Floor Statements

Mr. President, Senator Booker and I have now spoken multiple times on the floor. The Senator from California has been here multiple times. We are doing so because we saw the look in our colleague's eyes as he was being violently thrown out of that room. You lost contact with his eyes in the hallway as he

was being pushed stomach-down onto the ground and handcuffed.

One of our colleagues suggested that Senator Padilla got what he wanted. If you saw Senator Padilla's eyes, if you saw Alex's eyes as he was being pushed out of that room, you saw a man who did not expect to be treated that way. He thought that he was coming to register his dissent, his objection, to something deeply serious and illegal that was happening in his State. He had a responsibility as a Senator to speak truth to power.

So we are here on this floor speaking repeatedly in hopes that at some point, some of our Republican colleagues, whether here or in other public statements, will register some degree of concern for what happened to their colleague.

We lose our democracy if we lose our ability to dissent.

In 1722, in a newspaper started in Boston by the name of the New- England Courant--one of the country's first newspapers--a series of essays began to appear that were speaking to some really radical ideas for 1722. This is 20 years before Thomas Jefferson was born. This was 50 years before Thomas Paine wrote ``Common Sense.''

This is 1722, and the author's name is Silence Dogood. Silence Dogood writes in the New-England Courant:

Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin

by subduing the Freeness of speech; a Thing terrible to

Publick Traytors.

Silence goes on to say:

This sacred Privilege [of free speech] is so essential to

free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the

Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched

Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can

scarce call any Thing . . . his own.

In 1722, this was a radical idea, this idea that a tyrant must control the freedom of thought with violence in order to maintain control of the people.

The New-England Courant was owned by a man named James Franklin, and he probably didn't know that Silence Dogood was a pseudonym for his 16- year-old brother named Benjamin Franklin. That is Benjamin Franklin writing in 1722, 16 years old.

Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin

by subduing the [Freedom] of Speech.

What happened to Senator Padilla today, it does stand in context. I say again, it does matter that on that day in which violence was used against the U.S. Capitol as a means to try to upset our democracy was cheered on by a President who then pardoned those violent rioters.

It stands in the context of the arrest of a mayor in New Jersey and a Congressperson seeking to do normal and regular oversight. It stands in context with the use of the FCC to try to intimidate and harass news stations that carry coverage unfavorable to the President and stands in context of the banning of outlets having access to the White House or the Pentagon simply because they don't write things that are favorable to the President or use terms that are favorable to the President.

If we lose our democracy, it is not likely that there is going to be this one moment, this one day, this one fight. It won't be like other revolutions where the Parliament building gets burned down or a coup occurs. No. It will be that, over time, the message has been sent that if you speak up against the government, there is a price to be paid, and that price involves violence. But if you use violence on behalf of the government, it will be excused.

And so why we are still on this floor tonight is, sure, we have immense respect for our colleague, and I believe he has respect across the aisle. Senator Padilla is a decent human servant who doesn't deserve to be treated that way. We are here because he is our friend and our colleague. But we are also here because too many in this body take for granted that this democracy is natural, that it is just going to hang around, no matter the threats.

The effort that this administration is undergoing to excuse and normalize violence when it happens in advancement of the administration's political priorities and then to suppress nonviolent speech in a multitude of ways when it objects to this administration's priorities, it sends a message to the public about what you can get away with and what you can't get away with.

Now, I don't think this will be the result. I don't think the American people will be bullied into silence. I do not believe they will watch that clip of Alex Padilla being forced to the ground and handcuffed and decide to stay home. No, I think, in fact, the opposite will likely happen. I think more Americans will be out there protesting this government. I think more Americans will decide to be present this weekend, to stand up for the right of free speech.

But if that were to be the case, it would be the exception to the historical rule, because in most countries when a ruler uses violence in order to suppress dissent, it works. People decide that they don't want to risk the fate of Alex Padilla. They don't want to be on the ground with their hands forced behind them and put into handcuffs. They stay home, and they just let the tyranny wash over them, their community, and their country.

We are not there yet. I don't mean to exercise hyperbole. What I seek to say is that we should not take this democracy for granted and that there can be--history tells us there often is--a deep impact when violence is used against those who are protesting the regime. It becomes normalized. And it ends up scaring many people into a dissent away from civic participation, and that is where our democracy dies.

This sacred privilege, the privilege of free speech, the privilege to protest your government--says 16-year-old Benjamin Franklin--``is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together.''

Men cannot be prosperous, he says, without having access to the freedom of expression.

Senator Padilla was doing his job. Sure, you can decide that he was being disrespectful. That is not illegal. You could decide that he, in the alternative, should have waited until the press conference was over. But nothing he did warranted the treatment he got.

And when you stand it side by side with the pardoning of the January 6 protesters, the attempt to bully the free press into toeing the administration's line, the deployment of the National Guard and the Marines to a protest in California that was largely peaceful and, basically, just encompassed 1 or 2 square blocks, nobody mistakes what that agenda is about. That agenda is about trying to bully the American people into silence.

And once again, the first several comments from our colleagues justifying the handcuffing and violence to Senator Padilla simply because they believe he was disrespectful paints a really dangerous picture of where we are headed.

Senator Booker is right. The focus should be on the violence that is being done to the American people's healthcare right now. We are debating a bill right now, as we speak, to rip healthcare away from upwards of 15 million Americans. That is extraordinary. That is a healthcare catastrophe. That is not just 15 million people losing their healthcare. That is hospitals, drug treatment centers, health clinics shutting down when you pull almost a trillion dollars out of the Medicaid system.

There is a new budget analysis today that shows that the poorest 30 percent of the country, 40 percent of the country, will be poorer after this bill passes, just so that the richest 10 or 20 percent can get a massive new tax cut. In fact, the richest people in this country will get an average $270,000 tax cut. Literally, a transfer of wealth from the poorest people in this country--people who are working minimum wage jobs are going to be poorer after having passed this bill in order to enrich the folks who are doing super well, and we are going to add $3 trillion to the deficit--just going to put it on our kids' credit card.

That is, maybe, the most unpopular piece of legislation that has ever come before the U.S. Senate. That is an agenda that you can probably only impose on the Nation by force--by force--because if people have the right to protest, if they have the ability to stand up to the most massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich in the history of the country, it might not pass. That protest movement might be big enough in order to change the minds of enough Members of this body so that that agenda might pass.

It may be that that bill is so unpopular that the only way that you can get it to pass is by using violence and the threat of violence to suppress protest and free speech.

So we are still here, hours after this incident, because we care about our colleague, because we believe this is ultimately going to do immense damage to this institution that we love.

I have done hard work with many of my Republican colleagues. I deeply care about many of my Republican colleagues. I don't know all of them well, but I know enough of them to know that there are patriots; there are people who believe that America matters more than our party.

I showed that video to several of my Republican colleagues as we were leaving the Chamber today. I saw their jaws drop. I know their human reaction to what they saw. But I also know that there is a tendency in this version of the Republican party to circle the wagons around one message. If Democrats say X, then Republicans have to say Y.

That doesn't have to be the case every time. It just doesn't.

There can be true things. And a true thing is this: That was an excessive, impermissible amount of force that was used on Senator Padilla today. We can say that together.

Even if you agree with the President on his decision to deploy the National Guard, even if you hate every single one of those protesters, even if you don't like Senator Padilla--which is hard because he is a freaking hard guy not to like. But even if you believe all those things, you can say that what happened today is not all right and that the White House should admit that; that there should be an apology; and that there should be protocols set in place to make sure that if a U.S. Senator shows up to a public event--he didn't bust into a private meeting. This was a press conference designed to be public, to transmit public information. He wanted to make sure that that was accurate information. Maybe you don't like the way that he did it, but what he did is not illegal. What he did does not deserve that treatment. We can decide that that is wrong. We can recognize the danger to this concept of free speech, defended in 1722 by a 16-year-old Benjamin Franklin, is serious enough for us to speak together with one voice.

So my Republican colleagues may think that we are belaboring the point, but this is an important moment for the Senate and for the Nation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, pursuant to section 36(b) of the Arms Export Control Act, I move to discharge the Committee on Foreign Relations from further consideration of S.J. Res. 53, as provided under the previous order.

Mr. President, pursuant to section 36(b) of the Arms Export Control Act, I move to discharge the Committee on Foreign Relations from further consideration of S.J. Res. 54, as provided under the previous order.

Mr. President, I am bringing before the Senate an opportunity for us to take a stand, to take a stand against the corruption of American foreign policy.

The Senate will take a vote in just a moment to deny the President the ability to move forward with two arms sales--one to Qatar and one to the United Arab Emirates.

I believe that this Senate should join Republicans and Democrats together in saying that any country that is willing to pay the President personally, to enrich our President personally, in order to receive favorable treatment from the United States of America in its foreign policy or to receive national security secrets from the United States of America shouldn't be able to do business as usual with this Congress or with this country.

I want to tell you a story that is as heartbreaking as it is aggravating. We give the American President enormous power, and particularly we give the President enormous power when it comes to managing the foreign relations of this country. The President decides where we send arms. The President gets to negotiate peace treaties. The President decides how millions of troops are deployed all around the world. We trust that the President is going to use those powers for good, that the President is going to use those authorities to protect the United States of America.

But they are vast powers. They are immense powers. So there is always the potential that those powers are going to be used for corrupt purposes, that instead of using those authorities in order to gain concessions from other nations that benefit the broad American public or benefit American national security, the President may use those powers in order to enrich himself personally.

Our Founding Fathers actually thought a lot about this problem because they had watched their monarch. They had watched the King of England use the powers that he had in order--not to protect the British people but to amass enormous wealth. He used those powers both to control dissents and protests domestically, but he also used those powers in order to compel other nations and actors inside the empire to pay him tribute.

President Trump has decided that he is going to use the powers that we have given him to demand the same kind of tribute that Kings and monarchs demanded.

The reason we have to stand together today to vote against these arm sales to Qatar and UAE is because unfortunately these two countries, who are admittedly often allies, important allies of the United States, have decided to comply with President Trump's request to pay him that tribute.

Shortly before the President went to the Middle East, he did not dispense to the region his Secretary of State. Instead, he dispensed to the region his business partners. Just before the President made his first major foreign trip to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and to Qatar, he sent his son and their business partner--who, not coincidentally, happens to be the son of Trump's Middle East Envoy--to the United Arab Emirates.

Their request was pretty simple. Their request was not that the UAE do something that would be in the interest of collective American security; their request was that the UAE invest $2 billion in Trump's new crypto business--in particular, his stablecoin venture. This is the President of the United States going to the UAE and asking a foreign government to invest $2 billion in his personal business. The company is called World Liberty Financial. On World Liberty Financial's website, it says the majority of the company is owned by Donald J. Trump.

This was a pretty exceptional request to make because his crypto business was brand new. At the time, it was a pretty minor player. So a $2 billion investment from a country like UAE would vault World Liberty Financial into the stratosphere. And, in fact, it

did. When the UAE complied with that corrupt request, World Liberty Financial--the stablecoin that it issues became the fifth biggest stablecoin in the world overnight.

Now, the UAE felt like it had to comply with the President's request because they had things they wanted from the United States.

First, they wanted a continuation of arm sales, including the sale of Chinook helicopters that we will be voting on today. But they wanted something more specific, something that they weren't able to get from the first Trump administration or from the Biden administration. They wanted some of our most vital, most significant national security secrets. They wanted to be able to get their hands on computer chip technology, the kind of technology that will power the next generation of AI.

We as a nation--again, based on bipartisan consensus--had been unwilling to give UAE that technology because it is a fairly open secret that the UAE has a very close, very cozy relationship with China, and there was a very real worry--there still is a real worry-- that that technology, if transferred to the UAE, would be quickly transferred to China, allowing China to be able to outpace us, to outrun us in the race to advanced AI.

But the UAE knew that there was a way to get what they wanted, that there was a way to change the policy of the United States, and it was a $2 billion investment in Trump's business.

Not coincidentally, just weeks after they announced they were putting $2 billion into Trump's crypto business, his father--who, again not coincidentally, is Trump's Middle East Envoy--went back to the region and announced that they would be moving forward with the transfer of these computer chips to the UAE--$2 billion into the Trump family's pockets and the most sensitive American technology that had been previously banned from going to the UAE, being sent to the UAE.

Apparently, we didn't make any demands that the UAE divest itself from its security relationship with China. Instead, what we demanded was that the UAE make a $2 billion investment in Donald Trump's business.

As you can imagine, once the word was out that the Trump administration was for sale, other countries decided to get into the mix. Donald Trump barely had taken a look at a luxury plane that the country of Qatar owned--reportedly the most luxurious plane in the world: gold plating, a spiral staircase designed by a famed French designer--and the President wanted it personally. So he dispensed the Department of Defense, apparently, to go to the Qataris and asked them to give him the plane, just like he had asked the UAE for a $2 billion investment in his business--a $2 billion investment that nobody else was going to give him except for a foreign power over which Donald Trump had leverage because of his role as President of the United States.

He went to the Qataris and asked them to give him this jet because he liked it, because it was fancy, because he thought he deserved it, and he knew they couldn't say no. Why? Because the Qataris also have specific asks of the United States. More broadly, they were burned during Trump's first term. When the Saudis and the Emiratis ganged up on the Qataris and effectively implemented an economic and political blockade on Qatar, the Trump administration, in the first term, effectively took the side of the Emiratis and the Saudis. That was devastating for the Qataris.

So first and foremost, they wanted to make sure that never again would Trump abandon them if there was a contest like that in the Middle East. So when he asked for the plane, just based upon their desire to make sure they did not get abandoned again, they felt they had to say yes.

But they also wanted an arms sale, and the arms sale they wanted was a groundbreaking arms sale. Never before has the United States been willing to send our most sensitive drone technology into the Middle East, weren't willing to transfer our most sensitive computer chips. We also weren't willing to send our most sensitive drone technology.

Qatar wanted that drone technology and once again, just like the UAE knew that they could get our most sensitive computer chip technology if they sent $2 billion to Donald Trump's business ventures, Qatar, having learned that lesson, realized that if they gave a massive gift to the President, maybe he would break with a bipartisan precedent not to send this sensitive drone technology into the Middle East.

Guess what. They got what they wanted. The President has agreed to move forward with sending our most sensitive drone technology, the Predator drones, into the Middle East, selling them to Qatar. It is not a coincidence that they are also willing to send him this jet.

I had the chance this morning to talk to the Secretary of Defense about this jet because one of the claims the administration has made is that the jet is actually being sent to the U.S. Government. But we learned some important facts this morning. It is true that right now the U.S. Government is buying two new Air Force Ones, and it is true that this contract is expensive and it is taking a little bit longer than both Republicans and Democrats had hoped, but both those planes from Boeing are due for delivery sometime at the end of Trump's term.

What we learned today is that this plane that is being gifted temporarily to the U.S. Government is going to take several years to retrofit and will become available essentially at the exact same time that the two Boeing planes are made available.

So we don't actually need this plane as a new Air Force One because the Boeings are still under contract, and they are going to be ready simultaneously. But the Secretary of Defense is committed to accepting the gift of this plane and then spending upwards of $1 billion of taxpayer money in order to retrofit this plane--$1 billion that we don't need because we are already spending $4 billion on the two Boeings.

So now, instead of having two Air Force Ones, we are going to have three Air Force Ones. We don't need three Air Force Ones. But Trump is solving this problem because what he has said is that, when he leaves office, he is taking this Air Force One with him.

Now, that has never ever happened before. We have never just given a President of the United States a gift on the way out the door. But we are going to spend $1 billion getting this plane ready. It, effectively, will not be used as an actual Air Force One because it won't be completed until the very end of his term. And then Trump is taking the plane, apparently, to his Presidential library, but who knows.

And so this gift is actually going to Donald Trump, not to the American taxpayers. The Department of Defense is, effectively, a straw purchaser. It will hold the plane for a couple years; it will spend your taxpayer dollars to retrofit the plane; and then the plane will just be given to Donald Trump to take with him in his post-Presidency.

So $2 billion from the UAE into the President's crypto venture, a plane that, when all is said and done, is probably going to be worth about $1.5 billion, straight transferred to Donald Trump personally-- this is unprecedented in the history of the United States of America. Never has a President of the United States, while in office, solicited, sought, and accepted billions of dollars' worth of investments in his private companies or gifts to him and his family.

Remember, our Founding Fathers thought about this problem. They worried about this exact situation: a President using the vast power of the article II authorities he is given in order to trade favorable American treatment for foreign countries in exchange for personal enrichment of the President. They literally wrote a clause into the Constitution which, clear as day, says that a President of the United States cannot accept gifts from a foreign Prince, King, or nation. That is exactly what the President is doing. This plane is a gift. He advertises it as a gift--a gift that will be in the American public's hands for a nanosecond before it goes into his private hands.

If we don't take a stand, if we don't act together against this unconstitutional corruption of our foreign policy, I don't know that we can ever get this genie back in the bottle.

I understand that it is difficult for my Republican colleagues to stand up to this President, but we have an independent responsibility, as a coequal branch of government charged with upholding the Constitution, to call out

wrong when we see it, to call out illegality when we see it. This is wildly unconstitutional. This is wildly illegal.

So we have a chance today, with these resolutions, in order to make clear that we are not going to accept or make normal this kind of corruption of American foreign policy.

Now, Mr. President, I will finish with this because my colleague from Maryland is going to add some remarks.

I admit that these are imperfect vehicles. It is all part of the same story. Trump would not be moving forward with these arms sales if he wasn't getting what he wanted personally from these two countries. But I also admit that the UAE and, most especially, Qatar have been allies of the United States. We have worked together in our efforts, for instance, to combat terrorism in the region. Qatar specifically has, at times, been a heroic partner of the United States. We would never have been able to rescue thousands of Americans and American allies from Afghanistan without Qatar's help.

Qatar has consistently acted as an interlocutor between warring and conflicting factions in the region. Qatar has taken risks on behalf of the United States. We, of course, have thousands of American troops and soldiers and airmen in Qatar today.

And so what we need to say here is not that we are going to permanently pause our military relationships with these countries, but for the time being, while these two nations are willing to pay the President tribute, we cannot endorse or condone business as usual.

These are important partners of the United States in the region. They will be important partners in the future. But this is an exceptional moment where the corruption and our effort to stop the corruption has to take priority and has to take precedent. And so I am going to vote for both of these resolutions while also still believing that we are going to have a continued, important bilateral relationship with Qatar and with the UAE.

But if we start to endorse and grease the wheels of this kind of corruption, then there will be no end because once it becomes accepted, once it becomes implicitly endorsed by the U.S. Senate that foreign governments can put money into the personal treasury of the President in order to gain favorable treatment from the United States of America, that becomes the way our foreign policy works.

So I appreciate my colleagues' time and attention to this matter, and I encourage them to support these motions when they come up for a vote later this afternoon.

I yield the floor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Madam President, the U.S. Constitution and the American people give the American President vast power: the power to decide how billions of dollars are spent; the power to oversee the entire Federal criminal justice system; the power to sell arms around the world, to deploy millions of American soldiers, to negotiate peace treaties.

We give him these powers--the Constitution gives the President these powers--so that he uses them on our behalf, to deploy that vast power of the American Presidency to increase our quality of life, to protect the American people. We place immense trust in the President not to abuse these incredible authorities that are given to him.

But Donald Trump is abusing that authority in ways that, honestly, shock the conscience. Donald Trump is using the power of his office not to help or protect us but to enrich himself and his family. He is doing it publicly, brazenly, out in the open. He is, in effect, daring us-- specifically, daring the legislative branch, the coequal branch--to stop him.

Nearly 3 weeks ago, news broke that the White House had dialed up one of our key allies in the Middle East, the Government of Qatar, and it asked that the Qataris give the President a luxury jet that is reportedly worth upward of $400 million.

Now, the nicest jet that I have ever been on is Air Force One, and it is really nice. But the jet that Trump wants to make Air Force One-- that he is asking for from the Qataris--makes Air Force One, the current version, look like a tenement house. The Qatari jet that he is asking for, its interior is designed by a famed French designer, complete with a flowing grand staircase, sculpted ceilings, plush carpeting, leather couches, and gold furnishings. The plane has been called the world's most luxurious private jet. It includes nine bathrooms, five kitchens, swanky lounges, and a master bedroom suite.

The arrangement that Trump proposed to the Qataris would briefly pass the jet through U.S. Government hands--but only, as reported, for just a year or two--before it would end up belonging personally to Donald Trump. The U.S. Government would essentially be a straw purchaser. The real owner of the jet, for all practical purposes, would be Donald Trump.

Now, this kind of gift, a $400 million luxury jet, has no precedent in American history. No President has ever asked for--never mind been given--a $400 million gift from a foreign nation. Why? Well, because Presidents know that that is crossing a line; that is a massive abuse of their power.

The leverage that Presidents have over other countries that they could use to ask for millions of dollars in gifts, it is supposed to be used to benefit the Nation's security, not to enrich themselves. But, also, it is just illegal. There is a very specific clause in the Constitution that forbids this kind of gift from a foreign government to a President, and this body is supposed to be in charge of helping to enforce the Constitution. Our Founders wrote that clause into the Constitution because they worried about this exact situation, where a President is using his authority, like a Monarch or a King, to make himself the richest person in the world.

Now, the Qatari Government feels like it had little choice but to say yes when asked for this $400 million gift--again, briefly to the U.S. Government but really, for all practical purposes, to the President. They felt like they had no choice precisely because an American President has so much power; they have so much leverage, especially over a vulnerable country in the Middle East.

In this case, Qatar really needs to keep the United States on its side. Middle East politics, they shift really quickly, and during Trump's first term, when the Qataris were not close to Trump, they paid a price. They found themselves badly and dangerously isolated in the region. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, if you remember, effectively ganged up to blockade Qatar, and Trump gave that move implicit consent.

So Qatar, frankly, is willing to pay a very high price to avoid that fate again. But Qatar also has things that it wants from the United States. No Middle East country has ever been allowed to buy MQ-9 Reaper drones. These are the most lethal armed drones that America makes. We have previously judged that the region is just too volatile to allow any nation to possess the Reaper, and, arguably, there is an arms controls regime that doesn't allow us to transfer that technology.

But Qatar wanted to break that precedent. Of course, they did. They wanted to be the first nation to have the Reaper technology, and Trump seemed willing to go along. So a $400 million gift to the President-- again, that the President was asking for--is a relatively small price to pay for that kind of military edge over your rivals in the region.

But there was one more reason that Qatar had no choice but to give Trump--or, at least, they felt they had no choice but to give Trump-- this wildly illegal gift: because Trump had made it clear to the whole region, to the whole of the Gulf region in the Middle East, that he was for sale and that preferential American treatment was for sale and that if Qatar didn't pay, another country would.

Qatar wasn't going to be protected, frankly, by a collective refusal of Trump's extortion in the region, and they had only to look next door to the United Arab Emirates to see how high the price was getting to win Trump's affection. At the exact moment that Trump was leaning on Qatar to give him the luxury plane, he was also leaning on UAE to give him not a $400 million gift but a $2 billion gift.

And he didn't have to lean hard. Just before the Qataris committed to give Trump the plane, an investment firm backed by the Emirati Government and chaired by the Emirati Government's National Security Advisor shocked the world and announced that it would use Trump's brand new stablecoin--this is a form of cryptocurrency--in a $2 billion investment deal that this investment fund, essentially an arm of the UAE Government, was doing. And because of that $2 billion deal, overnight Trump's stablecoin became one of the five largest stablecoins in the world--massively inflating the President's wealth due to this one single investment.

Now, this wasn't an ordinary investment decision. Out of all of the stablecoin companies in the world, the Emiratis chose what, at the time, was a brandnew, relatively small crypto company run by two people who had very little background in the industry. Why? To put money directly into the pocket of Donald Trump.

On the website of World Liberty Financial--that is the company that is issuing the Trump coin--they don't hide the fact that this isn't the Trump kids that own the business.

On the website it states, 60 percent of this company, World Liberty Financial, is owned by an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump.

But it gets even more corrupt because World Liberty Financial's other cofounder is a guy named Zach Witkoff, who, not coincidentally, is the son of Steve Witkoff, Trump's top Middle East adviser. The Trumps could have picked anybody in the world to run his stablecoin business with, but they chose the son of the Middle East envoy just so that when they were going around asking for money in the region, it was crystal clear that if you were doing business with World Liberty Financial, you were doing business with the people in the Trump administration who make all the decisions about the Middle East.

So in one fell swoop, the Emiratis can put money into the family that controls the White House and the family that deploys and decides Middle East policy.

Now, just like the Qataris, the Emiratis want something in return too. Their ask was for the United States to remove restrictions on selling the most advanced American-made computer chips to the UAE. The restrictions have been in place under Republican and Democratic administrations for a really good reason: The UAE has a very close--too close--relationship with China, and the United States has always, rightly, worried that if we gave advanced technology to UAE, it would pretty quickly potentially fall into the hands of the Chinese. Now, this would be very bad, especially regarding these microchips--these computer chips--because these chips power the most advanced and proprietary American AI systems. Losing these chips to China could cost us the lead to China on the global AI race.

The UAE also wanted the United States to look the other way while they helped fund a death-spiral civil war in Sudan. The UAE is the main supplier of weapons to the worst of the two parties that are involved in the brutal, catastrophic, deadly civil war in Sudan.

And they want the United States to keep giving them weapons--most recently asking for a resupply of Chinook helicopters, even as they use their military prowess to destroy Sudan.

The end of this chapter of the story will not shock you. In coordination with the $400 million luxury plane and the $2 billion investment in Trump crypto, Qatar got signoff on buying the Reaper drones, and Steve Witkoff--father of the co-owner of World Liberty Financial--marched over to UAE right before the President was showing up himself and announced that the United States would, in fact, magically, lift those restrictions on the microchips. And just as unsurprisingly, Trump announced he will sell the Chinooks to Abu Dhabi, with no requirement that they stop fueling the war in Sudan.

The blatant exchange of U.S. national security secrets, our most sensitive drone technology, and our most sensitive chip technology in exchange for cash into Donald Trump's pocket is perhaps the most brazenly corrupt act in the history of the American Presidency, and we cannot normalize it just because he is doing it out in the open in public.

The Senate--the Senate--which is given the responsibility by the Constitution to be a coequal branch with the President--we have independent responsibility to uphold and protect the Constitution to set American foreign policy. We cannot pretend this is not happening. We cannot look the other way while the entire moral foundation of our foreign policy is being shattered.

Republicans can't ignore this just because the President is their party's leader. We have that independent obligation to protect the Constitution, which clearly says that these gifts are illegal, whether they are going to a Democratic President or a Republican President.

We have a responsibility to our taxpayers to stop a President from immorally enriching himself using the power we give him to help himself instead of helping us.

What makes this moment so dangerous is that both UAE and Qatar-- especially Qatar--are key partners of the United States. They aren't our adversaries. They are our allies. They are imperfect allies, but they are our allies.

In fact, I have been down on this floor in the past arguing on behalf of Qatar and the United States-Qatar relationship when other Senators have tried to denigrate the Qataris' contributions to regional peace. The Qataris have been a critical partner on so many important issues. It is worth saying that.

There is no way that we would have been able to evacuate 124,000 people from Afghanistan on the eve of the Taliban takeover without Qatar's help. The Qataris today host thousands of U.S. troops at Al Udeid Air Force Base, the largest base in the region.

The Qataris are critical mediators who have helped us send back- channel messages to secure the release of American hostages or negotiate peace deals. There is no question that Qatar is a country that helps stabilize the region and often is indispensable in protecting U.S. interests overseas.

So I want to cultivate and strengthen that important relationship. I honor the work the United States and the UAE do all around the region to try to

track down and hold accountable terrorists. These are real partnerships.

But our relationship with Qatar and the UAE, it can't be a corrupt relationship. We can't sell drones to Qatar--our friend--if our friend is willing to take part in Trump's corruption. We cannot sell weapons to the UAE--our ally--if our ally is willing to take part in Trump's corruption.

We will have a chance this week to make this clear; that the U.S. Senate will not facilitate--will not grease the wheels of Trump's corruption of our foreign policy.

We can do that by voting to block these two arms sales to Qatar and to the UAE--not permanently but until both countries commit to deny Trump's requests for personal enrichment as part of the bilateral relationship.

That is why Senators Van Hollen, Kaine, Schatz, and Sanders have joined me in two resolutions of disapproval for those Reaper drone sales and the Chinook sale, and we will have a vote on these two resolutions as early as this week.

President Trump has declared that U.S. foreign policy is for sale, and the opening bids from two of the richest nations in the world is a $2 billion investment in Trump's crypto company from the UAE and a $400 million luxury plane essentially for the President's permanent personal use.

At the exact same moment that Trump is trying to push a bill through this Congress that is going to ruin a lot of people's lives--cutting off their healthcare or leaving kids without food at night--he is making himself even richer by trading American national security policy for gifts and, to make it worse, trading away U.S. national security secrets in exchange.

The net result is an American public that is poorer and weaker and less secure and a President who is richer. It is corrupt. It is corrupt. We have never ever in the history of this country allowed for a President to do this. Never in the 250 years that our Republic has been on the Earth has a President ever asked another nation to enrich himself in this way in exchange for preferential treatment from the U.S. taxpayers.

If you are Republican or Democratic Senator, you have to see this as unprecedented, as terrible for our Nation, as corruption. American foreign policy should not be for sale. If we let these arms sales go through, we are greasing the wheels of that corruption. If we vote for these resolutions of disapproval, at least we have a shot to stop it.

I yield the floor.

I am going to object, but I think the Senator has some remarks.

Mr. President, I object.

I will let the Senator explain the reasons for the motion he is making, and afterward, I will comment on the reasons for my objection.

Mr. President, thank you. I appreciate the Senator's remarks. I look forward to getting to know him as a new colleague.

But let me explain to the Senator why I am objecting. I abhor attacks on police officers--all police officers--and no matter the motive. But that is not the position of Republicans in the Senate.

On the day that President Trump was sworn into office, he pardoned scores of violent felons who beat police officers, and my Republican colleagues--almost to a Member--cheered him on and supported him. Donald Trump pardoned David Dempsey who, on January 6, beat Capitol and DC Police officers with his hands, feet, flagpole, crutches, broken pieces of furniture--anything else that he could find that could be used as a weapon. He teamed up with another rioter who pulled back one police officer's gas mask while Dempsey sprayed pepper spray in his eyes. He hit another police officer over the head with a metal crutch, with so much force that it cracked the protective shield of the officer's gas mask, causing him to collapse as his ears started ringing.

Donald Trump also pardoned D.J. Rodriguez.

On January 6, Rodriguez pushed through the crowds, found a police officer and put a Taser to his head. When the police officer screamed out in pain and recoiled from the shock, Rodriguez attacked him again, Tasering him this time in the neck. The officer was done. He collapsed unconscious. Another officer pulled his lifeless body to safety. That attack ended that officer's career.

Thomas Webster was pardoned by Donald Trump too. Webster attacked police officers with a flagpole. He tackled one officer to the ground, dragged him by the helmet, ripped off his gas mask to allow tear gas to seep inside, and held the officer down so other rioters could brutally kick him.

I oppose all violence against all police officers. So I don't understand why there seems to be an exemption for the violence that was perpetrated against the officers who protect us.

Your bill proposes a new mandatory minimum for assaults against police officers that you are not applying to the officers who beat the people who protect us. They were let out of jail free--D.J. Rodriguez, David Dempsey, Thomas Webster. Republicans cheered as they were let out of jail before their sentence was completed.

So if we are serious about protecting the police officers, we need to protect all police officers. If police officers are protecting Democrats--because that is who those rioters were here to kill or here to hurt--then those assaults should matter. If Donald Trump says the assault is OK, that shouldn't matter.

Yes, I have stood by the side of the families of slain or injured police officers. But think about the families of those officers who were brutally beaten here at the Capitol. Think about the officer who was dragged unconscious from the site. His attacker was let out of jail--no mandatory minimum.

Politics shouldn't have anything to do with our collective decision to stand up against attacks on police officers. So I offer this objection because I just don't feel like this bill is on the level until we have agreement in this Chamber that President Trump doesn't get to decide which attacks on police officers we care about and which ones we don't.

We shouldn't pass this bill until Republicans make it clear that they oppose all attacks on police, no exceptions--no exceptions, no exemptions.

Republicans need to loudly oppose President Trump's pardons because if you don't, you are sending a message that if you are carrying out attacks on police officers in the name of President Trump's political agenda or you are carrying out attacks on police officers who are defending Democrats, those attacks might end up being pardoned or excused. And our Nation just fades away. What makes our Nation great fades away if violence is OK if it is in service of a particular political agenda or if the attacks are in service of the President.

So I do take attacks against our police officers seriously, but I don't think we should move forward legislation that implicitly has exemptions in it. So let's get on the same page. Let's come to a collective decision as a body that we care about all violence against police officers. Let's hear every Member of this body condemn President Trump's pardons. Let's come to the conclusion that politics should never play a role in enforcing our laws against police violence.

I look forward to working with the Senator on that endeavor, and if we can come to that conclusion jointly as a body, then I look forward to working with him on this legislation.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield?

Mr. President, you are right. The Senator from Ohio was not here on January 6, and your political affiliation mattered that day. It mattered that day. Those rioters were here to harm not allies of President Trump but opponents of President Trump. They had the gallows outside with Mike Pence's name on it. They were searching the halls of the Capitol for people who opposed Donald Trump's agenda.

So I agree with you that it would be wonderful and lovely to remove this debate from politics, but on that day--on that day--there were bad people here, seeking to do violence based upon the political affiliations of people in this building; and the reason that they were pardoned was that President Trump supported the violence so long as it was in his name. So, yes, it does matter what happened not just on that day but when Trump issued the pardons because it provides this message of endorsement to violence so long as it is violence that Donald Trump supports. That puts officers in jeopardy all over the country if the potential perpetrators of violence against police officers have an idea in their heads that, if they are doing it in support of Donald Trump, they have a pretty good chance to get away with it. I don't think anyone who assaults a police officer should get out of jail early.

So let me put the question to you. Maybe we can find common ground right now. I recited to you the violence that was perpetrated on police officers here by three specific rioters. Do you support Donald Trump's decision to let those three individuals out of jail early? I think it would be important for you as a Republican Member to say that you oppose Donald Trump's decision to let those perpetrators out of jail early, and we could have common cause today in that we both oppose all early releases of individuals who attack police officers. So do you agree with me that it was wrong to release those three individuals early from prison?

I understand he has that power. Regardless of whether he has that power, do you agree with his decision?

Let's have common cause right now.

Let's decide it was not OK for Donald Trump to let the people who brutally beat police officers out of jail early. Let's find common cause right now. That would be in service of preventing violence against police officers in the future because we could make it clear-- you and I could make it clear right now--that it doesn't matter whether you are committing violence in the name of Donald Trump or not. It is wrong if you commit violence against police officers. Why can't you just agree with that?

Just say yes.

I apologize.

Mr. President, I understand the Senator is new. I will remind him you are not allowed to impugn the motives of Members of the Senate.

Listen, I think it is unfortunate that you cannot and other Republicans cannot say that the individuals who beat the living hell out of the police officers who protect us should not have gotten out of jail free. I don't think that is a separate issue from the broader concern about protecting police officers from violence because I think what you have done in endorsing violence, as long as it is perpetrated in the name of a political agenda, is to make every police officer in this country less safe and to make all of us less safe as well.

So I think, if we want to come together around an agenda to protect members of law enforcement, then, yes, it is very important--it is very important--for the future protection of the law enforcement officers, the police officers who protect us, to hear loudly from Republicans that there is no exception--no exception--to the premise that you will serve a long prison sentence if you commit an assault on a police officer.

So I look forward to continuing this dialogue with my colleague. I admit that we do not know each other. Maybe we can find common ground here, but this is not a small issue. The normalization of political violence in this country could be the defining issue of the next decade, and I think that my Republican colleagues will rue the day that they looked the other way when Donald Trump said that it was OK to beat police officers over the head with flag poles, to Taser them to the point that they were unconscious just because you were serving President Trump's political agenda. That is not a side issue. That is not a fringe issue. That issue of endorsement of political violence may be central to the question of whether this democracy survives.

I know we have a pending vote and our colleagues are eager to get home, and I look forward to continuing the conversation with my colleague.

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

Mr. President, usually, public corruption happens in secret. The politicians that do it know it is wrong to accept money in exchange for favorable government treatment, and so they hide it until they are found out.

A textbook example would be Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, who in the 1990s was quietly taking bribes from businessmen who wanted to get licenses for riverboat casinos.

In the late 1990s, Edwards was convicted of the crimes of extortion, racketeering, and money laundering. The way in which he was doing it was like out of a movie. In one instance, a businessman handed the Governor a suitcase full of $100 bills, totaling $400,000--all in order to get a 6-to-0 commission ruling in favor of his casino. Eventually, as with most all corrupt officials who are taking money privately, Edwards was discovered, he was disgraced, and he went to jail.

As we speak, our President Donald Trump is going to the Middle East on a public corruption tour. He is no less corrupt than Edwin Edwards of Louisiana. In fact, he is way more corrupt. Edwin Edwards took $400,000. Well, in the Middle East, Donald Trump will cement deals totaling in the billions in exchange for favorable treatment by the U.S. Federal Government for these Gulf countries.

The key difference is that Donald Trump isn't hiding it like other corrupt officials are. He is not ashamed. He is not doing it in secret. His corruption is wildly public, and his hope is that by doing it publicly, he can con the American people into thinking that it is not corruption because he is not hiding it. But what he is doing, in reality, is no different than any other corrupt public official who does it in private other than the fact that Trump's corruption, his foreign policy corruption, is just so much bigger in scope and the impact it has on the American people than anything a corrupt mayor or a corrupt Governor may have done.

Trump's first major foreign trip--and he just landed--is to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE--not because these are our most important allies in the world, not because these are the most important countries in the world, not because he is going there to talk about making the Middle East more safe and more secure--no. His first trip is to these three countries because these are the three countries that have agreed to pay Donald Trump money. Donald Trump is going to collect tribute, and it is all just out in the open.

Frankly, it was pretty easy to see this coming.

Recent former Presidents, Republicans and Democrats, have always very seriously and studiously avoided even the appearance of a conflict of interest. President Bush placed his assets into a qualified blind trust where investment decisions were made without his knowledge or input. Both Biden and Obama divested all of their assets except for cash and mutual funds. They didn't enter into any new business ventures while in the White House.

In contrast, Trump has refused to abide by these standard ethics rules. His family runs his business, but nobody honestly believes that the kids are really in charge. President Trump is still calling the shots. His interests are not in a blind trust. He has made no pledge that he won't do new deals, even with foreign entities, while he is in office. In fact, he is doing deals seemingly every single week. He is open for business, and every foreign government knows it. In fact, it appears that right now, the Gulf States are trying to outdo each other to up the price of buying an American President. And because Trump is greedy and he is insecure, he wants to fit in with the billionaire class, he is traveling the region with his hat out for further solicitations.

So let's ask: What is the going rate right now for a Gulf country to buy access to Donald Trump, to get favorable

treatment from the Federal Government?

For Qatar, we recently found out it is a $400 million luxury plane. This plane has been opulently configured for royal use. It is not a gift to the U.S. Government; it is a personal gift to the President. The terms of the arrangement apparently include a stipulation that after Trump leaves office, it will be transferred to Trump, to his Presidential library, which means Trump gets the so-called floating palace for himself.

This is outrageous. We have never seen anything like this before in American history--a foreign government gifting a $400 million luxury plane to the President of the United States.

This is spelled out as blatantly unconstitutional by our Founding Fathers. They wrote into the Constitution a specific clause called the emoluments clause, which prohibits Federal officeholders from accepting gifts from any King, Prince, or foreign state without the consent of Congress. Like, how much clearer could it be? It is unconstitutional. It is illegal. The Founding Fathers knew it was evil to have Members of Congress or the President of the United States accepting expensive gifts from a foreign nation that, in exchange, wants favors from the U.S. Government. Donald Trump's acceptance of the luxury plane from a foreign monarch is basically the corruption that our Founding Fathers were seeking to prevent.

But that is not all he is getting from Qatar. The Trump Organization recently signed a $5.5 billion golf course and real estate deal with DarGlobal and Qatari Diar, a firm established by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund--$5.5 billion while Trump is in office.

It would have been unthinkable for any previous President to enter into a $5.5 billion business deal with anybody--never mind a foreign government--while they are in office, and it still should be unthinkable.

Now, Qatar is a U.S. ally. It is a very important ally. But they are a complicated country. They have their own interests, some of which don't overlap with ours. A foreign government like Qatar should not have a $5 billion chit hanging over the head of a sitting U.S. President, and they should not be gifting him a $400 million plane. That should kind of go without saying.

For Saudi Arabia, the price is also in the billions. Soon after leaving the White House in Trump's first term, his son-in-law Jared Kushner created a private equity firm and got a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia. The board of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund questioned whether this was smart, to invest that much money in a totally unproven fund, but the Saudi Crown Prince himself overruled the board, undoubtedly seeing the political advantage of investing directly with the Trump family.

But this was only the beginning. The Trump family has put things into overdrive during the second term. Within his first 3 weeks of office, Trump convened a meeting at the White House with the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund--not to discuss matters of state, but to negotiate a deal between the PGA and the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour. Do you want to know why? To try to bring PGA tournaments back to Trump golf courses. Trump convened a meeting in the White House with the Saudis in order to enrich himself.

In addition to the $5 billion Qatar real estate deal, the Trump organization is also partnering with a Saudi firm on a $1 billion Trump-branded hotel and tower in Dubai. The property's website--this is, like, unbelievable. The property's website--this is a Trump- financed property, along with a Saudi investment fund--offers free 10- year ``golden visas'' to the United States, hinting at the opportunity for investors in Trump's property to buy residency in the United States and a pathway to citizenship. For the UAE, the price is somewhere north of $2 billion. Last week, Eric Trump and World Liberty Financial cofounder Zach Witkoff spoke at a conference in Dubai on crypto called

Mr. President, I want to come to the floor today to talk about a success story but, potentially, a success story interrupted.

Back in 2022, we all were shocked to watch news playing out during an afternoon that we were here, working in the Senate, of another mass shooting--this one of just unthinkable size and scope--in Uvalde, TX. I was actually sitting in the Presiding Officer's chair when I saw word of the shooting scroll across my smartphone screen.

Gratefully, in the wake of that shooting, a group of us--Republicans and Democrats--were able to come together and set aside the differences that we had and still have on the issue of gun violence in this country. We decided not to argue about an assault weapons ban, for instance. Instead, we decided to work on finding the least common denominator, as we called it, and tried to find a set of commonsense changes to our gun laws and commonsense investments in our communities that would, hopefully, together, try to put a downward pressure on what, up until then, had been annual spiking rates of homicides and mass shootings.

It is just true that, in this country, you are 10 times more likely to be shot in your school, in your neighborhood, at a movie theater than you are in any other high-income, developed nation. That is a choice. That is not bad luck. That is not happenstance. That is because, in America, we decide to have a ton of weapons in the hands of very dangerous people. We also don't spend enough time trying to unwind some of the reasons young people, in particular, get into lives of really risky and potentially violent behavior.

So we came together in 2022, and we passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. It was a big bipartisan vote. It wasn't close. The final tally was 65 to 33, with nearly two-thirds of the Senate voting in favor of this commonsense gun safety measure. It wasn't anything close to what I see as being necessary in order to tackle this epidemic in this country, but it was significant. It was five changes in gun laws: supporting State red flag laws; stopping domestic abusers from getting their hands on guns; putting in a short but meaningful waiting period when young people are hastily buying an assault weapon; making it easier for law enforcement to go after drug trafficking rings. It was five meaningful changes, but it was also a big investment, a big investment in the kind of services that can help interrupt violence.

A lot of my Republican friends said: You know, we don't believe it is the guns. We think it is mental illness.

Well, I don't agree, but this is how you put together a compromise. So we passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which included a landmark $14 billion investment, most of it in mental health, most of it directed toward kids' school-based mental health, but there were also significant investments in school safety--just hardening schools to make it harder for a shooter to get inside and community anti-gun violence initiatives, which is the work that local community groups are doing in North Carolina and Connecticut and all across the country to just try to wrap services around people who might be at risk of gun violence or to stop that cycle of violence once the first shooting happens.

So we passed this legislation, and we crossed our fingers. We said: Let's hope that we are right and that these changes in gun laws and these investments we are making in our communities will make a difference.

Well, what happened after we passed that law was absolutely stunning: the biggest 2-year decline in gun violence in the history of recorded statistics in the United States of America. That is extraordinary. That is extraordinary. I am not going to sit here and claim that the entire reason was the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, but it was a big part of the reason because we did make it harder for bad people to get their hands on guns. We did deliver the kinds of services that are necessary. You are seeing this downward trajectory, but let me just put the numbers on it.

In 2023, there were 659 mass shootings in America. In 2024, there were 500. That is a 24-percent, 1-year decline in mass shootings. That means that there were 160 mass shootings that didn't happen and 160 communities that were not terrorized in 2024. And this bill had a lot to do with it. Overall gun deaths went down from 2023 to 2024 from 19,000 to 16,700. That was a 12-percent reduction. We have never in this country's history seen 1-year declines in gun homicides in the neighborhood of 12 percent. Certain cities saw astronomical declines. In Hartford, we saw a 39-percent drop in homicides from 2023 to 2024. This year--this year, 2025--Hartford is on track to have the lowest recorded instances of gun violence--those are homicides and nonfatal shootings--since 2006. New Haven saw a 39-percent drop in homicides. As I think I said, overall, in Connecticut, we had 167 homicides in 2023. In 2024, we had 63. It is wild.

This happened in Baltimore, and this happened in Chicago. In most of the major cities in this country and in rural areas as well, we saw this dramatic, dramatic decline. So it is just something to celebrate because it is not easy to get that kind of consensus. It is not easy to get that kind of consensus, and we should celebrate the fact that there are literally thousands of people--largely young men--who are alive today because of the bill that we passed.

But this progress is in threat of being interrupted, and the reason is that the Trump administration has reversed course. I want to talk specifically about how they are undoing the progress of this bill, but their attempt to try to reverse the broader progress that we have made on reducing gun violence is pretty comprehensive. Let me just give you a handful of the ways in which the Trump administration is trying to make our communities less safe.

First, they closed the Office of Gun Violence Prevention. This was something the Biden administration set up to try to better implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. This wasn't a terribly political office. It was just trying to coordinate all the work being done across Agencies to reduce violence in our communities. Trump would have taken this office in a different direction, but he didn't. He just shuttered it. There is no Office of Gun Violence Prevention anymore in the Federal Government.

On March 20, the administration announced that they are going to start a process of restoring firearms rights to individuals who have had them taken away because they had serious criminal records. This is likely illegal.

There is an appropriations bill rider that says the ATF can't do this, but the message was sent: We actually think that dangerous people should be able to get their gun rights back.

That same day, Trump's Department of Justice filed a motion in Federal court, trying to overturn a decision to say that silencers are not protected by the Second Amendment, trying to say that no State legislature could ban or regulate the use of silencers, and silencers are broadly used by killers, by criminals who are trying to hide the fact that they are engaged in criminal, lethal conduct.

On April 7, the DOJ announced that it was repealing a policy from the Biden administration that said simply this: If you are a gun dealer and you are engaged in illegal conduct, we are going to pull your license, and we are not going to give you two or three or four shots. We are going to have a zero tolerance policy for gun dealers who are selling guns on to the black market. That is a policy most Americans would see as common sense, but the DOJ announced that it was going to let off the hook gun dealers who are violating the laws.

Now, throughout the last 100 days, the Trump administration has been sending all sorts of signals that they are deprioritizing the work of the ATF. Most recently, on April 9, they announced that the Army Secretary would now be the acting head of ATF. This was basically telling ATF agents: We don't care about your work. We are not going to have a full-time ATF head. We are putting somebody with a big, other important job in charge of the ATF. You are not going to have any real supervision or direction.

It was just a signal of the deprioritization of the enforcement of our gun laws that caused, the next day, the second highest ranking official at the ATF, who had served admirably for 35 years, to resign in protest.

Then, maybe most unconscionably and most cruelly, just a few days ago, the ATF took down the memorial wall dedicated to victims of gun violence. I mean, there were names up there, tributes to moms and dads, brothers and sisters who had been killed in episodes of gun violence. That was really important to hundreds of families out there who knew that their loved ones' names were part of that wall. Now the wall comes down. For what? Just to send another signal that the administration doesn't care about attacking gun violence.

But I really wanted to come to the floor today to talk about the two most important assaults that the Trump administration has made on our work to try to keep our communities safe. Those are the twin announcements that the administration made that they were going to end two of the key streams of funding for community groups in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

First, the administration announced it was ending $1 billion in grants under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to invest in school mental health and then that they were ending $800 million of DOJ grants to try to drive down violence through supporting community efforts to do that work.

This makes no sense. I understand we have a difference. The President and I have a difference on what our gun laws should be. But there is consensus--I thought there was consensus--that we should support investment in mental health. I thought there was a consensus that we all believed that there were good community groups that were doing totally apolitical work, not related at all to gun laws, to try to interrupt cycles of violence.

The reason that these numbers have been going down is not just the changes in gun laws. The reason that our communities are safer all across the country is that we are finally putting real money into school-based mental health, into children's mental health, and into the groups in our communities that are keeping kids alive.

In Oakland, they have seen a stunning 32-percent drop in homicides, and it is a result of groups like Youth Alive!. This is a nonprofit that is working to prevent and disrupt the cycle of gun violence. So you go into a community, you go into a place where a shooting has happened, and you do work with the victim of that incident to make sure that it doesn't become a cycle of violence.

These are often called hospital-based violence intervention programs. When there is a shooting, you have a social worker or a community anti- gun violence worker that goes to the hospital. That is often when the communities are the most angry, the friends of that victim may be planning for revenge, and you do the work to stop that cycle of violence.

It was working in Oakland. Youth Alive! was preventing gun violence. Last year, of the 113 clients they served, only 1 of them was injured a second time. Yet, in the middle of a 3-year $2 million grant that Youth Alive! was getting, it was suspended, terminated. They are going to have to lay off their staff. That program is being shut down in Oakland. And I will just tell you, I would bet you homicides are going to start going back up in Oakland.

Baltimore has seen a similar massive decline in gun violence, a 43- percent reduction since 2010--what a success story in Baltimore, one of the most violent communities in terms of rates of gun violence in the country, a 43-percent decline.

Center for Hope is a group in Baltimore that provides prevention and healing services for children who have been the witnesses or victims of gun violence. They were getting, again, a $2 million grant to work with the victims of gun violence to try to heal those communities and, again, stop that cycle of retributive violence that often happens in places like Baltimore.

Donald Trump cut their grant. So in the middle of the grant, they are losing $1.2 million, and they are going to have to lay off 7 employees.

Center for Hope runs 6 of the city's 10 Safe Streets sites. These operate in the pockets of Baltimore where you see the most shootings. Because of these Center for Hope sites--these Safe Streets sites-- between 2023 and 2024, four of the sites run by the Center for Hope saw zero homicides. Now they are having to lay off people. Guess what is going to happen. Those shootings are going to go up again.

We had to work really hard to find this consensus on a very difficult issue. It is illegal, what the President has done. He is not allowed, under the Constitution, to decide unilaterally to cancel spending that has been authorized and appropriated by Congress. So maybe the first and most important thing to say about what the President has done to cancel mental health grants and anti-violence grants is that it is illegal. He can't do it, and it is likely that a court will turn these grants back on.

But it is also such bad policy. It is cruel and inhumane, but it is also illogical. We literally are seeing the fruits of the labor of these groups, and not just in saving a life or two. You are talking about a 30- and 40-percent reduction in violence in these cities. And what will happen is unmistakable. You stop funding these groups that are doing the mental health work in the schools, that are doing the anti-gun violence work, and these rates will start to go back up again.

That is illogical, but it is cruel as well because what the President is doing, for instance, in cutting off the school mental health grants is that he is cutting off existing grants. It is not that he is announcing: I am not giving any new grants.

There are schools all across this country that have set up new mental health clinics because of the grants they got. They were 5-year grants, and 1 or 2 or 3 years into those grants, Donald Trump is shutting those programs down. So there are literally going to be thousands of children--traumatized children, children with serious mental illness, with cycles and histories of abuse in their households--who have created this relationship with an adult--this adult who is helping them address their potential tendency to act out in violent ways due to their mental illness, their trauma. And one day, these kids are going to show up at school, and that adult is going to be gone. That trusted adult that had created that bond, that relationship that is helping that child, that is keeping that school safe--that relationship, that bond is destroyed because in cutting these grants off with no warning, there is no way, in the middle of a school year, for a school mental health clinic to find the money under the mattress.

It is illogical. It is going to drive up gun violence rates. And it is cruel to

our poorest and most at-risk communities and to the kids--and to the kids--the traumatized kids, the kids with serious mental illness, the kids that we should think first about when we wake up in the morning.

I guess the final thing to say is this: We are putting ourselves out of business. We are putting ourselves out of business. What is the point of passing a law by a 65-to-33 vote if the President of the United States can just ignore it? As I said, that is illegal, and the courts will likely tell him: You can't shut off the funding that we appropriated and authorized.

This should matter to Republicans and Democrats. Every single one of my Republican colleagues worked really hard to get this job, worked really hard to become a U.S. Senator. Those of us who worked on these bipartisan pieces of legislation worked really hard to pass them. What is the point of running for the U.S. Senate, what is the point of working to forge this compromise if the President can just ignore it?

By the way, if Donald Trump gets away with it, mark my words, a Democratic President will do the same thing. If this becomes standard practice, if our laws just become advisory, then there is no reason for any of us to show up any longer. Why do you work so hard, why do you care so much about getting to this place if you don't care when the President just ignores the laws that we pass?

It is very hard to find consensus here, especially on an issue as important and as politically sensitive as gun violence. So when we do find that consensus, on behalf of the kids and the families out there who are begging us to work together to save lives, we should protect that consensus.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, my colleagues, you are going to hear a lot of stories about the first 100 days of President Trump's second Presidency, and, indeed, there are a lot of stories.

There is a story of incompetence. We are dealing with multiple measles outbreaks all across the country.

There is a story about abdicating our responsibility to lead around the world. Vladimir Putin is laughing at us as Trump goes about the business of handing Ukraine to a brutal Kremlin dictator.

There is a story of transferring wealth from the poor and the middle class, through massive cuts to Medicaid, to the very, very wealthy, who are asking for another massive tax cut.

But I would argue that the most important story to tell is a story of corruption--a story of mind-blowing, massive, scalable corruption. That story is important because we are watching the theft of taxpayer money by the decision of the Republican Party to look the other way as Donald Trump essentially monetizes, at scale, the White House and the powers given to him by the Constitution and the American people in order to enrich himself and his friends.

And if we don't tell this story and if we don't mount a national, bipartisan, apolitical resistance to this thievery, to this corruption, and it becomes normalized as just a part of doing business in America, a normal facet of residence in the White House, then shame on us because our democracy will not survive this level of corruption, grift, and graft.

So I am going to try to tell the story really quickly. I have got two charts, and this is hard to read. These words are really small because, you know, over the course of 100 days, there are 40, 50, 60 different individual acts of precedent-breaking corruption.

And that is intentional, because what President Trump is trying to do is engage in so much public corruption that you just become normalized to it, that you stop paying attention to the corruption because is it-- can it be--corruption if it is just playing out in public? He is trying to make you think that this stuff happens all the time behind the scenes, and, now, all that is different is that you are seeing it publicly.

But that is not true. This is not, actually, how government works, and I refuse to accept that, just because the corruption is happening in public, in front of the cameras for everybody to see, we should accept it.

OK, I am going to try to do this: I am going to try to do this as quickly as possible. I am just going to highlight for you maybe the 40 most egregious examples of corruption in the first 100 days, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So, on January 6--this is before Trump is even sworn in--Amazon, which has a ton of business before the incoming Trump White House, pays $40 million to the Trump family to license a documentary, a series, about Melania Trump--just a cash payment from a company that has huge interests before the incoming White House to the Trump family.

On January 17, a few days before Trump is sworn in, maybe the most corrupt act in the history of the White House: This is the creation of the Trump meme coin. This is just a backdoor way for anybody with business before the Trump administration to send him millions of dollars in total secret.

Trump doesn't disclose who buys the coin. He launders his income from the coin through an unregulated Chinese exchange. He promotes the coin on his social media feeds.

In the first minute of trading, one buyer--and what we know is, this was likely a Chinese individual--purchases 6 million coins, sending the price through the roof and immediately making a ton of money for Trump, who makes money off of every transaction. Trump knows who this person is, no doubt, but American citizens do not.

All right, on January 20, he is now sworn in, and he fulfills a campaign promise to the oil and gas industry. There is a report from the campaign

that said they came down to Mar-a-Lago, I think, and said: We will give you a billion dollars in campaign contributions.

This is not me alleging this. This is an open report.

The oil and gas industry says: We will give you a billion dollars in campaign contributions if you do what we want when you are sworn in.

And the day he is sworn in, Trump issues an Executive order gutting environmental rules so that the oil and gas industry can start making bigger amounts of money.

On January 25, Trump eliminates the inspectors general, the ethics officials in government, and whistleblower offices. It is a late-night purge; so you know it is fishy. On January 25, 17 inspectors general get fired, clearing the way for the President to engage in even more corruption--because that is what the inspectors general do: They sit in these Agencies, and they look for corruption.

Now, the inspectors general are gone. They are just gone. But that is not good enough because, on the same day, Trump fires the head of the Office of Special Counsel. Why would you do that? Well, that Office is an investigative and prosecutorial Office that works to end government and political corruption and protects government employees who become whistleblowers. That office is gone now, along with all of the whistleblowers.

Two days later, Trump illegally fires NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox. This effectively shuts down--illegally--the NLRB for a period of time. Why is that important? Because the guys who are standing behind Donald Trump on Inauguration Day, people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are being investigated at the moment by the NLRB for massive workplace violations. Now the NLRB is shut down--a big gift to the people who financed Donald Trump's inauguration and stood behind him to give him political endorsement and cover on his Inauguration Day.

On January 31, a trend begins. Enforcement actions are paused against Trump loyalists.

This is Representative Andy Ogles from Tennessee. He was being investigated for illegal or potentially illegal loans made to his 2022 campaign. But right after Representative Ogles introduces a bill to amend the Constitution to allow Trump to serve for a third term, what happens? Trump makes the investigation go away. As you will see, Trump's justice system will often look the other way if you cheat or steal but you are a friend of Donald Trump's.

At the same time, another of Trump's friends, his IRS nominee, Billy Long, gets his donors--almost all of them have direct interest before the IRS--to pay off his six-figure campaign debt. It is a fabulously corrupt thing to do, but it is just all normal now. So when Trump is showing you the way, then the folks who work for him follow suit.

All right. We will jump to February now, February 4. We are into, what, week 2 of the Trump White House. Trump hauls the PGA and the Saudi Government into the White House to broker an agreement between the two rival golf leagues so that Trump can make more money hosting golf tournaments. He is in business with one of these entities, the Saudi-owned LIV league.

In a normal world, the President of the United States wouldn't be in business with any foreign government, but the President is. And not only is that OK, but it is also apparently OK for him to bring the golf league that he is in business with into the White House and pressure the other golf league, the rival golf league, to cut a deal. And guess what happens? The PGA, which had long said they were not going to host events at Trump's courses, after being hauled into the White House, looking the President of the United States in the eye--somebody they clearly have to do business with--they announce that they are going to start allowing their tournaments to be held at Trump courses--big benefit to Donald Trump's personal bottom line.

On February 6, 2 days later, Trump ends the criminal enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Do you know what this is? You should. It requires people who are being paid by foreign governments to register. It is no longer going to be enforced. So now members of the Trump administration can get backdoor payments from foreign governments, and nobody is going to enforce the law.

This isn't theoretical. There were people who got arrested for doing this exact same thing--getting paid by foreign governments while working for the Trump administration in term one. He wants to make sure it is not a problem in term two, so he pauses enforcement of the actual act.

Four days later, Trump eliminates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is just a magnificent present to all of his billionaire enablers because this is the Agency that stops big businesses--banks, other financial firms--from ripping off consumers, and now it is just shut down.

The same day, DOJ drops charges against Eric Adams in a mind- blowingly public and brazen quid pro quo. Adams says he will pledge loyalty to Trump. He is going to support Trump's political priorities in New York City. Trump drops the corruption charges against Adams.

Just like the Ogles case, the door is now wide open to engage in corruption or criminality as long as you support Donald Trump.

The thing that makes this one so egregious is that Adams and the White House go on TV to announce the corrupt deal, and they don't hide it. They just say that Adams is now supporting Donald Trump, and we are now going to drop the charges against him. And everybody gets the message: There is a lot of stuff I can get away with as a corrupt official as long as I am in bed politically with Donald Trump.

On the same day, February 10, DOJ pauses enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This is the law that stops American companies from bribing foreign governments in order to get business. On February 10, Trump suspends enforcement of an antibribery statute, paving the way for his friends in corporate America to start bribing foreign governments again.

Two days later, the State Department forecasts that they are going to dramatically upscale the amount of money that they are going to send to Tesla. This is the first time that Elon Musk shows up in this story. By February 12, Elon Musk is pretty well embedded in the White House, and, guess what, the State Department is now going to spend $400 million for armored Teslas--its largest expected contract in the upcoming year.

On February 12, the same day, Musk infiltrates the Department of Labor and OSHA, giving him exclusive, secret access to labor law violation data against him and his competitors. It is unethical and corrupt, but this stuff is happening every single day.

A few days later, on February 15 and 16, Musk now starts really testing the limits of what his boss will let him get away with. He fires a specific set of regulators at the FDA that are reviewing one of his medical products, Neuralink. The message is clear: You got to do right by my applications or you risk getting the ax too.

Three days later, on February 19, Trump's new U.S. attorney for Washington, DC, Ed Martin, starts to use his government power to harass Trump's critics. He launches something called Operation Whirlwind, and he is pretty unapologetic about the fact that this is going to be an enforcement operation against anybody who just seeks to get in the way of DOGE. He doesn't say it is going after people who are acting illegally; he says anybody who tries to stop or protest or harass DOGE's work is now going to be the subject of Operation Whirlwind. He starts trolling critics of DOGE online. The U.S. attorney for DC is now just trolling DOGE critics online, obviously threatening criminal enforcement.

See what is happening here? We are 30 days into the administration, and everybody in Trump's world, including the supposedly independent U.S. attorneys, are getting the message that it is now part of your job if you work for Trump to use your government powers to either enrich yourself or Trump or to help Trump politically.

On February 21, 2 days later, the FCC drops a major investigation into a company called Robinhood. Why does this matter? You guessed it-- this firm donated $2 million to Trump's inauguration fund. Thirty days later, the SEC drops an investigation into that firm. Put a pin in that because you are going to hear stories like it over and over again.

Throughout February, we watched the rich guys that are surrounding Trump come up with new ways to monetize their positions.

Kash Patel is a perfect example. He is the nominee to head the FBI-- maybe the most important independent Bureau of the Federal Government-- and while he is going through that process, he is selling merchandise online, ranging from T-shirts to playing cards, with the proceeds supposedly going to whistleblowers' education and defamation cases.

On February 26, news breaks that the FAA is considering giving a $2.4 billion contract to Elon Musk's Starlink. But it is not like a regular contract that is up for bid; it is a contract that was already awarded to one of Musk's competitors, Verizon, and word leaks that the White House is thinking of just ripping the contract away from Verizon because Verizon is not a political supporter of Donald Trump in the way that Elon Musk is, and just giving it to Elon Musk.

Now, that doesn't happen as reported. The contract has not been canceled yet. But there are regular reports of the administration still relentlessly attacking Verizon in a clear attempt to try to undermine their contract.

On February 27, the next day, Trump drops a lawsuit against Capital One. Why does this matter? Capitol One donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund.

It is now just kind of automatic--you donate a big amount of money to Trump's inauguration, and you can ask him for something.

We are not done. That same day, the FCC drops a lawsuit against Coinbase. You have the story now. Coinbase donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. They are now told that it is OK to keep cheating consumers.

We are not done. On February 28, a day later, the DOJ announces that it would drop a complaint against SpaceX, Elon Musk's SpaceX, for labor discrimination.

Elon is like: Wait a second. All of these other big donors to your inauguration are getting out of jail free. I want my get-out-of-jail- free card as well.

He gets it from DOJ.

We are now into March. On March 1, a report breaks--this is maybe second to Coinbase, the most stunning act of corruption--on March 1, word breaks that Trump is selling meetings at Mar-a-Lago. On at least one occasion, Trump has charged guests $1 million to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago.

According to the same report, business leaders can secure a one-on- one meeting with the President of the United States for a $5 million payment to Donald Trump. If you were mayor of a medium-sized town and it was reported that you were selling meetings for like $200, you would be arrested. You would be run out of town. But not Donald Trump. He is selling meetings for $5 million, according to this report, and because the corruption in this White House is daily and normal, he gets away with it.

On March 2, Trump launches the crypto reserve fund. This is going to involve government-taxpayer dollars purchasing and holding a variety of digital assets in a strategic reserve fund--a move that definitely inflates and protects Trump's investment portfolio, by now, you understand, very heavily dependent on crypto assets.

Now, this normally wouldn't be a problem because normally when somebody takes a high position like President or Governor or mayor, they divest from their own personal assets or they put it all in a blind fund. Trump does none of that. He is controlling his own assets and his family is controlling their own assets while he makes policy that benefits himself and his family financially.

On March 3, a really curious thing: DOJ intervenes in an obscure but open-and-shut 2020 Colorado elections case. This is the case of Tina Peters, who tampered with voting machines on Trump's behalf in Mesa County, CO. She was convicted by a jury of her peers, open and shut, but because Peters is a MAGA loyalist, now DOJ, on March 3, says it is going to step in and review the case because there are concerns about how it was prosecuted. This is just President Trump again clearly shielding those that violated the law to help him from consequences.

Same thing, different day--no, not even a different day. This is actually still March 3. Yuga Labs, a blockchain company, donated $100,000 to Trump's inauguration fund. They now get in line. They get what everybody else is getting. The SEC closes an ongoing investigation into the company.

On March 4, DOGE lays off thousands of IRS employees. This is bad for a lot of reasons, but it certainly helps Trump's Mar-a-Lago friends because the IRS now cannot enforce the law against the big giant tax cheats in the ways that it could have when it had those personnel on the books. Mar-a-Lago is celebrating.

On March 4, the same day, word breaks that the Commerce Department is considering changes to a very specific rural broadband program and who is eligible. Why? Because Elon Musk wants to dominate that program. Under the program's original rules, Starlink was kind of capped at $4.1 billion. This curious change now will allow Elon Musk's company Starlink to receive between $10 billion and $20 billion from the rural broadband program.

This is like a broken record, but 6 days later, the CFPB, which is basically shut down but exists in name only, drops a lawsuit against Bank of America and J.P. Morgan. Bank of America donated $500,000 to the inauguration, and J.P. Morgan donated $1 million to the inauguration.

On March 11, a day later, Trump and Musk hold this now very well- known advertisement for Tesla on the White House lawn. This is just taxpayer dollars used to support the personnel at the White House and the White House being used to sell cars for Elon Musk. And the message, again, is pretty simple here: If you are loyal to me and you pay any kind of price for your loyalty to me, I will use government resources to help get you out of trouble, even including free advertising.

On March 19--we are 8 days later--the GEO Group donated $500,000 to Trump's inauguration fund. This is a private prison company. The NLRB drops its investigation into this company.

I mean, it is really getting disgusting at this point. I mean, I don't know that there is anybody left that made a major donation to the inauguration fund that has not gotten their favor from Donald Trump.

On March 24, the Treasury Department guts something called the Corporate Transparency Act. This is the regulation that requires businesses to reveal their true owners to the government. These new rules now make it easier for billionaires to hide money, to avoid taxes, to engage in corruption--less accountability for corporations.

On March 25, a day later, the SEC reduces from $125 million to $50 million an existing fine. So this has already been litigated. This company, Ripple, a blockchain-based digital payment company, has been fined. Trump comes in and reduces the fine from $125 million to $50 million.

You know the story by now. These guys made a big investment in the inauguration. Most of these companies that got a ``get out of jail free'' or had their investigations terminated were giving $500,000 or $1 million. Ripple made sure they got it right. They made a $5 million donation to Trump's inaugural fund, and they got their fine reduced by $75 million.

On March 28, Trump pardons the founder of Nikola autos, one of his campaign megadonors. Again, this is a pardon for one of his major campaign contributors. When asked about the pardon, Trump said: They say the thing they did was wrong, but he was one of the first people who supported me for President.

He just tells you what he did. He said: Yes, they said what he did was wrong. He did something that was probably pretty wrong, but he supported me for President. So I am giving him a pardon.

I am not saying there hasn't been a lot of really bad stuff that has happened in the pardon program under Democratic and Republican Presidents, but let's just name it what Donald Trump named it.

April 8--we are into April. Trump issues an Executive order to expand coal mining, part of his downpayment on the promise he made to those oil executives. Shares of the company owned by Joseph Craft, the billionaire coal

magnate who helped lead those Trump fundraising efforts during the Presidential campaign, immediately shoot up.

On April 9, this really curious timeline of events plays out, which Trump posts on his social media:

Mr. President, I was sitting with the CEO of one of America's biggest and most influential companies last month, and I asked him a simple question: What could President Trump do that would be a bridge too far for you? What attack on democracy or the rule of law could Trump make that would cause you to speak up?

His answer was pretty simple, and it was pretty confident. He said: If Trump were to ignore a Supreme Court ruling, that would cross the line.

He was reflecting a familiar theme: that until President Trump thumbs his nose definitively at a Court ruling, then his attacks on democracy are troubling but not lethal. It is normal politics up until that dramatic confrontation between the executive branch and the judicial branch, for which the Constitution, as we know, really has no prescribed remedy.

For many Americans, they may breathe a sigh of relief that America's most influential private sector leaders would rise up to defend democracy; that if this confrontation that we worry about would come to pass, combined with a massive public mobilization, we could be saved.

But I didn't breathe a sigh of relief. It was the opposite.

I am deeply worried that we have really spent little time studying the paths that democracies take when they collapse. Most of the time, there is not a singular moment when the Executive dramatically seizes power. There is not normally a brazen attempt to burn down the Parliament building. No, instead, democracies die when gradually, often quietly and methodically, over time, the structures that hold the Executive accountable for corruption, for thievery, for wrongdoing are dismantled--dismantled so that citizens can no longer hold the Executive accountable; dismantled so that the political opposition never has enough room to maneuver meaningfully.

There are still elections. The Executive doesn't try to stuff the ballot box. Occasionally, at lower levels, the opposition still wins. But what happens is that those structures of accountability are either so degraded or so completely co-opted by the regime that the truth is just buried, and the political opposition loses the basic tools that it needs to win.

In every democracy that stops being a democracy, then, there is a familiar story. There are four institutions that the regime attacks and that it attacks relentlessly until those structures of accountability are so disintegrated that, even though elections continue to happen, the same party or the same person wins power election after election. Those four institutions are the press, the legal profession, universities, and the business community. If you degrade or co-opt these four institutions, you never need to have a high-stakes fight with the top court in your country. You don't need to burn the Reichstag down. You can still have elections, but only one party will win.

So that is why this CEO's assurance, frankly, sent a chill down my spine--because our democracy isn't at risk of dying; it is dying. As we speak, we are watching it die. It is not too late to save it.

Let me say that again. It is not too late to save our democracy. But we can't continue to close our eyes and think that our democracy can survive a coordinated assault on those four key institutions of accountability. Democrats and Republicans need to see what is happening before our eyes, rise up, and defend the independence of journalists, of lawyers, of universities, and of the private sector.

So I want to spend a minute or two to walk you through what President Trump is doing and how it, frankly, chillingly, mirrors the tactics that other leaders have used to transition real democracy into pretend, fake democracy.

It always starts with journalists, from Hungary to Belarus, to Venezuela--countries that have elections but elections where one party just keeps on winning. These are places where journalists are subject to a nonstop harassment campaign from the regime, such that people just stop doing journalism or journalists stop telling the full truth.

Last month, for instance, Turkish President Erdogan locked up 11 journalists simply because they were covering protests against Erdogan's jailing of the top opposition leaders.

Now, Trump has not started jailing journalists, but the pace of harassment in the first 60 days of his second term is alarming.

He has denied access to government buildings, including the White House, to journalists who don't use preapproved language from the White House. He is preferencing credentials to partisan journalists who simply parrot his party line. His FCC has begun to deliberately harass media companies that are owned by political opponents of the President.

But Trump's campaign to destroy independent journalism has a darker and more menacing side because Trump isn't just trying to intimidate journalists so that they will be afraid to tell the truth; he is also trying to destroy the concept of truth itself. Again, this is a key facet of leaders who are elected who are trying to transition democracies away and into something very different.

How do you destroy truth? Well, that is why the Secretary of Defense looks into the camera and tells the American public that the text messages that everybody read, filled with classified information and war plans, did not include classified information and war plans.

The White House wants you to believe that one plus one does not equal two any longer; that you should doubt even the clear things that you see with your eyes; that nothing is real; that nothing is true; that if you are a supporter of the regime and I tell you once plus one equals three, then one plus one equals three. Those weren't war plans. Those weren't classified items.

That is also why the official position of the White House on key issues like tariffs changes every hour, because if the ground truth just changes constantly, then there is no truth at all.

Journalists are made to look foolish by reporting a true thing at 9 a.m. that becomes untrue at 10 a.m. Journalism loses its credibility when the facts being distributed by the White House change all the time.

Trump says the tariffs are permanent.

Journalists report that the President says the tariffs are permanent.

An hour later, Trump says: I never said they are permanent. They are not permanent. I am cutting deals.

They write that he is cutting deals.

An hour later, they are suspended--no more tariffs.

When the truth changes constantly, it is hard to believe that there is anything true any longer.

Second, universities are always--always--a target of would-be autocrats. Again, in Turkiye, the government has terminated thousands of professors just because they criticized the government. In Hungary, one of the nation's most prestigious universities was forced to move out of the country because President Orban attacked it so ceaselessly for fomenting protests against his government.

Universities, over the long history of democracy, have been the place where protests--especially youth protests--begin. They are a thorn in the side of leadership. The famous Tiananmen Square protests in China were, of course, started by university students.

So it is no surprise that if you want to crush democracy, you need to crush the independence of universities. That is why Trump's decision to target universities that permit criticism of President Trump is so bone-chilling. He pretends like he is standing up to anti-Semitism on campuses, but what he is really trying to do is make clear that protests against his policies on campuses will result in Federal funding being cut off.

Columbia University was forced to agree to a stunning list of free speech concessions in order to gain assurances from President Trump that their Federal funding would continue. They had to agree to allow campus police to arrest protesters. They had to essentially agree to receivership, Federal receivership, over an academic department

that houses professors who are critical of Trump and his policies. Effectively, the President of the United States got to pick the person who will oversee the Columbia Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies. That is extraordinary. That is not what happens in a healthy democracy--the leader of the country micromanaging academic departments at major universities to ensure that academic work aligns with the regime.

Now, having successfully forced Columbia to bend the knee and quell dissent on their campus, Trump is targeting other universities. Some of them will sign similar agreements giving President Trump power over those campuses. But, frankly, all Trump has to do is make an example of a handful of universities, and others will simply comply and obey in advance.

Why? As an academic president, when you have Federal dollars that employ people at your university, would you permit a major protest against a Trump policy if you know that is going to jeopardize Federal funds? Maybe you allow it because you don't want to brazenly stand in the way of free speech, but you just make sure that it is not too big a protest or it is not too critical. You police speech to be on the right side of the regime. That is what happens in all of these fake democracies, and that is what is happening here.

But controlling speech on campuses is not enough. Controlling and intimidating journalists is not enough. You have to go after the lawyers too.

Now, maybe there is not a lot of love for lawyers in this country, but lawyers are the ones who bring the lawsuits to stop the thievery and the illegality. Lawyers are compelled by their oath to stand up for the Constitution.

Putin arrested Navalny's lawyers right on the eve of Navalny's trial.

In Venezuela, Maduro routinely harasses and detains lawyers--human rights lawyers--because he knows those are the ones who will hold him accountable.

In Tunisia, the regime stormed the offices of the bar administration to intimidate the legal profession into silence.

Here in America, Trump is engaged in a shameless campaign of extortion against any major law firm that has taken a position against Trump or Trump's interests. What he is doing is extraordinary, and it is mind-blowing to me that it is just being ignored by my Republican colleagues. He is going firm by firm--and not to every firm, just to the firms that have represented Democrats or brought cases against him--and he is telling them that if they don't fall in line and stop doing work to oppose him, their clients will lose access to Federal work.

That is extortion. This body, Republicans and Democrats, should stand up against it. But it is working. Several law firms have signed deals with Trump that obligate them to support--guess what--causes aligned with Donald Trump.

Paul Weiss was targeted by an Executive order and struck a deal. But so did Skadden. They struck a deal with Trump before they had even been targeted. Already, collectively, these firms have pledged--think about this--about a quarter of a billion dollars of pro bono work to file cases in coordination with the President of the United States' political interests.

Just like what happened with the universities, there is a lot of extra compliance that is happening. I know for a fact that firms that have already signed these agreements with Trump have gone above and beyond the terms of the agreements to quiet their criticism of the government. No doubt, every single major law firm will think twice before bringing an action against an illegal or corrupt action of the President in fear of Trump retaliating against their business.

That is the point. The point is to try to crush dissent. The point is to try to stand in the way of anybody who is going to hold Trump accountable by using the power--the official power granted to him by the people of the United States--to try to signal retaliation against anyone who dares oppose him.

But collective action can be a powerful tool. Together, the collective might of our universities and our law firms is significant. So they could choose to band together and decide to sign no agreements with Trump, to refuse to let the President of the United States dictate the terms of their speech, their business, their defense of the rule of law.

I don't want to make the victim the perpetrator. This is all Trump's fault, what he is doing to extort political loyalty from universities and law firms. But instead of there being collective action on behalf of these industries, the opposite is happening.

In the legal profession, when Paul Weiss was being targeted, the other big firms didn't rise to their defense; they started making calls to Paul Weiss clients and lawyers, using Trump's assault as a means to poach business or partners. That is shameful, acting like ravenous vultures, putting your profits first instead of your country's interests or the interests of the legal profession, which pledges before a court to stand up for the rule of law. Instead, these big firms are aiding and abetting the destruction of the rule of law by doing Trump's work for him, making targeted firms even more vulnerable by working behind the scenes to strip them bare for parts.

There are good, patriotic lawyers at many of these high-priced firms who know that this is wrong and they should speak up. Some of them already have.

Now, finally, Trump is coming for the rest of the private sector. Listen, I have no idea what the Trump tariff policy is. The constantly shifting positions of the last week are an embarrassment. It is complete incompetent malpractice. It has jeopardized jobs and retirement savings and college funds all across this country.

But the tariffs are complicated and convoluted and hard to understand, likely because they aren't actually economic or trade policy; they are a political tool--this one designed to force every major company to come before Trump to plead for tariff relief in exchange for giving Trump the company's political loyalty--no different than what is happening in the legal profession or in America's universities.

A tariff can be written very easily to favor one industry over another or one company over another, and the confusing nature of the tariff regime is a means for Trump to require every major company in the country to come on bended knee to him to get the relief they need. And that loyalty pledge could be anything--the purchase of some Trump crypto coin, public support for Trump's economic policies, donations to his political campaign. But having watched what Trump has done one by one to universities and law firms, why would we assume the tariffs aren't just simply a tool to do the same thing to big companies?

What I am trying to say here is that you don't need a battle royal between the President and the Supreme Court for democracy to die. If journalists are constantly looking over their shoulders and unable to report on the truth; if protest is suppressed, even moderately, at universities; if lawyers start giving cover instead of uncovering corruption and illegality in the regime; if companies start being mouthpieces for the regime as a price of doing business--if all that happens, then we are not a real democracy anymore; we are a fake democracy. Elections still happen, like in Turkiye, like in Hungary, like in Venezuela, but the rules are going to be tilted, and dissent will be suppressed so much that the same side--Trump's side--wins over and over and over.

This should matter not just to Democrats, not just to members of the minority party; this should matter to Republicans as well. We swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, and it is time for us to see the game that is being played.

The good news is that the rules have not been fully rigged yet. There is still time--not loads of it, but there is still time for this body to set a tone that causes the kind of massive public outrage necessary to stop this campaign of destruction in its tracks. But that requires those of us who believe that the threat to democracy is urgent to act like it. That means saying to our Republican colleagues that we are not going to act like business as usual, that we are not going to proceed to legislation unless we have agreement, Republicans and Democrats, to stop this assault on free speech and dissent. It requires the minority party to say that right now.

Only if we come together are we going to have a chance to save ourselves from the fate that has befallen so many other countries that have slowly, too quietly, seen their countries transition from real democracy to fake democracy.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, the budget that we are debating really comes down to one simple idea: the massive transfer of wealth and resources from the poor and the middle class to the ultrawealthy.

What is being proposed in the Senate right now is stunning in its scope. We are talking about a piece of legislation that has such deep cuts to Medicaid--this is the program that insures 24 percent of American families. One-quarter of Americans get their health insurance from Medicaid. You don't know it as Medicaid because it is called something different in each State. In Connecticut, it is called HUSKY. In Wisconsin, it is called BadgerCare. But in every State, about a quarter of the population gets their insurance through a Medicaid- funded program. Most of those folks are working full time, but for one reason or another, that is where they get their insurance.

You are talking about kicking millions of people off of that program--and for what? For what? To rack up the biggest bill ever on the credit card of the middle class--an explosion in debt--but also to fund a tax cut for the fabulously wealthy.

This is the 2017 tax cut, which is essentially going to be mirrored, we believe, by this tax cut. The top 1 percent of earners got tax cuts 852 times bigger than working families in America. We don't know the final shape of this tax cut, but it won't look fundamentally different from that. This is a really bad time to be a working mom or dad in America.

This week, we are passing, apparently, a massive cut in healthcare benefits for working families in order to pad the pockets of the wealthy.

We are also dealing with the Trump tariff plan, which has been a ``Keystone Cops''-like rollout that will ultimately raise prices for every single American.

Tariffs can work as part of a coordinated, thoughtful approach to trying to rebuild American industry, but they only work when you partner those tariffs together with industrial policy, incentives to help promote the industry that you are trying to punish when the products come from abroad.

I am not reflexively opposed to the use of tariffs, but this use of tariffs is bananas because it is not paired with any domestic industrial policy, meaning that you are just going to get the downside--the massive increase in costs for consumers--without the upside, which is job creation in the United States of America.

So before I get to the insult to middle-class families that will come through the budget, let's just talk about what is going to happen with these tariffs.

We know how it is going to work because we saw how tariffs worked in Trump's first term. Let me just take one specific example. In Trump's first term, he proposed a 20-percent escalating tariff on washing machines. The idea was, you know, we want washing machines to be made in the United States instead of outside of the United States, but because he didn't pair that together with any more comprehensive help for the washing machine industry in the United States, it was only the downside.

It was only the downside not just because of the lack of a comprehensive policy but also because there were no checks on the corporations that saw the tariffs as a means to gouge consumers. You have to also partner tariffs together with some accountability for corporations--for the greedy corporations that get wide-eyed when they see the tariffs and realize, well, this is an opportunity to not just pass the tariff along but to jack up the price a little bit more and say it was all because of the tariffs.

Here is what happened on washing machines. So you have a 20-percent escalating tariff. We have the data. We saw what happened. The economic data tells us that the washing machine companies passed along the 20- percent tariff and then padded the price increase sometimes by 15 percent, sometimes by 50 percent. But it is worse than that. The price increase was not just for imported washing machines; they also increased the price of the domestic washing machines that weren't subject to the tariff. Why not? Why not? The Trump administration won't hold us accountable for that. Nobody really looks to see whether the washing machine was made in America or not. We will just raise the price on everything.

What do you buy when you buy a washing machine as well? A dryer. So guess what happens. Even though dryers weren't subject to the tariff, the price got jacked up on the dryers as well. Dryers went up by 50 percent sometimes in cost--15 percent, 20 percent. All of a sudden, prices went up for everything.

Now, Trump collected a bunch of money in tariffs--$80 billion--but that was literally just middle-class people paying the additional amount to the company and the company passing it along to the government. So it was just a tax. It was just a tax.

OK. Maybe you could live with that if it revitalized the domestic washing machine industry, if there were tens of thousands of people going back to jobs in that industry, but that didn't happen. I think there were one or two domestic washing machine factories that opened up, and Trump, of course, made a big deal. Do you know how many jobs it was in total? Less than 2,000 jobs. Less than 2,000 jobs were created for a tariff that jacked up costs for every American and resulted in $80 billion of middle-class taxes being collected by the government. That works out to about $800,000 per job.

So that is what is coming at scale, not just on washing machines but on virtually every consumer product: a big price increase, little to no domestic job creation, all the pain on the middle class.

Tariffs can work, but this is not the way that they work.

So this week, Senate Republicans, instead of trying to help consumers deal with the impact of these tariffs--I mean, we are talking about huge price increases coming for American families, and this week, we could be sitting here, voting for bills that cancel the tariffs or try to help middle-class families in another way. We are doing exactly the opposite. Instead of helping families deal with the impact of the tariffs, instead of holding the greedy corporations in check as they get ready to gouge consumers, we are debating a bill that would cut almost $1 trillion out of Medicaid--the program that provides insurance for a quarter of Americans. That will result in raising healthcare costs for tens of millions of Americans.

We are also talking about giving a massive tax break to the billionaire CEOs of the companies that are going to be doing the price gouging and to the companies themselves. That is outrageous. That is outrageous.

If you were a regular, ordinary American, what you are being told is that you are going to have to pay huge new price increases on everything you buy. You are going to have your healthcare disappear, and corporate profits and take-home pay for CEOs are going to skyrocket. Who is asking for that? What American is asking for prices to go up, my healthcare to be cut, and billionaires to get a big tax break?

Let's start talking about these tax cuts, OK? They are at the center of this bill. Everything in the Trump administration is about a simple story: How do I help my Mar-a-Lago billionaire friends?

So this is the old tax cut because we don't know all of the details of the new one. If you look at sort of the poorest Americans versus the richest Americans, the tax cut is 852 times bigger.

But here is a back-of-the-napkin analysis of what this new tax cut is likely to look like, if it is, basically, formed like the old one. Instead of taking the poorest Americans versus the richest Americans-- instead--let's just look at, sort of, the bottom 60 percent of income earners in this country. That is roughly about everybody who makes $90,000 or less. So that is a lot of your neighbors. Right? I mean, $90,000 is an income that is familiar to a lot of Americans.

So under this new tax cut, if it looks like the old one--and that is the signal that we get--households in the top 1 percent are going to get an average tax cut that is 120 times bigger than the tax cut given to people who are making $90,000 or less. So that is 152 times bigger than the very poor.

But let's take somebody who is making $60,000. The richest 1 percent are going to get a tax cut that is 120 times bigger. How is that fair?

OK, now, you would say: Well, that is because they make a lot more money; so, of course, they are going to get a bigger tax cut.

But let's do the math a different way.

As a share of after-tax income, the tax cuts for the top are still more than triple the total value of the tax cut received for people with incomes in the bottom 60 percent. So even when you adjust for the fact that they are making more money, they are still getting a tax cut whose value is three times bigger than folks who are making a middle income in this country.

And why? Does anybody believe in trickle-down economics anymore? It has been completed discredited.

Again, we have the 2017 tax cuts as evidence. Donald Trump touted out a big promise. He said: These tax cuts for corporations and billionaires and millionaires, they will trickle down to everybody else, and I will tell you the number. The average worker will get a $4,000 salary increase.

That was the promise. The money will trickle down. The corporations will be so generous--so generous--that they will take their giant tax cut, bigger than they even asked for--Senator Whitehouse just showed you the chart where corporations have gone from providing 30 percent of American tax revenue down to 10 percent of American tax revenue--what a great deal for corporations.

OK. That is a nice chart. That makes sense if the corporations are taking their lower tax liability and turning it around into wages. Instead, they are not. They are keeping it for themselves, for their executives, for their top shareholders.

The analysis shows that that promised $4,000 salary increase as a result of the tax cuts, it wasn't $4,000. It wasn't $2,000. It wasn't $1,000. It wasn't $100. It was zero because all of that money-- virtually all of this money--ended up getting gobbled up by the corporations, mainly for stock buybacks. It didn't go to increased compensation for their employees.

So it is not to raise wages. I guess it is just to make rich people richer.

From 2017, when that tax cut passed--that first Trump tax cut passed--until 2023, Elon Musk's wealth grew by 1,222 percent. I don't even know what that looks like. Jeff Bezos' grew by 96 percent, Zuckerberg's by 50 percent, and Rupert Murdoch's by 50. I use those names because those were the billionaires who were at Trump's inauguration, cheerleading him into office because they know that another big tax cut for their company and for them personally is coming.

I will admit to you, median income overall grew from 2017 to 2023. So everybody in the country was making more in 2023 than they were making in 2017. But median income was not growing by 50 percent, 96 percent, or 1,222 percent.

So this is a massive tax cut, the vast majority of it going to the very, very wealthy.

But what makes it even harder to understand is what Senator Whitehouse laid out for you. Most of this is just going on your credit card. Most of this is just being borrowed. And that has a consequence-- the national debt potentially doubling as a result of this massive tax cut for the very, very wealthy.

It is just so heartbreaking, the hypocrisy. I mean, I could string together a 24-hour-long video of my Republican colleagues talking ad nauseam about the danger of debt, the rising deficit.

We can't spend money on kids. We can't spend money on climate. We can't spend money on schools. We can't help people go to college. No, no, no, we can't do any of that. We can't do any of that because of the deficit.

Yet when it comes to a billionaire tax cut, a corporate tax cut, we are going to potentially double the debt. Nobody is caring about the debt. In fact, they are rigging the rules of the Senate. They are breaking the rules of the Senate just so they can get away with a massive increase in debt and deficit.

But somewhere along the line, they said: Well, do you know what? We can't borrow the whole thing. We have got to make it look like we are cutting some spending. So let's cut some spending to make it at least look like it is not all borrowed. But let's make sure that the spending we are cutting only hurts poor people and the middle class because God forbid we can cut spending that helps the rich or the affluent. God forbid we take away some of the tax breaks that help them.

So where are the cuts coming? Medicaid. Eighty percent of the cuts are Medicaid--$880 billion in the House bill, a similar amount, cutting Medicaid.

Medicaid, as I said, is the program that insures 24 percent of Americans. At least two-thirds of those are working--working full time. They just don't have health insurance through their employer. So they have to get it through Medicaid.

So when Republicans decided that they couldn't borrow the whole thing--like, we will double the national debt, but we are not going to triple the national debt--they targeted the cuts to hurt the middle class and poor people.

So I just want to end by telling you what this means in realtime. I don't actually know what it means to give billionaires another $50,000 in tax breaks. I really don't know what that means. I don't know what that life is like. I don't know what it is like to have seven houses and four yachts. I don't know what a billionaire does with an extra $50,000. I can't actually explain that to you. I don't understand that kind of rapacious greed.

What I do know is what happens to poor people, the people who live in my neighborhood in the south end of Hartford, when they lose their Medicaid.

Linda lives in Sherman, CT, a small town in western Connecticut. Following the economic downturn in 2008, Linda had trouble finding work. And that was tough for her because she is a cancer survivor. She had high healthcare expenses, and she needed work.

She was underemployed. She worked in plant nurseries and agriculture. Her husband, at the same time, lost his job as an auto mechanic. They lost their healthcare insurance.

But then, when the Affordable Care Act passed, Medicaid was expanded. More people were made eligible for Medicaid, and in 2010, she was able to sign up for Medicaid.

She said:

I had so much anxiety [all the time] about how to pay for

healthcare. We were going through all of our money, and we

[just] thought, ``this isn't right, people shouldn't have to

worry about [just] being basically healthy.''

But once she got healthcare, she was able to restart her life. Linda went back to school because now she had healthcare. She got a new degree. She found a job teaching agriculture at a local high school. But that program didn't provide healthcare. So she still needed that Medicaid.

``Medicaid,'' she says, just ``provides such a baseline for society. It [allowed me to maintain] my health so that I was able to continue working.''

The Medicaid cuts that they are talking about will destroy Medicaid expansion. In fact, some States will automatically cancel the Medicaid expansion program when these cuts are made, meaning that people like Linda all across the country are going to lose their healthcare. For what? For a massive tax cut for the wealthy.

Emily Granelli is a worker at one of Connecticut's biggest behavioral health and substance abuse providers. So every day she is talking to people who rely on Medicaid so that they can get help for their mental health disorder or their substance abuse disorder. And let's be honest. We all have somebody in our life who has a serious mental illness or has struggled with substance abuse. So you know these people.

She wrote me a letter talking about the fact that the conversations in their therapy groups in the last month have fundamentally changed. They are actually not doing therapy any longer for mental illness or substance abuse. They are now doing therapy for the anxiety all these people have knowing they are about to lose their health insurance.

One case manager told me--she writes that she was working with a client to find housing. The client now just wants to stop looking because she feels like there is no point because she is going to lose her Medicaid. Republicans are going to strip her Medicaid from her. She won't be able to get her medication and services. She feels hopeless.

A clinician told me about an hourlong session she had the day before. Seventy-five percent of it was focused on the client's fear of losing her

benefits and what that would mean for her and all the other clients. She shared with me that if there was a way for her to leave the country right now, she would.

At this provider, 35 percent of their clients would likely lose access to mental illness and substance abuse services if these cuts go through.

What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Why are we choosing--why are my colleagues choosing--to destroy healthcare for millions of Americans in order to pass a tax cut that basically helps corporations and billionaires and millionaires? It is fundamentally immoral.

I have to believe, like in 2017, when Republicans were trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which insured 20 million Americans, that there are a handful of Republicans who know that this isn't right, who maybe aren't ready to stop it today--tonight's vote isn't the final vote--but might be willing to stand up to this thievery before it is too late.

The people of this country who are getting killed by higher prices that are coming because of the tariffs and are going to be hurt by these Medicaid cuts and are going to be furious when the rich become richer at their expense, they are counting on just a small handful of my Republican colleagues to realize right from wrong.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Senator Whitehouse, first of all, for all the work you have put into passing that legislation, which has given access to millions of people across the country who are struggling with addiction and recovery access to services.

Again, I said what I said in my underlying remarks. There is not a single Member of the Senate who doesn't have a close family member or a friend who has struggled or is struggling with addiction. This is a nonpartisan, apolitical problem. Addiction doesn't care if you are left, right, Republican, or Democrat.

We did come together around funding these programs. So it is hard to understand--it is heartbreaking--that I am telling you the story of one of Connecticut's biggest addiction treatment providers, and they are telling us that if these cuts go through fully, one-third of their clients will lose access to some or all of their services.

And to your point in your initial speech, Senator Whitehouse, I mean, maybe I could understand if we were deciding to cut funding for addiction treatment because we had some other really important priority that helped regular people--like if we said: Do you know what? There is a housing crisis in this country. Right now, we are going to have to borrow money from addiction treatment in order to make sure that people get housed. Or, you know, our schools are underfunded and teachers need to be paid more. And, OK, it is really hard to cut funding from addiction treatment centers, but at least we will get better education for our kids. That is not what we are doing. We are cutting funds for people struggling with addiction who get served by programs that we agree are important in order to fund a tax cut for corporations and super, superrich people. That is why this is fundamentally immoral.

I would.

Right.

It is thievery masked by a bogus economic argument that says the money will eventually find its way down to everybody else. That is not true. That has never been true. In fact, the opposite is often true.

The billionaire class is sometimes referred to as sort of citizens of everywhere, right. They are global citizens. They globe-trot from homes in the United States and Europe and the islands. But that is also where their money ends up going as well.

It used to be that the richest guy in your community was investing only in your community, but today, when we pad the pockets of the uberwealthy, that money either does not get spent or it ultimately gets delivered to investments that flow into economies all over the world. These tax cuts don't end up back in America. To the extent the money gets spent anywhere, it gets spent in international index funds.

So the theory of the case--which has always been cover for simply delivering more and more excessive resources to the very, very wealthy--has never worked, but it works even less now when, in a global international economy, the very, very wealthy have options to invest in the United States or, often, for higher returns, invest somewhere else.

I thank the Senator for the question. Listen, I read it as just a different kind of thievery.

So what we are talking about here is this massive thievery from Medicaid recipients so that we can pass along this big tax break for folks that don't need it. But my sense is that the billionaire and investment and Wall Street class is really upset that there are still a few remaining government programs that they haven't gotten their hands on, that they haven't operationalized in a way to make themselves money.

They have had their eyes on Social Security for decades. I remember George Bush proposing privatizing Social Security, which is essentially just taking that big lump of money and handing it to the investment managers so that they can skim some money off the top.

They also looked at schools the same way, I think, Senator Whitehouse. They have been discrediting public education to the point where now they don't think the Department of Education needs to exist. And why? Why? Because they ultimately want to do the same thing for our public schools. They want to privatize our elementary schools, our middle schools, and our high schools so that they can have private equity funds owning the schools, providing some form of education but just seeing our kids as a source of profit.

So you can tell me if I am wrong about this, but my sense is that the theft happens in all sorts of different ways: sometimes in just a transfer--Medicaid recipients losing, billionaires winning--but sometimes by taking government programs and turning them--instead of something that tries to work for the common good, as a program that just gets turned into a vehicle for profit for the very, very wealthy.

Sure.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1977 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, so we have learned that the Republicans think that it is essential to blow up the deficit and debt in order to allow people making $100 million a year to get a tax cut.

But what about a half a billion dollars? Do you think it is fair to kick millions of people off their healthcare--that is what your Medicaid cuts are going to do--so that you can give a tax cut to somebody who makes $500 million?

Just a little perspective: If you make a half a billion dollars, you have just enough to afford the essentials--a six-bedroom house, three vacation homes, five luxury cars, a yacht with a full staff, and--good news--you have just a little bit left over, $499 million a year.

It is immoral to kick people off of their healthcare in order to give a handout to somebody who has that kind of wealth. This amendment gives the Republicans a chance to do the right thing: no blowing a giant hole in our budget, no more massive debt in order to help people who are making a half a billion dollars a year.

Will the Senator yield?

Senator Booker, first of all, I want to express my gratitude to you for recognizing the gravity of this moment. Your ability to see that we are facing a series of threats that are not normal--a series of threats to families, to children, to individuals, threats to our democracy, threats to our rule of law--I think it is really important.

And you have endeavored to do something extraordinary here, to stand on your feet for as long as you can to convey both to our colleagues and to the public that because these are not normal times, what is required of us is something different than a normal response.

And I know maybe we have extended the amount of time that you had planned to talk on this particular topic of the threat to Americans' healthcare, but I don't know that there is anything more important that we are talking about today in the U.S. Senate because the scope of what Republicans are talking about here is absolutely extraordinary.

And I want to lay out for you, you know, a few additional facts and numbers and ask you to respond to them as you wrap up your time talking about this particular topic.

But let me just underscore what you have laid out very well. We are talking about nearly $900 billion worth of cuts to Medicaid in order to pay for about a trillion dollars' worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

There will be table scraps in the Republican bill for middle-class consumers and families, but the bulk of the tax cuts are going to the very, very wealthy--millionaires and billionaires; frankly, people who have done tremendously well in this country over the past several decades, who are not in need of more.

And so you were very right to point out the immorality of the 2017 attempt to cut the Affordable Care Act, which insured 20 million Americans. But Medicaid covers 70 to 80 million Americans, and the new wrinkle is that this proposal doesn't just cut healthcare for tens of millions of Americans; estimates are that it could be 30 million Americans that lose healthcare under the Republican proposal.

No, this is even more difficult to swallow for the American public than the 2017 attempt to cut and eliminate the Affordable Care Act because this measure is a direct transfer of money from the poor, the middle class, the

people who are on Medicaid to the very, very wealthy.

Frankly, it could turn out to be the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of the country from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy, which is why, I think, you are taking this extraordinary step to make sure that our colleagues and the American people know the gravity of this moment.

A lot of Republicans all across the country are not doing townhalls any longer; they are not meeting in person with their constituents. And so there are a lot of Americans that are going to be in the dark that have a lot of questions, have a lot of questions about what is happening here, about why it is necessary to cut a program like Medicaid--that insures 24 percent of Americans--to the bone in order to finance a tax cut for the very, very wealthy.

One of the things I just wanted to set up for you here is, you know, just to note that Americans may be surprised to know that 24 percent of Americans are actually on Medicaid today, because some Americans may say: Well, my insurance isn't Medicaid. My insurance is through MississippiCAN. My insurance is through ACCESSNebraska. My insurance is through Centennial Care. Or in Connecticut, my insurance is through HUSKY Health. In New Jersey, it is New Jersey Family Care, right? So Medicaid normally isn't called Medicaid; it is called something different in every State.

So it is important for you to understand that so many of your neighbors are on Medicaid even though it may not be called Medicaid in your State. That is how we get to 24 percent of American families on this particular program.

The Joint Economic Committee, which is a committee of Congress, did a study, issued a report, talking about how many people would lose their healthcare insurance on a State-by-State basis if this $880 billion cut to Medicaid went through. I won't go through the whole list, Senator Booker, but I just pulled out some States that are represented by our Republican colleagues.

In Alabama, 20 percent of Alabamans are on their Medicaid Program. In total, 330,000 people in one State--Alabama--would lose their healthcare if this cut went through.

In Arkansas, 25 percent of families are on the Arkansas Medicaid Program. A quarter of a million people would lose their health insurance.

In Florida, 17 percent of the State is on Medicaid, and 1.3 million Floridians could lose their healthcare because of these Medicaid cuts.

We can just go on and on. Twenty percent of Iowans are on the Medicaid Program, 20 percent of Indiana residents, and 25 percent of Kentucky residents. Thirty percent of Louisianans are on their State's Medicaid Program, and 500,000 residents of Louisiana could lose their healthcare.

Some of that would happen in a sort of slow-moving catastrophe, but, as you pointed out, Senator Booker, a lot of that would happen immediately because many of the States that have taken advantage of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion have a built-in clause to their State's law that says that the minute the reimbursement rate declines, even if it declines by only a few percentage points, the entirety of the Medicaid expansion program is eliminated. So, overnight, you will have millions of people who would lose their healthcare insurance.

But, as you have rightly pointed out, that is just the beginning of the disaster because there are hundreds of rural hospitals in this country that are right now living on the brink of disaster. If Medicaid reimbursements drop by just 5 or 10 percent, those rural hospitals are out of business. The same can be said of thousands of drug treatment centers in this country, addiction treatment centers. So you are ultimately talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of hospitals and health centers closing and millions of Americans losing their healthcare insurance. And for what? And for what? To be able to hoard a bunch of money so that the richest Americans can buy a third vacation home? So that millionaires can double their landscaping budget? Who is asking for this in America today?

Of course there is a conversation to be had about efficiency in our healthcare programs, but none of that conversation is happening here. If it was, you wouldn't be reading the letters of all of these associations representing healthcare groups predicting disaster; they would actually be in the room at the table. If you really wanted to save money, you would actually put the doctors and the hospitals and the medical providers who know something about the system in a room, but instead this is a political decision that has been made to cut a certain amount of money that does not coincidentally line up to the amount of money that the Republican budget bill wants to give in tax cuts to the very, very wealthy.

So you, I think, rightly put emphasis on and drew attention to John McCain's decision--and, of course, we should always give credit to Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who also voted no in 2017 on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act bill--because it is just a reminder that you are under no obligation as a U.S. Senator to do the wrong thing if you know what the right thing is.

You work so hard to get this job, spend your entire life working to become somebody who can make important decisions like we can in the U.S. Senate, and you are under no obligation to outsource your decision making to the President of the United States or your party leadership. Everybody here gets to make an independent decision on what is right or wrong, and this just feels plain wrong--a thoughtless, unplanned, massive cut in Medicaid that is going to throw millions of people off their healthcare in order to finance a tax cut, the majority of which is going to go to people who don't need it. Every Senator here can make up their own mind as to whether that is the right thing or the wrong thing to do for this country.

The exercise that you are engaged in, Senator Booker, is a simple one: just trying to make sure that all the facts are on the table.

That last segment you did on the impact on medical research should be reason alone for folks to reconsider the path this administration is taking. But the Medicaid cuts as a mechanism to further enrich those that are already plenty rich--man, I just don't imagine that is anything the American public are clamoring for.

So, Senator Booker, I just wanted to really thank you for standing up and making this moment possible. I want to leave you with just two stories on this topic that have come into my office and then ask you a question. This is all lead-up to a question.

So I have a constituent who was paralyzed about a decade ago, and he now uses a wheelchair, and the only insurance program that can provide him with what he needs from a mechanical and technological standpoint, plus the drugs he needs to survive, is Medicaid. It is his only option. It is his only option. He can't work. He is paralyzed. Medicaid is his only option. For him and for millions of others, Medicaid is life or death. It is just life or death.

If you are talking about cutting Medicaid by as much as 20 percent-- that is what we are talking about here today. An $880 billion cut in Medicaid represents about 10 percent of the overall program, but you have to assume that States are not going to continue to match if the Federal Government isn't putting in their share. So that 10-percent cut could very quickly become something closer to a 20-percent cut. There is no way that you can cut the Medicaid Program by 20 percent without it impacting people like my constituent in a wheelchair who comes to many of my events when we protest these Medicaid cuts. This is life or death for many Americans.

But that is not the full extent of the horror that will happen. I was just reading a letter the other day from an 80-year-old constituent of mine who lives at home with his wife, but his wife is very frail, and it is Medicaid and Connecticut's Medicaid waiver that allow for her to receive in-home healthcare services.

He is panicked. He wants to spend the final years of his life with his wife. He knows that if Medicaid gets cut even on the margins, that Medicaid waiver likely is gone, and either his wife will pass or she will have to be in an institution.

Query whether that institution will even be able to give her a place because two-thirds of nursing home beds in this country are paid for by Medicaid.

So one way or the other, he is staring separation from his wife in the eye.

She either doesn't make it without the Medicaid reimbursement that gives her the services at home or she is forced to go to an institution, and they live separately for their final days.

This is the reality facing people who rely on Medicaid, whether you are disabled or elderly. This is the reality that will be imposed on millions of Americans in order to finance a tax cut for the wealthy.

The scope of this is just enormous, Senator Booker. So I guess this is the question I wanted to ask you. You and I have been in government for a long time. We have served in a variety of different capacities.

I don't think this country is really ready for the scope of the healthcare cataclysm that could come with a trillion-dollar cut to the health insurance program that is responsible for the care of one- quarter of Americans, two-thirds of nursing home beds, and the budgets of literally tens of thousands of vital healthcare institutions in this country.

Nobody is better than you at conveying the moral consequences of the decisions we make here. Just share with us for a minute, as you sort of wrap up a conversation on this topic of the healthcare priorities of the Trump administration and the Republican Congress, what America may look like in a world where we have decided to gut the health insurance program of last resort for the most vulnerable Americans and the health insurance program that insures 24 million Americans, two-thirds of whom are working for a living. Just give us a little bit of a sense of the enormity of the consequence that this ultimately would bring to this country.

I did.

Will the Senator yield?

There is so much similarity between the debate that you are forcing this Senate to have tonight and the debate that we were having back in 2016 on this epidemic of gun violence. I would describe it this way. The only thing that matters, the thing that matters more than anything else in your life is protecting your loved ones from physical harm.

You would give anything, right? Anything. You would give your life savings, your house. You would perhaps give your own life in order to protect your child or your brother or sister or mother or father from physical harm. So when you and I have sat across from the victims of gun violence, many of whom live in your neighborhood and my neighborhood, in Newark and Hartford, we are looking at a kind of desperation and sorrow that is unique--that is unique that also

comes with not just losing a loved one to gun violence but feeling powerless in that exercise.

Feeling like there was nothing you could do and watching your elected leader stand by and allow for this reality to continue to occur in your neighborhood, where kids are being shot down in cold blood and your elected leaders--the adults in charge of your community--are standing idly by.

That is not fundamentally different than the reality that will be visited upon millions of families if this size of a cut in Medicaid funding goes into effect because families out there who rely on Medicaid to keep alive their son or daughter who has a complicated medical disease have no other quarter, have no other last resort besides Medicaid. Medicaid stands between life and death for their son or daughter. There is no other place for them to go.

So that same empty, hollow look that we have seen so many times in the eyes of a mother or father who lost a son or daughter to gun violence, that is the look that we are choosing to visit upon millions of families in this country who, when faced with the loss of their only health insurance option for their disabled child, will watch their child potentially face the same fate as those young men in your neighborhood and my neighborhood.

That is the reason why I pose this question to you that you are answering about the moral gravity of this moment because it is not fundamentally different than the one that brought us here in 2016.

You lived in Connecticut.

Senator Booker, I am going to pose to you a pretty simple question here, but, first, let me lay down a little bit of a predicate.

You know, we have heard already some talk tonight about this extraordinary statement, but not terribly surprising, from the Secretary of Commerce, who is a close friend of the President, somebody who is very close to all of the decisions being made in the White House, where he said, you know, that if a Social Security recipient misses their check for a month, then they should not complain.

My mother-in-law wouldn't complain.

That is easy for him to say, you know, maybe you wouldn't complain if your son-in-law was a billionaire. You probably are not going to be harmed by missing a Social Security check if you have got a billionaire in the family.

But 99.99 percent of Americans do not have a billionaire that they can get on the phone if they miss a month, and 1 month's Social Security check disappearing is a cataclysm for a lot of families.

As I was listening to you, I just did a little bit of, you know, easy, back-of-

the-napkin math. So the average Social Security check, on a monthly basis, in this country is somewhere around $2,000. Obviously, it varies based on how much money you put in and what your income was, but, on average, it is about $2,000.

Now, some Americans have supplemental retirement income, but fewer and fewer do today because it is just not the case any longer that employers are going to provide for you a defined benefit plan. So if you were working minimum wage your entire life or if you were working a low-wage job, you are not going to have money to put away in Social Security.

I remember during one of my walks across the State of Connecticut, spending about half an hour walking with an elderly gentleman in Willimantic, CT, and he told me a story that is not atypical. He worked his entire life. Most of his adult life he worked for Walmart. He was really proud of working for Walmart. He helped a whole bunch of people in his community. He was working for a great American company, a company he was proud of. He was helping people every single day that lived in his neighborhood get what they needed when they came into the store.

But you know the wage he was making at Walmart. He was making very little, and they didn't have any defined benefit plan. They would let him save a little bit of money if he could find the means, but he couldn't because every single dime that he made from Walmart had to go to rent and groceries and medicine and cell phone bill and transportation.

And so he worked for 20 years at Walmart, and when he retired, do you know how much he had in savings? Zero. Zero. And he felt like he had done everything people had asked him for. He worked for a great American company. He helped people. He worked full time. He didn't miss time. He didn't goof around.

And when he retired, he had nothing--nothing--saved. So the Social Security check, which to him was probably about $2,000 a month, was everything he had. And he is walking with me explaining to me what his life is like today. He was coming out of the liquor store, and that was one of the things he did every day was go down to the liquor store and, you know, buy a nip or two and, you know, just pass a couple hours. He didn't like to spend a lot of time in his house because he has roommates.

He lives in a small apartment with two other guys, strangers. He doesn't know them. And he says to me as we are walking: This is not how I expected my life to go. I thought if I worked my entire life and I played by the rules and I worked hard, you know, I would have a little bit more dignified retirement than this. I share a room with two other guys that I don't know.

And that is the reality for a lot of Americans. That is the reality for a lot of retirees. You know, $2,000 is the average Social Security check. I don't know why I picked Tallahassee, but I just picked Tallahassee. I said what is the average one-bedroom rent in Tallahassee? It is $1,200, utilities are probably a couple hundred dollars, the average senior citizen spends $500 a month on food. Rent, utilities, food, that is it. That is your $2,000. You have nothing left if you are 1 of the 7 million Americans who rely only on Social Security like my friend from Willimantic.

You have nothing left for medicine, for transportation. You have got nothing left for a cell phone. You have nothing left to go to the movies once a month. You have nothing left for presents for your grandkids for Christmas or for their birthday. If you are relying on Social Security--and many people who have worked their entire life are--you go without that check for 1 month, your whole life falls apart.

And so this ``cavalierness'' that Musk and Trump have about Social Security, that the billionaires that advise them have about Social Security: Don't worry about it if you miss a check for a month or 2 months. You are a fraudster. You are trying to defraud the government if you complain about missing a Social Security check. It is so disconnected from reality.

I know we are going to talk later today about the plans to shut down the Department of Education. It shows this similar disdain for public education, the way that they are showing a disdain for working Americans who are relying on Social Security as their primary means of retirement income, the disdain for the 40 million working Americans who rely on Medicaid.

And it is not hard to understand why, because if you are a billionaire, if you are Elon Musk, if you are Donald Trump, you don't have to rely on the public school system. Your kids go to fancy private schools. You will never need to rely on Medicaid. You have lived fortunate lives--in Donald Trump's case because he was born into wealth. You will get a Social Security check, but that is not going to be your primary retirement.

And so you can understand, if you put a bunch of billionaires in charge of the government who don't lead lives that are remotely connected to how average people live, they will say things like Social Security is just one big Ponzi scheme, and that is the big one to eliminate or, you know what, America will be all right if we impose $880 billion in cuts to the insurance program for 24 percent of Americans or let's shut down the Department of Education because, I don't know, public education doesn't matter to me.

So I think it is just the reality that we are living in today in which we have people who are making these decisions who just don't understand how normal people's lives work and, in particular, how a person's life falls apart if they have any diminution in their Social Security income, when the average check is $2,000 a month and the average expenses in most cities for a senior citizen who relies on Social Security are going to be far higher than $2,000 a month.

Here is my question for you. You laid out what is going on with Social Security today. It is like the opposite of efficiency. It is called the Department of Government Efficiency. And what we know for certain in the Social Security system is that everything they are doing has the intent of making the system less efficient, right? You don't just close dozens of offices and shut down the phone system to make the system more efficient. You do that to make the system less efficient.

And so I am trying to figure out why, right? I am trying to figure out why. And I will give you, you know, two theories and then let you tell me if you think I am right or I am wrong. It could be a pretext to eradicate the whole system.

What did they say about USAID? They said that USAID was a corrupt enterprise. It was corrupt. No evidence of corruption in USAID. No evidence of corruption, no allegations of specific corruption, but they just made these accusations that USAID was criminal. Musk and Trump said this: It is a criminal enterprise. It is a corrupt enterprise. And that became their justification to eliminate it. Within weeks, USAID, one of the most important vehicles of U.S. national security was gone-- was gone. They didn't run on that. Nobody saw that coming.

It was 2 weeks of allegations about criminality and corruption, and then USAID vanished. And people were like looking around, what happened? They didn't tell us they were going to do that, and now it is gone. They certainly didn't run on eliminating Social Security or cutting people's benefits. But, boy, the playbook seems a little familiar here that all of a sudden there are these lies being told. Lies being told. Let's say what it is about the corruption inside Social Security.

As you said, the improper benefit payments are minuscule, right, .3 percent of overall payments.

And so is this a pretext to ultimately make big cuts in Social Security or, alternatively, is it just part of a plan to just sort of put the entire country on edge, right? To just make everybody wake up in the morning wondering whether they are next, right? Is it my Medicaid benefit that is going to be cut? Is Social Security going to be there for me if I am a Federal employee? You know, is my job here next week?

And is that a means of distracting you from the corruption, the thievery that is happening at the highest levels of government? Is that in service of an agenda to try to convert this country from democracy to something else, if everybody is just so focused on the next hit, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, my son losing his Federal job? Is that a means to ultimately try

to drive an agenda through the back door while people are looking at the threats coming at them through the front door? It is clearly not about efficiency. I mean, that is what we know. The changes they are making to Social Security are not about efficiency, so the question is, What is the agenda here if it is not efficiency?

Right.

Will the gentleman yield?

So there is also a third agenda here. We were not necessarily both here at this time, but a few Republican administrations ago, there was an attempt to privatize Social Security, to take, you know, the corpus and move that money into the hands of the private sector for them to manage the money and, of course, charge a fee or a commission for the management of the money. The Social Security trust fund, if sort of fully handed over to investors on Wall Street, could make a lot of money for that industry.

The American people rose up against that. It was stopped in its tracks. But that is still a priority for a lot of allies of the President, to get their hands on that money inside Social Security.

And, again, I am previewing a future conversation, but I keep on making the analogy to what is happening inside the education space because those same industries--whether it was the investment banks or private-equity firms--get wide-eyed at our public education dollars as well because they would love to get their hands on those public education dollars and have private equity companies running our elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools and skimming a little bit of money off the top to pay back their investors.

And so, you know, the other potential agenda here is to attack the public administration of Social Security, attack the public administration of our public schools in order to shift that administration--and the oversight of the investments in the case of the Social Security--to the private sector so that the President can hand those functions and that oversight to friends in the private sector. And, once again, it just becomes a money-making vehicle for folks who are already doing very well instead of an exercise in just trying to promote governance.

Instead of the agenda simply being the education of our kids or the administration of a benefit program, it just becomes about making somebody else money.

I pose that as a question to my friend because we saw this attempt to try to privatize Social Security, and you can certainly see at the end of this assault, this false assault on the inefficiency of the public administration, the solution being to turn the program over to the private sector, the privatization of Social Security that many Republicans have wanted for a long time finally coming to fruition.

Ready, fire, aim.

Does the Senator yield?

I thank the Senator.

What the Senator is outlining is an extraordinary assault not just on education but on the knowledge economy.

I want to bring manufacturing jobs back to this country, but I understand--I think everybody understands--that we are not going to be a nation filled with low-skilled manufacturing jobs. We are going to be a nation that does high-skilled manufacturing. We are going to be a nation that invents things. We are going to be a nation that is dependent on engineering and on invention. We are going to be a knowledge economy.

We are today, but we are going to be even more reliant on maintaining and expanding our knowledge edge on the rest of the world, given the fact that the pace of change and the oncoming transformation that will come from robotics and AI will make it even more important for a nation to have the most highly skilled, most highly educated workforce possible in order to stay ahead of the curve and not have employment be buried by automation and artificial intelligence.

So this is a moment in which we should be doubling down on our support for the knowledge economy, on an integration of public sector research and private sector research, which has always been the genius of American economy. We did that integration better than anybody, and it is not coincidental that we leap-frogged the rest of the world when it came to that innovation economy.

But what the Senator is explaining is that the Trump administration is waging a war on the knowledge economy. It is literally signing our economic death warrant by coming after the foundational strength of our Nation, which is that public-private sector integration.

I just checked in with the University of Connecticut, which is going to lose $165 million because of this illegal

change that the Trump administration has implemented, dramatically cutting the amount of research dollars that go to institutions with NIH grants.

I will just read half their list. They gave me a list of all their research projects that are going to either be eliminated or slowed for diminished:

A project for improving physical and cognitive function in

aging; a project for improving outcomes for people with

autism; a project for understanding neural mechanisms for

language and reading, including people with dyslexia; funding

for prevention and care for HIV patients; projects for

studying the leading causes of death and disability in the

United States, including cancer, obesity, Alzheimer's

disease, and substance abuse; projects studying treatments

for rare diseases and genetic disorders with specific impacts

on health, including sickle cell, mitochondrial disorders,

Rett syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, muscle and bone

regeneration research, tick-borne diseases.

The University of Connecticut faces the same crisis as all the other institutions listed in that incredibly long STAT news article.

And as you mentioned, research is not going to wait around for this crisis to pass. They are going to accept offers from research institutions in other countries, from our European allies to our Asian competitors. We are going to lose our competitive edge when it comes to research.

It is worth noting that this change in research funding is illegal. Article I vests the spending power of the Federal Government in Congress. That is plain and simple, and there are lots of good reasons why our Founding Fathers did that, Senator Booker. They were determined to keep the spending power out of the hands of the executive branch because they had seen how the British King used the Treasury in order to compel loyalty and to punish opposition: You get money if you are loyal to me.

You get money if you are loyal to me; I withhold money from you if you are disloyal to me.

And so Congress got the spending power. We decided the exact rate of reimbursement for medical research. We were very specific about it in the statute that we passed, Republicans and Democrats.

This cut in funding for institutes of higher educations' research that has been implemented by the administration is illegal on its face.

Congress said exactly how research funding should be allocated; the President is ignoring that statute and implementing a unilateral cut.

It has been enjoined by the Federal court. Hopefully, if the courts follow the law, it will be permanently stopped.

But it is important to note that it stands in a larger context of the Federal Government using its spending power--excuse me--the Trump administration trying to seize control of Federal spending in order to do that work that our Founding Fathers were so worried about.

We have seen over the past several weeks the administration march through school after school, trying to cut individual deals with institutions of higher education. We will release your funding only after you sign a bilateral agreement with the administration lining your institute of higher education's priorities up with the political interests of the administration.

This is exactly what our Founding Fathers were trying to avoid: the Executive using the spending power to compel loyalty from individuals and institutions. What they are doing is illegal.

And it is beyond me why my Republican colleagues, our Republican colleagues, stand idly by while the spending power vested in Congress by the Constitution is ripped from us.

But, Senator Booker, I guess I am going to ask you the same question I did when it came to this assault on Social Security, and it is a simple question. And I will lay out a little bit of a predicate. The question is: Why?

What the administration has done is extraordinary, proposing to close the Department of Education--wildly unpopular. Nobody is asking for that--waging this illegal and unconstitutional assault on our knowledge economy, suspending funding for institutions of higher education, research budgets, when, plainly, the statute says they cannot do that. So why engage in this extraordinary action to essentially destroy America's knowledge economy from elementary school all the way up to graduate education?

Well, as we have talked about, as you laid out, it can't be because you are trying to help the economy. This destroys the economy. I mean, this is the worst thing that you could probably do for the economy is to wage this open, transparent, proudful assault on research because we will not survive as an economy unless we are the place where cutting- edge research and invention happens. We just won't.

And so researchers now, who are having all of their offers suspended by major colleges and universities, they are looking elsewhere. Maybe they are hoping that the offer still comes through, but they are dialing up other competitors, many of them outside of the United States.

There was a story out of the University of Cambridge in England a couple weeks ago in which their administrators were talking about the bounty that they are receiving as some of the highest class researchers in the world are coming to them because they don't believe that they will have any source of stable funding from the United States.

So it can't be about helping us create jobs or supporting our economy. This is, no doubt, an assault on the economy.

One of the complaints that I hear often about elementary and secondary education is that the Department of Education was engaged in micromanagement, right? That it was a Federal school board, and we want to get the Federal Government out of the business of dictating what local schools will do.

Well, that is not a credible explanation for what is happening because, in fact, the Trump administration is telegraphing that they are going to actually jump into the micromanagement of our local schools.

Nobody has any idea what ``DEI'' means. Let's just be honest. It means something different to every single official in the Trump administration. It is just a proxy to impose a set of reactionary, rightwing values on our schools or on our Federal Agencies.

I asked a question of the nominee to be the alleged last Secretary of Education as to whether or not African-American history could be taught in our high schools any longer, and her answer was essentially maybe not. I don't know, but DEI might mean that you can't teach African- American history. It might mean that the Federal Government is going to comb through every syllabus in every high school in the entire country and tell you what courses you can teach and what courses you can't. And if there are any words in there that our AI algorithm doesn't like-- like ``African''--can't teach it. That is a level of micromanagement never seen before in the Federal Government.

And so the reason that they are cracking down on the Department of Education or eliminating funding for research is not because they are trying to get the Federal Government out of the management of our schools, because they are doing exactly the opposite. They are telling you that your school is not going to be able to make decisions on what classes it offers its students. It is going to be Linda McMahon, the former CEO of the World Wrestling Federation, that is going to be in charge of whether your school can teach African-American history. OK?

So then what is the reason, Senator Booker? And I will, you know, just give you a couple suggestions: Well, maybe it is just to compel loyalty, right? Maybe it is just to use that money to compel loyalty so that boards of education or colleges are only teaching conservative or right-leaning curriculum.

Maybe it is to try to quell protests on campuses so that there isn't an ability for students to robustly protest the policies of the regime.

Maybe it is just to destroy the idea of objective truth. I mean, this whole scandal over Signal has lots of elements to it, but I think one of the most worrying things for the American public, why it is still a story a week later, is because the Secretary of Defense looked the American public in the eye and said: 2 plus 2 equals 9. Right? He said: Those Signal texts you saw did not involve war plans, did not involve classified information.

The American public was like: Wait a second. We read them. I am not dumb. I know those were war plans. I know that that was classified information.

But if you are in the business of trying to unwind democracy, you have to destroy objective truth. You have to make everything political. You have to make everything subjective.

Where is objective truth midwifed? It is in our education system. That is where we learn 2 plus 2 equals 4 every time. But if you want to undermine the foundation of a democracy, then you undermine the place where truth happens.

OK. Maybe it is the same agenda with Social Security, just come up with an excuse to privatize it all. Just take all the money that is going to good, public sector research and just move it all into the private sector so it can be a source to reward the friends of President Trump. That could be a rationale as well.

Or maybe it is even simpler. Maybe it is just to own the libs. Maybe it is just that, historically, Democrats on the left have maybe talked about education more than Republicans have, even though, to me, it was always something we both cared about. Whether or not I agree with George Bush's ``No Child Left Behind'' plan, at least he was walking into the Capitol with a plan to try to improve education.

But maybe it is just that Democrats on the left have historically talked more about education. And if you believe, as Donald Trump does, that all politics is zero sum, anything the Democrats are for must be, by definition, bad for America. And Democrats seem to like college, and they seem to really support our schools, so we have to destroy our colleges, and we have to destroy public education. Because if the left is for it, it must be evil. Maybe that is the reason they are doing it.

But that is the question I pose to you because it has nothing to do with our economy. It has nothing to do with getting the Federal Government out of the management of schools and colleges. There is another agenda here, and it doesn't seem to be an agenda that squares with anything that the American people have been asking, Senator Booker.

Will the Senator yield?

I take the Senator's point, my friend's point. I am probing tonight for the why because it is the obvious question. It doesn't make sense, right? On its face, this intentional chaos--this intentional chaos in Social Security, in Medicare, in higher education, it doesn't make sense. It is not about efficiency. It is not about jobs. So what is it about?

But your point is a good one. That may not actually be the conversation that a lot of apolitical Americans are asking. They may just be looking at this on the face and say: How does this impact me? It doesn't matter to me why it is happening; it matters how it is going to impact me.

There is no doubt that this assault on higher education has none; it does. We are, as you said it better than I have, we are just in a race.

We are just in a race, and we just decided to slow down to a walk, which is a shame because we are fast. We are fast. This country is quick. And our coach just told us, start walking while the other guys speed up.

This is why we have urgency because the race--this one is not. Maybe it is a marathon. But it is one of those races where if the other team gets too big a lead, it is going to be hard to catch up.

So in the next 3\1/2\ years, if we just stand down in terms of supporting the knowledge economy, we are going to shed millions of jobs--millions of jobs. And once those centers of excellence, research excellence are outside the United States, it is not like the next President can just come back in and fix it. That becomes a permanent liability for us.

The reason that I am here on the floor with you, Senator Booker, is because I agree with you that this is not normal. But I also agree with you that we have to wake our colleagues up fast because like a second ago, I thought we all agreed on the fact that we need to support the knowledge economy. Like 2 seconds ago, we were all raising hands together, Republicans and Democrats, that we finally started putting big new dollars into NIH. We did a $2 billion increase, I think, a few years ago, and it was a big bipartisan achievement. And all of a sudden, just because Donald Trump is in the White House, we have lost the bipartisan consensus of the knowledge economy.

I am good. I made my point.

Will the Senator yield?

Those are hard stories to read, Senator Booker, but I appreciate your showing the coldness of this current administration's immigration policy.

The tragedy to me is that there is an opportunity to fix what is, undoubtedly, a broken immigration system, and yet we are into day 71 and Donald Trump has not proposed to us any proposals to fix the broken system. Instead what he is doing is spending like a drunken sailor on an enforcement system that wastes tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.

You described this harrowing experience that this Canadian woman had, and as I was listening to this 2-week ordeal that she went through, being transported from site to site, being processed and reprocessed, as the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Subcommittee of Appropriations, I am just cataloging in my brain how much money that cost us. Ultimately, this was somebody working in the United States, this was somebody that posed no threat to the U.S. citizens, but we probably spent several million dollars on that 2-week ordeal.

Overall, the Trump administration is going to blow through all of the money allocated to Border Patrol. They are going to have to come back to Congress for a massive additional appropriation, all at the same time that they are shuttering medical research in this country; they are closing down Social Security offices. There are measles outbreaks all across the country. Planes seem to be falling out of the sky as the FAA is enduring layoffs. There are consequences to these spending decisions.

The amount of money that is being spent at the border, much of it wasted in a showy, ineffective response, the consequence of that is that the services that the average, everyday Americans need, like help on their Social Security claims, are being impacted.

But we need to fix the broken immigration system, and we had an opportunity to do that last year when Republicans and Democrats came together and wrote a bipartisan border security bill that, frankly, would have allocated tens of billions of additional dollars that would have fixed our broken asylum system, would have given the President new authorities, and Donald Trump instructed all the Republicans in this Chamber to oppose it.

In the end, I think four Senators, including the author, Senator Lankford, supported it, but every other Republican here opposed it. And the reason Donald Trump told them to oppose it was that he would fix it when he became President. But we are now in day 72, and there has not been a single proposal from Donald Trump to fix the broken immigration system, just a whole bunch of spending, essentially money down the drain because the system itself needs to be reformed.

And so it speaks to my confident belief that Donald Trump does not want to fix our immigration system. He wants to keep this issue open as a sore in our politics. If I were wrong, he would have proposed legislation here to deal with the underlying inefficiency of the system, instead of just throwing money at the problem.

And so we will see what the result of this campaign is. We were told that immigrants to this country represented a very specific national security threat; that we needed to crack down on immigration, including expelling from this country legitimate asylum seekers because that was what was necessary to protect the Nation. Well, we will see what the crime data tells us for the first few months of this administration.

I have a feeling I already know what the story is; crime is not going to have gone down. Why? Because, in fact, whether people want to acknowledge this or not, natural-born American citizens commit crimes at rates higher than first-generation immigrants or people born outside of the United States of America.

But Senator Booker, I guess the question I want to ask you is this: I think you and I agree that Americans right, left, and center acknowledge that the immigration system is broken. They didn't love it when they saw thousands of people crossing on an average day. And they know that when it takes 10 years to process an asylum claim, something is wrong, and that it then just provides incentive for people to come here without documentation. But my impression is that the cross section of Americans that believes that the existing immigration system is broken also believes three other things: One, that the way to fix it is to change the laws, and they believe that we have not done our job until we have changed the laws; for instance, building a better asylum system. And once again, not a single proposal from the Trump administration on how to fix our broken immigration system, not a single proposal.

Second, I believe that they understand that immigration is a core strength of this Nation, not a liability, and that if we want to thrive as an economy, we are going to have to bring people to this country legally. But to turn our backs on immigration as a mechanism to grow economically, that is not in line with what Americans believe, even those that think the existing system is broken.

And then, lastly, I just don't believe this country is as mean as Donald Trump thinks it is.

I get it that everybody wants this Nation to be a nation of laws, but when an American citizen looks at a child with a medical condition, when an American citizen looks at an individual who will face certain death from a drug gang if they stay in their home country, when they look at individuals in war-torn nations overseas, they believe that America is strong enough, is big enough, is generous enough to be able to protect those people from harm. Why? Because that is what America always has been.

And so this idea that President Trump has that Americans are mean and spiteful and don't want to help people just because they were born outside of the United States or their parents were born outside of the United States, I just don't think that is right. It obviously betrays the best traditions of this Nation, but I think it also fundamentally misreads the American people.

So I think people want our immigration to be fixed, the system to be fixed, but I think they want us to do it. They understand the laws are broken. They do not want to abandon America's tradition of bringing people here from all around the world.

They understand that our economy and our economic prosperity is linked to our ability to bring hard-working immigrants to this country, and they are just not as mean as Donald Trump thinks they are.

Can the Senator yield?

I just want to drill down on this for a moment. It gets back to a theme that you have been hitting on throughout the evening and early morning, and that is that not everything has to be zero-sum politics. This is part of what is so exhausting about the last 71 days for many, many Americans. I think it is part of why Donald Trump's approval ratings are tanking by the day.

You and I are pugilists when we need to be, right? We fight when we think that there is a worthy fight. That is what this is today--it is a fight. We understand it is a fight for our values. But we don't think everything has to be a fight. We see our jobs as standing up for our convictions but then finding that common ground.

I did not expect to be in that room with Senator Lankford. I was surprised, pleasantly, when we came to an agreement. You spent months and months hammering out really difficult criminal justice reform with a colleague of yours that you have equal numbers of disagreements with because we feel like we have a call from our constituents to fight but then find the common ground.

But this administration has zero interest in common ground. Every single day, they wake up thinking only about conflict, thinking only about defeat of their opposition. And they have been frustrated because they have been trying to do a lot of illegal things, and the courts have been telling them no. They are now talking about extraordinary measures, like impeaching judges or defunding the courts.

Instead, they could reach out to Democrats. They could decide to do what every previous President has tried to do, which is, instead of ramming through a one-side-only policy on immigration, for instance, come to people of good will on the opposing party and try to work out a compromise.

This is what exhausts the American people, is this administration's complete and total unwillingness to find common ground on anything. That is not where the center of this country is.

On the issues of immigration, we found common ground last year. It was hard. It did not satisfy everyone. But we have proven that on this issue--it is hot. It is difficult for even family members to talk about it sometimes. Even on this issue of immigration, we can find that common ground.

So we are here--you are here because there is a fight to be waged, but I think we both wish on a litany of these topics that we were instead sitting down with our colleagues. But that is just not in the DNA of this administration. That is part of why this President is becoming more and more unpopular by the day, is because they expect any President--any President--to make at least a minimalist effort to try to reach out and find compromise, and that never happens from the Trump administration.

Chippewa Falls.

Chippewa Falls.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

We have a few more colleagues who are going to join us before the top of the hour, but I just wanted you to round this out and ask you the question this way.

Often, when we talk about the withdrawal of USAID from the world, the withdrawal of the United States from international bodies like the WHO, the beneficiary is China. But I think you were hinting, as you talked about the African continent, that the threat is much broader than that because USAID is not just doing counter-China programming; it is also doing counter-extremism programming. In Lebanon, for instance, it is doing the primary work to push back against Hezbollah's political influence there. It is doing work to counter Russian influence around its periphery.

And so isn't it the case, Senator Booker, that as USAID is pulled off the playing field, for reasons we still don't understand, that it is all of our adversaries--state adversaries and nonstate adversaries--who are, tragically, celebrating at this opening that we have given them to gain additional influence?

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Senator Booker, it has been a wonder to be with you on the floor these last 24 hours. You indeed did something extraordinary and performed a sympathy filibuster with me 9 years ago where, as I stood at that desk for 15 hours, you stood on the Senate floor. You didn't need to but you did in solidarity.

I have been with you for the last 24 hours, but I have sat for most of this. You have done the hard work.

You are an extraordinary Senator. You are an extraordinary American. And I think I can say, on behalf of everyone in this Chamber and many people in the Gallery, you are an extraordinary friend. So I think all of us feel privileged to be here with you at this moment--this moment of peril, this moment of danger, this moment of opportunity for the Nation, but also this moment of history.

On August 28, 1957, at about 8:45 p.m., Strom Thurmond took this floor, and he took the floor with the intent of trying to block the 1957 civil rights bill. This was the most significant--really, the only--civil rights bill that had been before the U.S. Senate in 90 years. Most famously, about 10 years before, when he was running for President as a Dixiecrat, he had said:

There are not enough troops in the Army to force the

Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro

race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our

homes and into our churches.

He sat on this floor for just over 24 hours, and he made the case for why this Nation should continue to segregate Black and White. He started, in fact, by reading every single State's voting rights laws. Every single State's laws he read into the Record, apparently as proof that every State adequately protected all of its voters and that no additional laws were necessary.

He had friends in his cause to preserve segregation that came down to the floor and asked him long questions to give him breathers.

At the end of that 24 hours, at around 9 p.m. the following night, he could go no longer. His final words in his 24-hour, recordbreaking filibuster were:

I expect to vote against the bill.

But within hours, the bill passed. It became law. It established the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Justice. It was not nearly enough, but it broke 90 years of inaction.

What you have done here today, Senator Booker, couldn't be more different than what occurred on this floor in 1957. Strom Thurmond was standing in the way of inevitable progress toward equal political and economic rights for Black Americans. It was inevitable only because the people of this Nation were standing up at that moment--the beginning of the civil rights movement--to make clear that progress was inevitable.

I say that that moment is so different from this moment because today you are standing in the way not of progress but of retreat. You are standing in the way of retreat from the rule of law, retreat from our commitment to provide care to the most vulnerable, retreat from our common cause--at least what used to be a common cause--that we would have zero tolerance for corruption at the highest levels of government.

You have recognized, rightly, that this multifaceted retreat from everything that makes this country so special and the speed of that retreat over the last 71 days--it is an exceptional moment. You have said that word over and over again. It is not normal, what this administration has been doing to rob from us the values that used to unite left and right in this Nation.

So you made this bold decision to engage in an exceptional tactic, to declare 24 hours ago that you were going to stand on this floor for as long as you could to try to raise the specter of failure in our fight against this retreat for our colleagues and for the American public.

The exceptional nature we have heard so eloquently from you over the course of the last 24 hours--the massive transfer of wealth in this reconciliation bill from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy; the industrial-scale harassment of journalists, of universities, of law firms; the destruction of the independence of the Department of Justice; the destruction of the American knowledge economy and the research economy; the use of the White

House in violation of the Constitution to make those in power richer-- you have laid out the case.

It is funny--I remember this from 9 years ago--when you are sitting in your spot--you haven't moved in 24 hours--you have no idea what is happening outside of this building. You don't actually know how many people in this country have engaged in the conversation that you started 24 hours ago.

On one social media platform alone, there have been 150 million clicks on your live stream. This is a country of 300 million Americans. You have been able to pique a conversation here amongst our colleagues--who we need to stand with us eventually against this retreat--and across this country. And I think we are here, as we reach a pivotal hour, to just say thank you for having the courage, the audacity, to bring us on this journey.

So my question is pretty simple. I think you will find when you finally leave this Chamber that you have done something extraordinary, that you didn't solve the problem, that we are still a long way from being able to successfully beat back this retreat, but that you have accomplished something extraordinary.

So I guess that is just my question. When you set out with this idea, when this was starting to germinate in your mind, my question for you, Senator Booker, is, What did you hope to accomplish?