons. First, our asks were pretty minimal. All we wanted was to make

sure that the money we were sending to the Department of Homeland Security wasn't used for illegal purposes, it wasn't being used to tear gas elementary schools or conduct ``show me your papers'' raids in our cities.

A lot of things around here are about politics, but this didn't really seem to be about politics. I just think that we all have an obligation to only appropriate money to the Federal Government when the Federal Government is acting lawfully.

But there is another element to this. We definitely didn't anticipate that Republicans were going to pull the plug on those negotiations when they did. I was part of those negotiations up until the last minute. We thought that we had a potential deal in place in order to bring Republicans and Democrats together around funding all or most of the Department of Homeland Security.

We didn't get that done because Republicans decided--the Republican leader decided--instead to fund the Federal Government through this process, reconciliation, whereby Republicans only need 50 votes.

Now, both sides have used reconciliation to get things done that they wanted to get done, but never before has reconciliation been used as just a straight substitute for the appropriations process. Traditionally, appropriations bills need 60 votes. That means that the budget that we write for the country every year needs to be one that Republicans and Democrats support. But we are here today because Republicans didn't want to negotiate with Democrats over the Department of Homeland Security budget because they knew they could pass that budget with only Republican votes.

Now, listen, I am actually somebody that believes it is probably time to change the rules of the Senate. So I am not going to sit here and tell you that I am defending or willing to defend all of the current rules of the Senate. But let's just be clear, once Republicans have taken the lid off this jar, there is no putting it back.

Republicans are now using reconciliation to fund the ongoing appropriations of the government in an area where it was hard to get agreement with Democrats. Democrats are going to do the same thing. Regardless of how the rules change, now Democrats are just going to say: You know what? When we have power, we don't need to negotiate with Republicans over the hard stuff. We don't need your votes because we will just go fund the government through reconciliation.

So you have changed the practice of the Senate here, and you are going to have to live with the changes that you have decided to make because there are a lot of folks here who have defended the 60-vote threshold for appropriations. Well, that is probably going away, even if the rules don't change now because of the actions that you have taken.

But I guess I come back to this sort of basic obligation that we have, which is to just make sure that we don't fund illegality. A judge in Minnesota issued a ruling--this is at the height of the assault on Minneapolis--that ICE was in violation of almost 100 court orders.

That is stunning. Again, this isn't 100 instances where ICE was violating the law. This was 100 instances where ICE was violating the law, a court told them to stop, and ICE didn't stop. My Republican colleagues claim they are for law and order. How do you defend an Agency that was told to stop acting illegally and on 100 occasions, when reading the court order, just said: Forget it. We are not obeying what the court tells us to do?

When we say this is an Agency that was and is out of control, this is what we mean, an Agency that does not care about the law, does not care what courts say, thinks it is accountable to no one--except for the President of the United States.

We can't fund that kind of Agency. We would be violating our oath of office, all of us, to fund an Agency that just doesn't care about the law. To get 100 court orders telling you to obey the law, you have to be in violation of the law thousands of times.

In fact, Federal courts have ruled, just between October of 2025 and February of this year--that is October, November, December, January, February--over 5 months Federal courts ruled that ICE unlawfully detained not hundreds of people but thousands of people; 4,400 times in 5 months courts have ruled that Americans or legal residents of this country have been unlawfully detained.

That is illegal behavior at scale. And I don't care what your politics are, whether they are right or left, they are inclusionary or nativist, you should not be willing to fund an Agency that just doesn't care about the law at scale.

Mr. President, 48 people have died in ICE custody, 17 in just the last 4 months, right? The cameras aren't in Minneapolis like they were, but 17 people have died in custody in just the last month. Between 2017 and 2021, when Biden was President, there were a total in those 4 years of 52 people that had died. People are dying in ICE custody at a rate four times higher than during the Biden administration.

ICE has detained 6,200 children. We have put 6,000 children in jail. Seventy-three percent of the people that ICE has arrested have no criminal record; 95 percent of them have no violent criminal record. They say that they are locking up the worst of the worst; 5 percent, 1 in 20 have a violent criminal record.

Mr. President, 170 U.S. citizens have been detained. Almost all of them were Latino. You saw the videos of ICE and CBP officers going through the streets just detaining people based upon their accents.

Just this week, ICE detained the wife of SFC Jose Serrano. He is an Active-Duty United States Army soldier who has served our military for 27 years, including service in Afghanistan.

His wife wasn't not following the rules. She was obeying the rules. She was showing up to her court appointments, but they detained her anyway and now they are threatening to send her to Mexico, a country with which she has no ties. Sergeant First Class Serrano, because of his military service, is not allowed to travel to Mexico. Twenty-seven years he has been serving this country, and they are going to deport his wife who is following the law to Mexico and basically guaranteeing they will never see each other again.

Last month, a 5-year-old who was nonverbal with significant disabilities was put in jail at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, a detention center that I tried to get into to inspect because of claims of horrific conditions, and I was not allowed to go into that facility.

Again, this should trouble Republicans and Democrats. I didn't show up unannounced. I gave them notice. They still didn't let me in. Even though the law explicitly states that any Member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, has the right--the statutory right--to inspect facilities.

This little 5-year-old, nonverbal 5-year-old was in jail for 3 weeks. This place is called the baby jail. The boy literally melted down while he was there. He struggled to eat. His stomach became visibly swollen because he was literally suffering from malnutrition, and he couldn't go to the bathroom. He was only released after a children's entertainer named Ms. Rachel highlighted his case in a video. Like, what are we doing? What are we doing? Like, intentionally abusing children? This wasn't before Minneapolis; this happened just a month ago.

Yesterday, it was reported that the Trump administration is in discussions to send more than 1,000 Afghans who were in the United States because they helped us during the Afghanistan war--they would be under the threat of death if they stayed in Afghanistan; we emergency evacuated them to the United States because they helped us, because they protected our troops. And the Trump administration said yesterday that they are going to take 1,000 of those Afghans, heroes, that helped protect our troops in Afghanistan and they are going to send them to the Congo, just for the point of being cruel, just because it is mean, just because it would be kind of funny to send a whole bunch of Afghans who helped us in the war to a country that is in a humanitarian meltdown right now.

So no, none of us should be signing on to fund an Agency that is this lawless and this inhumane. That is the bottom line.

But here is the second bottom line: People are suffering in this country right now. And they are not suffering because we let immigrants into America, they are suffering because gas prices in some parts of the country are

over $6. On average, gasoline is over $4. It was just $3 a few months ago. And it is $6 and $5 and $4 for one reason only: this insane, incompetent war that is being waged in Iran. That is the only reason that these gas prices are so high right now.

The national average, as I said, is over $4. Americans have now paid more than $16 billion more at the pump than they should have simply because of Trump's war. Sixteen billion dollars out of the pockets of American consumers, American families, American small businesses, sent to the oil companies who are, by the way, making a killing off these high prices, just because of Trump's incompetent war in Iran.

Americans, since Trump came into office, have spent $2,300 more on goods and services because of inflation and tariffs. The average family has spent an extra $2,000 in the last year and a half on the things that they buy every day because of Trump's inflation and because of his tariffs.

There are 15 million people in this country who are on the verge of losing their healthcare because of a law that Donald Trump and Republicans passed in this Congress ripping health insurance away from seniors, the poor, and the disabled.

The Consumer Price Index is up 3.3 percent over last year. That is closing in on double what the Federal Reserve's target is. Unemployment is up since Trump took office. Long-term unemployment is way up since Trump took office. Unemployment for Black workers is up since Trump took office.

The tariffs, which are part of the reason that Americans have spent more than $2,000 extra because of Trump's policies, were supposed to be tough, hard medicine in order to bring factory jobs back to the United States. Biden had increased the number of manufacturing jobs in this country. We had more manufacturing jobs at the end of Joe Biden's term than we had at the beginning.

Well, do you know what has happened since Trump took office? He has reversed all of that progress. The tariffs aren't bringing more manufacturing jobs to the United States. We are losing manufacturing jobs. We have lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump became President.

So we are paying higher tariffs, and we are losing manufacturing jobs. Like, it doesn't make any sense.

And so we are going to spend--this week on the floor--giving a blank check to an immigration enforcement Agency that is out of control, while ignoring the real problems that Americans are facing.

We could have spent this week--Republicans could have spent their reconciliation process on gas prices or the healthcare catastrophe that is about to hit Americans or reversing Trump's tariffs or trying to actually do things that will bring manufacturing jobs back to this country, but they are doing none of that.

There is no conversation on the Senate floor right now about gas prices. There is no conversation on the Senate floor being led by Republicans about inflation. There is nothing being done to bring our manufacturing jobs back. There is no second look at the last reconciliation bill they passed, which is going to end insurance for 15 million Americans.

Instead, Republicans are handing billions of dollars in a blank check to an immigration enforcement Agency that right now is hunting 5-year- old kids with severe disabilities and locking them up in baby prisons to the point that they have swollen bellies because of their sickness due to the inhumane conditions.

They are locking up the family members of 27-year military veterans fighting for this country, just because it is mean and cruel.

So we are going to have a chance to debate this over the next 24 hours and vote on it, but I think the American people are seeing where Republican priorities are: not on the stuff that matters to American families.

I am not saying that the people of this country don't want a secure border--they do--but that is not what we are debating here. We are debating funding an immigration enforcement operation that is going after legal citizens, that is not targeting people who are a threat to this country, that exists just to try to stoke fears of our neighbors, that tries to make people think that immigrants are the biggest threat to this country so that you are distracted from the fact that Donald Trump is stealing from you--the most corrupt President in the history of this country.

We could be spending this time--we could even try to come together, Republicans and Democrats--to do something about inflation or the cost of gas. We have been begging our Republican colleagues to vote with us on these resolutions to stop the war in Iran because that is probably the fastest way to get the gas prices to come down.

We could spend time working across the aisle to try to address the issues that are a real crisis for American citizens right now: costs, inflation, gas prices, health insurance.

But, instead, we are about to send another blank check to an Agency that is unconscionably out of control.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague Senator Baldwin and others for continuing to bring this debate before the Senate again. It is just extraordinary that this is the most significant military action that the United States has taken in decades. And there has yet to be one single hearing, one single debate, one single vote on an authorization of military force.

I want to target my remarks today on just what has happened over the past 2 weeks because we tend to bounce from one news cycle to the next without being able to really connect together the growing incompetence that has defined the management of this war.

We shouldn't sugar-coat or normalize this degree of gross, unacceptable incompetence being exercised here. We essentially have a talk show host and a couple of real estate developers who are in charge of our war strategy, and we are getting essentially what you would expect if you put a talk show host and a handful of real estate developers in charge of a major Middle East war.

If millions of lives weren't at stake--and that is really what is at stake as the global economy threatens to melt down because of rising gas prices and the fact that one-third of all fertilizer supply is right now stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, if this wasn't really about millions of lives being at stake, this would be the stuff of farce, one mistake just compounded by another.

So many of us believe this war has to end right now because as each mistake gets bigger than the next, the hole for the United States, for American families, for our national security gets deeper and deeper.

So I am literally just going to very quickly run you through what has happened in the last 2 weeks.

So we all remember on April 7, when Trump posts on social media that he is going to destroy Iran's entire civilization. He says:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought

back again.

Later that day, he announces that there has been a cease-fire. But within hours, there is essentially diametrically opposed interpretations from Trump and the Iranians as to the terms of that cease-fire. The next day, he puts out a series of posts saying:

A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they've

had enough! Likewise, so has [everybody] else. The United

States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in

the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action!

By the end of day on April 8, the cease-fire has fallen apart. Iran says that a cease-fire in Lebanon is also necessary in order to get the Strait of Hormuz opened. Trump is unable to secure that. So by the end of the day, the day after the cease-fire is announced, the cease-fire no longer exists.

Two days later on April 10, Trump sends his Vice President JD Vance to Pakistan for negotiations.

On April 11, those negotiations are concluded after what appears to be an hour or two of face-to-face negotiations. Vance gets right back on a plane after--having spent an entire day--1 day--negotiating the end of this war to come back to the United States.

That day, Trump says:

Their Leadership is DEAD!

Not true.

The Strait of Hormuz will soon be open . . .

Not true. The U.S. delegation, led by Vance, comes back to the United States without an agreement.

On April 12, Trump announces--this is the day after the negotiations fall apart--that he is setting up a blockade. So the Iranians have a blockade on the strait. Now Trump announces a layered second blockade. But he is still saying that negotiations are going great. He says:

[T]he meeting the day before went well, most points were

agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR,

was not.

Of course, that is not true. Virtually nothing was agreed to in that meeting.

He says the next day that his negotiators, who were talking about a 20-year moratorium on enrichment of uranium, do not have his support. He says:

I have been saying they can't have nuclear weapons . . . so

I don't like the 20 years.

I mean, we have never seen this before--literally a President in public contradicting his negotiators who were negotiating the terms of an agreement just 2 days ago.

Three days later, on April 17, Trump says that Iran again has agreed to everything, including removing enriched uranium. Trump says our people are just going to go get the uranium and bring it back to the United States.

Within hours, Iran says this is not true. They say: We have the right--a sacred right--to enrich uranium on our soil.

Trump says his negotiators are not considering releasing sanctions. Two of his negotiators go to the press and say they were talking about releasing sanctions.

Again, this is just diplomatic malpractice. The President of the United States and his negotiators are arguing with each other in public through the media.

Then, on April 19, Trump says he is sending Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan for new talks. The top negotiator, JD Vance , apparently has been sidelined. The administration then says Vance is indeed going to Pakistan. Trump goes back to the press and says Vance is not going to Pakistan. The White House scrambles again and confirms that Vance will be going. The problem is that the Iranians have not agreed to the negotiations.

So a day later, the President says Vance and his delegation are on their way. Come to find out they are not leaving for Pakistan because the Iranians are not agreeing to negotiate.

I mean, I get it that we have come to kind of normalize this kind of incompetence, this kind of planned, executed chaos, but we are on the floor week after week asking our colleagues to end this war because this is an embarrassment to the United States of America. The President and his negotiators are arguing in public with each other. The President is literally deciding by the hour whether his son-in-law is in charge of the negotiations or whether the Vice President is in charge of the negotiations. The President is lying consistently about the nature of the negotiations, saying things have been agreed to that clearly have not been agreed to--helping the Iranians blockade the strait.

We have never seen a foreign conflict mismanaged in public like this before. I understand many of my Republican colleagues want to support their President, but we are becoming a laughingstock in the world while at the same time, we are hurting Americans who are now paying billions more in gas prices. We are risking a global famine as fertilizer is unavailable to poor farmers all over the world, and economies are shutting down because of the high price and shortage of fuel.

The costs of keeping this war going 1 more day are just too high both in reputational costs to the United States but also in the cost to lives and the pocketbooks of millions of Americans.

I know my Republican colleagues have a hard time breaking with their President. I will say that many of us--in closing--on the Democratic side certainly had a hard time breaking with our President as well, whether it was Barack Obama or Joe Biden, but on multiple occasions, we did. Many of us stood on this floor and argued against President Obama's intervention in the Yemen war. Many of us stood on this floor and argued against Biden's policy in Gaza. That wasn't easy, but we thought it was important for us to separate ourselves from our party loyalty when we thought our President had gotten it wrong for America's national security.

It is time for our Republican colleagues to join us in one of these resolutions because it is just so clear to the entire world that if this war continues

even for another day, the reputational cost to the United States is potentially unrecoverable.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am here on the floor to add my support to the resolution being brought before us by Senator Duckworth. This is the third week in a row that we are having an opportunity on the Senate floor to have a short debate and a vote on the most significant military engagement

in the Middle East in many of our Senate careers.

We are now a month and a half into this bungled, mismanaged war, and we have yet to have a single hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the Senate Armed Services Committee on this war, on this military operation.

In the absence of these privileged motions that we are bringing-- thankful to Senator Duckworth for bringing one this week--we would have no debate, no vote on the floor on the authorization of war, maybe the most sacred charge we are given as U.S. Senators.

We should not normalize that. We should not fail to note how extraordinary it is that our Senate Republican leadership has declined to do any oversight of a war that is costing billions of dollars every week, that has already led to the loss of over a dozen American lives, that has erupted a regional war throughout the Middle East and is literally melting down economies all over the world, especially in the developing world--not a single hearing--not a single hearing--in the U.S. Senate. Secretary Rubio, Secretary Hegseth have not come to the Senate to explain what their plan is, what their strategy is, what their endgame is.

And I think we know the answer. They simply can't explain what is happening. They can't articulate a strategy. They are not ready to answer questions from Democrats or from Republicans who, I think, increasingly are starting to scratch their heads about how on earth this is in the U.S. national security interest.

Very quickly, because I know we have a number of other colleagues who want to speak, let me just talk about what has happened since we last had an opportunity to vote.

First, the impact on the U.S. economy is getting more acute. There are more and more Americans who are unable to make their lives work because we have seen a 30-percent increase in gas prices since this war began. Farmers have seen a 35-percent increase in fertilizer, a 50- percent increase in diesel costs.

That increase in agricultural costs is going to almost immediately spill over into big increases at the grocery store. And so amidst high inflation, you are now going to see costs just become prohibitive for a lot of American families--a 30-percent higher gasoline cost simply because of this war of choice.

And agricultural economy, which was already in crisis--60 percent of farmers had already said that they were in a worse financial shape this year, prior to the war, than when President Trump came into office--now that gets even worse.

What is the impact on our national security? Well, the President has said that there are a bunch of different meandering explanations and objectives for this war. He said that we want to destroy their missile program. Well, what have we found out in the last 2 weeks? We have found out that we have come nowhere close to destroying their missile program. In fact, they still likely have the majority of their missiles. And during the cease-fire, Iran has used that time to rehabilitate and rescue many of the missiles and the launchers that were buried in rubble. China stands ready, as soon as the bombing fully ceases, to help them immediately rebuild their missile program. There is no way this campaign is going to eliminate their missile program.

Just the same, we were told that part of the objective of this war was to eliminate their nuclear program. And yet, a month and a half later, they still have all of their enriched uranium. We have not destroyed Iran's knowledge of how to produce nuclear weapons out of existence because neither are possible through a bombing campaign alone.

Sometimes regime change is an objective; sometimes it isn't. The President said: Well, we were gone last week. In fact, we have already achieved regime change. Well, technically, there is a new Ayatollah, but there is absolutely no evidence that this new Ayatollah, that this new crowd of elite leadership--mainly coming out of the hard-line IRGC--is any less provocative, any less dangerous, any less adversarial to U.S. interests. In fact, the opposite is probably true. A doddering 90-year-old Ayatollah was replaced by a group of leaders that are likely much more fanatical and probably much more effective in their aims to try to attack U.S. interests there and around the world.

Of course, one of our objectives is a new objective, the objective to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait was open before this war began; it is now closed. It is unclear whether President Trump knew that they would close the strait and just threw up his hands, didn't care about the impact on the U.S. economy or whether he didn't know--which would be egregious in and of itself--and was shocked to find out that Iran would close the strait.

We are now a month and a half into this war. The strait is still closed. The President is trying to reopen the Strait by blockading it, which is a very strange strategy, one that, in day two of this new plan, does not seem to be succeeding.

Finally, what is the impact on the world? And I just want to touch on this very shortly. A new war is erupting in the Middle East; Hezbollah was empowered by the attacks; and there is a prospect of a massive new ground invasion of Lebanon from Israel. Already, hundreds have died in that conflict. Last weekend, you likely saw images of just vicious bombings of what looked to be civilian infrastructure happening inside Lebanon. But a new war in the Middle East between Israel and Lebanon, in which thousands will likely die, in which millions will be displaced, that is horrible for U.S. interests, for our allies' interests. The region is exploding in violence.

But even more cataclysmic in its scope is what is happening to developing nations. Developing nations' economies are literally melting down right now because a 30-percent increase in fuel costs for a short period of time is something that wouldn't tank the entirety of the American economy, even though it does great damage to individual families. But in nations where a short-term fuel shortage or a 30- percent immediate spike is something that a government or a very poor population cannot manage has caused a lot of these countries' economies to simply melt down. These governments are now closing their public operations. Universities in some developing nations are permanently closed because they can't afford to keep the lights on.

There is a rolling disaster happening throughout the world because of these energy price increases that have been designed, manufactured, by Donald Trump. So it is not just that the Middle East is exploding; it is not just that we aren't meeting any of our objectives in Iran; it is not just that American consumers are being harmed--there are billions-- billions--of poor people all around the world whose lives are more miserable, whose lives are slipping into greater chaos because of this war.

So we will be down on this floor week after week, every single week, to force at least a short debate, to force a vote. And my hope is that at some point our Republican colleagues, besides one, choose to join us.

It is OK for you to support President Trump, generally and politically, and admit that this war was a massive mistake. We did that when there were Democratic Presidents in office. President Obama helped participate in a war in the Middle East, helping the Saudis be involved in a conflict in Yemen. Many of us thought that was a mistake. We came to the floor and opposed President Obama. We actually filed resolutions making it harder for President Obama to fuel that war.

So I hope, at some point, our Republican colleagues decide they can choose to just say what is clear and obvious--this war was a mistake; it should end as quickly as possible--and not believe that this is somehow incommensurate with their broader political support for the President.

You can, as a U.S. Senator, occasionally stand up to the leader of your party if it is a matter of right and wrong. I believe this is a matter of right and wrong. Maybe it won't be in today's vote, but hopefully in one of the votes we will continue to have, we can have some bipartisan agreement that this war needs to end.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in a building filled with history, Mario D'Angelo is an institution of the Senate in his own right. Born in Orsogna, Italy, in 1947, Mario traveled to the United States with his mother and sister at the age of 13.

Mario's father was a barber, and when Mario was growing up, he urged his son not to follow in his footsteps. Mario had other ideas. Though he briefly found work in the House of Representatives distributing packages of mail, his true calling was in the U.S. Senate.

In 1976, Mario was hired by the Senate Sergeant at Arms to manage the Capitol and Senate barber shop. He oversaw the remodeling of the Senate barber shop and cut the hair of countless Senate denizens, from summer interns to sitting Senators. For the last five decades, when Americans saw their Senators on television, it was often

Mario's handiwork on display. Giants of the Senate, including the late Senator John McCain, not only trusted Mario with their hair, they considered him a personal confidante and friend. Generations of Senators and staffers have relied on Mario's steady hand and extraordinary willingness to stay after hours to accommodate last- minute appointments. And in a place increasingly divided by tense partisan politics, Mario's genuine warmth and care provides a bridge of human connection for all who visit his chair. We honor and thank Mario for his 50 years of service and care.

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

Mr. President, colleagues, in a few moments I am going to call up for a vote--a resolution on a privileged motion to end the war in Iran.

I am going to be joined on the floor by several of my colleagues, all of us here in astonishment that 4 weeks into the most significant conflict in the Middle East in most of our careers in this body--12- plus Americans killed, $2 billion at least being spent every day, thousands dead throughout the region--we have still not yet had a single hearing in the United States Senate on the war in Iran.

We have not had a debate on a war authorization. We have not had a vote to allow Senators to weigh in--up or down--as to whether they want the United States to be at war again in the Middle East.

This is an extraordinary moment, and I know we risk engaging in hyperbole these days, coming down to the floor and naming one moment as extraordinary after another moment. But I don't think we have had a moment like this, where the United States has been unquestionably at war with a foreign power, where American soldiers are dying as we speak and it is being hidden, actively, from the public by the Congress.

It is bad enough that we haven't had a debate and vote other than those forced by Democrats. We haven't had a hearing in the Foreign Relations Committee. We haven't had a hearing in the Armed Services Committee.

Now, I think we know the reason. The reason is that this administration cannot defend and explain this war. But if they cannot and if they are not willing to come to Congress and defend this war, it speaks to the indictment of the preparation and the strategy.

I am going to read to you an excerpt from a Washington Post article. Now, the Washington Post has been very careful about their criticism of the President recently:

A surge of additional U.S. forces to the Middle East and

President Donald Trump's threat to ``obliterate'' Iran's

energy infrastructure have set the stage for what U.S. and

Israeli security officials increasingly see as the war's . .

. endgame: a battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz and

key energy installations.

Reopening the strait . . . has emerged as perhaps the

paramount objective of [the] war . . . officials now believe

is unlikely to achieve goals that briefly seemed possible at

the outset of the [war] . . . including overthrowing Iran's

theocratic regime and putting a nuclear weapon permanently

out of Tehran's reach.

Let me restate that for you. The Trump administration now says that the goal of the war is not to dislodge an anti-American regime in Tehran; it is not to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon; it is not even to permanently end Iran's ability to have missiles that can reach their neighbors or drone capacity that can provoke in the region. The primary goal now is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Here is the problem: The strait was open before the war began. We are now seeking to solve a problem that we created. This is insanity. Two billion dollars is a lot of money. That is the minimum amount of money that is being spent every single day on this war.

There are over a dozen families who are burying their loved ones in the United States, and there may be dozens more if this war continues. Prices are skyrocketing--not just in America but all across the world. Notices just went out from DuPont to their customers that the price of plastic is doubling. The price at the pump in many States is at $4, $5, and going higher. Fertilizer: soon to be unaffordable for American farmers. The consequences of this war are stunning in their scope: higher prices for American businesses and American families, a potential global recession, the wasting of billions of dollars of hard- earned taxpayer dollars, and new conflicts in the region that didn't exist before the war began.

In the last day, there have been 12 missile attacks inside Israel. Just during this last vote, news broke of another missile attack on a community, Bnei Brak, with nine people injured, six children injured. Just in the last week, there have been multiple missile and drone attacks on cities throughout Israel; six ballistic missiles from two separate attacks hit the Kurdish region in Iraq, killing six Kurdish fighters; and an Iranian missile attack on the Iranian-United States base in Diego Garcia. That is 2,500 miles away from Tehran.

UAE has basically stopped giving out information about these drone and missile attacks because they happen so frequently, but on Monday, they did publicize they engaged with 16 drones and 7 ballistic missiles. That was just on Monday.

Israel has invaded Lebanon. Those two countries are on the verge of full-scale war. One-sixth of the population of Lebanon has already been displaced. Syria is at risk of falling apart again.

We have created a catastrophe in the Middle East. We are lighting taxpayer dollars on fire. We are causing prices to go up for everyone.

And what is our new war aim? Reopening the strait that was open before we started the war.

This is basic incompetence. This is what you get when you put talk show hosts and real estate developers in charge of American national security: a war that makes absolutely no sense.

Even though our war aims have been reduced to simply undoing the damage

that we created, it is not even clear we can accomplish that goal. Word is that Iran has now figured out that they can open the strait for limited purposes if you pay them, and that may now be the permanent state of affairs in the strait, that Iran will decide who gets to go through and who doesn't.

That is not what happened before the war. We have created a new reality in which Iran has more power over the global economy than they have ever had before. We have not been able to stop their ability to project power. They are still, today, 4 weeks into the war, firing missiles and drones at their neighbors.

The regime that is in charge now is, according to analysts, worse than the regime that it replaced. Yes, we killed a whole bunch of people, including the Supreme Leader, but from everything we understand, the group now in charge is more adversarial to U.S. interests and is going to be more provocative in the region.

So this war makes absolutely no sense. And the only way to save American consumers, the only way to try to put the pieces back together in the region is for the war to end.

So I am glad to be joined here on the floor today by several of my colleagues. Many of them have introduced similar resolutions. This will be the third time that we have brought a War Powers Resolution before the floor--Senator Kaine and then Senator Booker. This will likely not be the last resolution that we will bring before the floor because we have a sacred obligation handed to us by our Founding Fathers for this body and the House of Representatives to decide war. It was a very deliberate decision not to give the power to make war to one individual--to the President of the United States--but to give it to the people. And the people make their voice heard through their elected Members of Congress.

And so if our Republican colleagues will not do their duty, if they are going to engage in an effort to hide the consequences of the war, if they are going to refuse to ask questions of our incompetent national security leaders at the White House who have waged this war without planning for the foreseeable consequences, then we will force a debate and a vote on this floor.

This war is not going to make more sense the longer it goes. It is not going to become more popular. Right now, by a 26-point margin, Americans do not support this war. It will be harder as time goes on-- not easier--for my Republican colleagues to continue to vote for this war as a vote against this resolution will be. But it is our responsibility under the Constitution to have this debate, and I am glad to have my colleagues on the floor to make this case to the Senate as well.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, whatever you think about this war, it should be unacceptable to all of us that we have not had a single public hearing, a single opportunity for the American people to hear directly through their representatives the justification and the endgame for this war.

I thank my colleagues for joining me here today.