Floor Statements

Mr. President, I am on the floor today to talk to my colleagues about something that is happening right in front of our eyes. It is a set of events that aren't random--they are connected to one another--that threaten to destroy this country that we love.

Everybody can see it, but for some reason--maybe the exhaustion of the aftermath of a brutal election, maybe the distraction of the Christmas season, maybe just an instinct to flee instead of fight-- there are far too many people who are denying to themselves what they are seeing.

What is happening right now is that Donald Trump and his billionaire advisers are unfolding for the country in real time a plan to transition this country from a democracy to a restrictive oligarchy, where political opposition is silenced, where the media isn't free, and where government just exists to enrich a small cabal of elites that surround the man in charge.

I know a lot of my colleagues do see how these dots exist and how they connect, and I know, in your gut, a lot of you see the specter of the disaster that is coming. But if you don't, I want to spend just a few minutes laying it out.

To make things simple, I am just going to focus on three events that happened in the last 7 days: the recommendation by House Republicans that Trump critic Liz Cheney be subject to criminal prosecution, the lawsuit filed by Trump against an Iowa pollster and an Iowa newspaper, and the decision by ABC to pay Trump $15 million to get rid of a bogus lawsuit.

First, the recommendation from House Republicans that Liz Cheney be prosecuted. Liz Cheney was a member of the January 6 Commission that tried to find some accountability for the assault on this Capitol that resulted in people dying, that resulted in an officer with blood running down his face running into this Chamber to rescue us before the violent rioters got ahold of us.

Donald Trump did not like that narrative that he had something to do with, that he inspired the January 6 riot. He doesn't even like the narrative that January 6 was a riot. His events are opened by the January 6 choir in commemoration of the events that day.

What happened this week is that Donald Trump made good on his promise. He said during the campaign that he was going to use the military, law enforcement, and the National Guard to deal with ``the enemy within.'' When asked who ``the enemy within'' was, he said: Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Democrats.

Now, people laughed it off during the campaign because that doesn't happen in America. We don't use law enforcement to lock up your political opposition. But that is exactly what is being recommended when it comes to Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney did nothing criminal. There is not even a whiff of a criminal allegation. She was just in charge of a Commission that Donald Trump opposed. But House Republicans, taking orders from Donald Trump, just recommended that the next administration, the next Department of Justice, criminally prosecute Liz Cheney.

By the way, Liz Cheney won't be the last. There will be other political opponents of Donald Trump who are referred for prosecution.

Now, that would be laughable today under an FBI and a Department of Justice that doesn't lock up people for political reasons, but Donald Trump is changing the guard at the FBI. He is putting in someone loyal to him as the next Attorney General. The person he is going to put in at the FBI wrote a book about how important it was to eliminate from government anybody that doesn't line up with the political priorities of the President. He has said that the people who ran fair elections in 2020 should go to jail because if you didn't run an election that resulted in Donald Trump being elected, then you did something wrong.

This week, the House recommended Liz Cheney for criminal prosecution. Donald Trump cheered that recommendation. And we are getting ready to vote on an Attorney General and a Director of the FBI who have made clear that they are ready to eagerly prosecute Trump's political opponents.

This is really important to talk about because this is one of the key ways that democracies fall all around the world. It, frankly, doesn't take hundreds of political prosecutions; it only takes a handful before ordinary, average Americans just decide that they would be better off staying quiet instead of facing potential harassment or intimidation or a jail sentence for speaking out the way that Liz Cheney did.

The second thing that happened in this last week was that Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against a pollster in Iowa. The grounds of the lawsuit are simple: He didn't like the results of the poll. The poll said the Iowa race was close. The poll ended up being wrong, but he is suing the pollster and the newspaper because he was upset that that poll helped galvanize opposition to him.

That poll, which suggested that race was close, got a lot of people to donate to his political opponent. It gave people in Iowa some hope that maybe a Democrat could win. That is not allowed in Donald Trump's world. It is not allowed in Donald Trump's world for anything to be in service of his political opposition. So he is filing a lawsuit that has no chance of succeeding because he wants to try to intimidate journalists and the press into submission.

Whether we like it or not, it just is true that maybe in the future, a pollster who has a poll in front of them that shows a race closing, shows a race that is favorable to Democrats, won't publicize that poll out of fear of a lawsuit.

Connected to that lawsuit is the third thing I want to talk about: the decision by ABC to pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle a bogus lawsuit--a bogus defamation lawsuit--that would have never succeeded in court. But ABC, for whatever reason, decided it would be better for them to just pay Donald Trump to make it go away.

You are seeing repeated decisions by people in the media to just go along with Donald Trump rather than risk his ire, rather than potentially put their profits at risk if Donald Trump and his regulatory Agencies turn against them. You saw Jeff Bezos tell his newspapers not to endorse Kamala Harris. You have seen an effort by Comcast to divest itself from MSNBC. You have seen ABC pay off Donald Trump $15 million. Over and over again, you see members of the press starting to decide it is just better not to fight him.

These three things taken together show you the playbook: Threaten political opposition with jail, throw a few of them into jail to show you are serious, sue and intimidate and harass anybody that does anything that is helpful to your political opposition, and intimidate and harass the media in the hopes that they will just go away and stop criticizing you.

I don't think it is a coincidence that during this period of media harassment by Donald Trump, when Liz Cheney was referred for criminal prosecution, all the headlines played it totally straight. None of the headlines suggested that the criminal prosecution was bogus, it was built on lies, it was built on no understanding of the law. The headlines just said: Liz Cheney referred for criminal prosecution.

I think it is really important that we lay out what is happening here because this is how a democracy vanishes, but I think it is also equally important to talk about why Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and all of his billionaire friends are engaged in this very coordinated early attack, even before he is sworn in, to try to intimidate his political opposition and bully the press.

The reason they are doing this, the reason they are trying to suppress dissent, is because they are preparing to steal from us. Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies want to be in charge of government so that they can make themselves more wealthy at our expense. They want government contracts. They want to privatize government programs. They want to get bigger regulatory breaks. They want lower taxes.

Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies want government to serve them, but they know the only way they get away with that is if no one holds them accountable. So in order to steal from us, they have to silence political opposition, intimidate activists into submission, and try to get the press to fold. If they do that, then they can get away with using government as a mechanism to enrich themselves.

If you want further proof of their agenda, look what is happening right now, today, as we speak: Republicans and Democrats had a deal to keep the government open and operating, to fund much-needed disaster assistance, and it was killed yesterday by the two billionaires closest to Donald Trump. When asked as to what their alternative was, they said: Raise the debt ceiling. Donald Trump said: Raise the debt ceiling. You will have my support for a continuing resolution if you raise the debt ceiling.

Why do they want to raise the debt ceiling? It is easy. They want to pass a huge tax cut for the billionaires in charge of Donald Trump's government. That is their agenda--big, big tax cut for billionaires and corporations. But the only way you can do that is if the debt ceiling is raised. The only way you can get away with that is if you can borrow more money on the backs of ordinary, average, everyday people in order to pay for that tax cut.

So we are seeing the agenda of the Trump administration before they are even sworn in, in front of our eyes: Rig the rules in order to make the billionaires richer, and telegraph that as your No. 1 priority to Congress.

Listen, there aren't just democracies and dictatorships in the world. There are dozens of countries that occupy a gray zone in between those poles, countries where there are still elections but the media and the political opposition are so weak--weak because they have been beaten into submission by the regime--that the people actually have no power. There are elections, but the same group, the same man, the same family wins every time.

America has been, for almost all of our history, a functioning, robust democracy where the party or individual in power changes regularly because people hold all the tools necessary to choose their leaders. But that could change in a heartbeat, so quickly, but without any one galvanizing moment, that the transition might just be missed by all of us. You could just wake up one day and find out that the rules of democracy have been so rigged that Republicans or the Trump family

never ever lose again and billionaires get to steal from all of us without any accountability.

I know that sounds hard to believe. I admit that I might be wrong about all of this. America's democracy is the longest existing democracy in the history of the world. It has proven to be resilient. It is filled with grit. It has survived challenges before. But like every one of us eventually disappears from this planet, so does every democracy. Every democracy has a last day.

If you look around the world, the steps that lead to the termination of a democracy--the termination, end of self-governance--are shockingly similar from country to country. The wealthy people who control the media and the economy fold into the regime. Better to join than to fight. The citizens get scared of joining up with the opposition movement because they are fearful of harassment. Better to stay quiet than fight.

If we don't speak out more loudly and more boldly about the events of the last week and the way we are seeing a purposeful, detailed roadmap constructed by Donald Trump and his billionaire friends to transition a democracy to an oligarchy; if we don't fight like hell against these nominees, especially those going to the Department of Justice that will execute this assault on democracy, then our Nation, very soon, could easily befall the same as these other destructed democracies.

The survival of our 240-year experiment is facing, right now, one of its most severe tests, and I just think it is time that everybody woke up to that and pulled their heads out of the sand.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the following bills en bloc: Calendar No. 457, H.R. 1555; Calendar No. 532, S. 4404; Calendar No. 533, S. 4634; Calendar No. 534, S. 4803; Calendar No. 535, H.R. 1823; Calendar No. 536, H.R. 3354; Calendar No. 537, H.R. 6810; Calendar No. 538, H.R. 6983; Calendar No. 539, H.R. 7180; Calendar No. 540, H.R. 7385; Calendar No. 541, H.R. 7417; Calendar No. 542, H.R. 7606; Calendar No. 543, H.R. 7607; Calendar No. 544, H.R. 7893; Calendar No. 568, H.R. 5867; Calendar No. 569, H.R. 6162; Calendar No. 570, H.R. 6188; Calendar No. 571, H.R. 6633; Calendar No. 572, H.R. 6750; Calendar No. 573, H.R. 8057.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the bills en bloc be considered read a third time and passed and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc.

Madam President, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be discharged from further consideration and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the following bills, en bloc: H.R. 6116, H.R. 7158, H.R. 7507, H.R. 7508, H.R. 8641, H.R. 8717, H.R. 8841, H.R. 8868, H.R. 8909, H.R. 8919, H.R. 8976, H.R. 9285,

I ask unanimous consent that these bills be considered read a third time and passed and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, all en bloc.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, earlier today, I got to spend a little time with a close friend of mine, Sam Saylor. As I was talking to Sam-- resident of Hartford, CT, the city in which I live--I was thinking about who his son Shane might be today.

Shane had a tough life. Shane was born with a birth defect in which one of his arms was essentially inoperable. He grew up in really poor circumstances. He was often bullied. But Shane had a spirit about him-- a fighting spirit sometimes that got him in trouble but a spirit to rise above his circumstances, to do something with his life.

His mom--strong mom--Sam's dad clearly gave him a vision of what his life could be, such that when he was 20 years old, he had started a small business. He was buying cars that needed to be rehabbed and fixed up. He would do that, and he would sell them to make a little bit of a profit. It was an extraordinary endeavor for a kid who lived that kind of life, who had those kinds of obstacles.

I think about 12 years later--Shane would have been in his early thirties today. What would Shane be doing? Would he be running an autobody shop? Would he be an active member of his community? Would he be making a difference in the way that his father and his mother have? Shane could have been a life-changer, but he is not because on October 20, 12 years ago, Shane died. Shane died when he was selling one of these cars. He was meeting a prospective buyer. He brought his girlfriend along, and one of the group of kids who were with the buyer said something mean or coarse about Shane's girlfriend. Some words were exchanged. Shane, as he sometimes did, threw a punch. In the other group's car, there happened to be an illegal gun. They were furious that Shane had thrown that punch. They went and got that gun, and they shot Shane dead in cold blood.

Shane's mom got there before he died, at the scene. He died at the hospital. I just think about who Shane would be today, what great things he would be doing.

Two months later, the entire world woke up to the epidemic of gun violence in this country. Shane's murder happened on October 20, 2012. And then on December 14, 2012, the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened; 20 first graders and 6 educators lost their lives.

I never really know what to say every year when I come down here to give this speech. But because this is the year that those kids would have been going to college and voting for the first time--this year of transition into adulthood--it is worth thinking about who they would be today and what amazing things they might be getting ready to do in their adulthood.

Catherine Hubbard, as early as preschool, just adored animals. And she knew, even when she was 6 years old, that her purpose in life was to protect animals. She would catch butterflies and put them in her hand and whisper to them, ``Tell your friends I am kind.'' And then she would let them go. She made business cards--she is 6. She made business cards for ``Catherine's Animal Shelter,'' because she knew that is what she was going to do. She was going to save animals as an adult.

Chase Kowalski was a jock. He loved to run and swim and bike so much that that year that he died, when he was 6 years old, he asked his parents to find him a triathlon to compete in. He was 6. You wonder, what triathlon--he trained for a triathlon. He ran in that triathlon. He swam in that triathlon. He biked in that triathlon. And he won his age group.

That kind of indomitable spirit--the willingness to tackle challenges, so big--that is a recipe for success in life. What would Chase Kowalski be getting ready to do right now? What big challenges in the world would he see as an opportunity to confront? What a difference might he be making in the world, having displayed those really rare characteristics as a 6-year-old?

Emilie Parker was a supertalented artist who didn't travel anywhere without her colored pencils and her markers. She wanted to do art wherever she was. She was very attuned to kids around her who weren't feeling well, who were feeling sad. And her immediate instinct when she would run into a friend who wasn't feeling good that day was to paint them a picture or draw them a picture to make them feel better.

This month, the Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary broke ground on what will become Catherine's Learning Barn. And over the last 10 years, the not-for-profit that her parents set up in her name has conducted thousands of opportunities and workshops for kids to commune with animals.

There is a Race4Chase Kids Triathlon today. And so there are children all over Connecticut who are learning how to overcome obstacles by racing in their first triathlon, named after Chase.

And the Emilie Parker Art Connection has helped support arts programs that are under siege with local budget cuts. Not just in Connecticut, but all over the country kids are getting the opportunity to experience art because of the Emilie Parker Art Connection.

That is a lovely story: the triathlon, the animal sanctuary, the arts program.

But what would Catherine and what would Chase and what would Emilie

have done with their lives? If they lived, what would all of these other beautiful girls and boys, their teachers have done with their lives had they been here today?

It is just unthinkable how many lives are cut off, how much genius is extinguished, how much change could have benefited all of us because we live in a world in which 100, mainly young men and women in their teens and 20s, lose their life every day.

But I am here to tell you that that is not the extent of the story, because it is not just those who die who have their potential extinguished.

I live in the South End of Hartford. The Presiding Officer lives in a neighborhood with high rates of violence, and he knows as well as I do the biology that impacts kids who wake up every single day fearing for their lives.

I have a group of middle schoolers who I sort of call my ``neighborhood kitchen cabinet,'' and I go and meet with them every month or so to get their feedback on what needs to be better about our neighborhood that we live in. And they regularly tell me that, for them, school is the safe place. It is their walk to and from schools, it is the weekends where they don't feel safe.

And when you have millions of children in this country who experience that exposure to violence on a daily basis--in Birmingham, AL, 58 percent of people live within a quarter mile of a recent fatal shooting. In New Haven--same number--58 percent of people live within a quarter mile of a recent fatal shooting.

When that is your daily reality, whether you survive the year or not, your brain is impacted as a child in a way that robs you of the basic skills for life's success: resiliency, grit.

It is not a coincidence that all the low-performing schools in this country are in the violent neighborhoods. It is hard to learn-- impossible--for those kids who see gun violence on a daily basis.

And so I wish I knew what Shane would be as an adult. I wish I knew what all of these kids ended up to be--where they were going to college, what their dreams were becoming. But make no mistake. The potential that we are losing in this country because of the choices we make here not to make combating gun violence a priority, it is extinguishing the potential not of 100 people a day--those who lose their lives--but literally tens of thousands. And it is just a choice we make.

Shane's first small business was a water-selling business. He asked his dad one summer if he could just set up a little stand and sell bottled water to people in the neighborhood. And so his dad fronted him the money and bought him one of those big Costco packs of bottled water. And Shane set out his little stand to sell the water in a neighborhood where, whether he knew it or not, he was already exposed to levels of trauma due to the loss of life that was happening almost every weekend that summer in Hartford, CT. And he put a sign in front of his table. He named his business Shane Oliver Sells. And he wrote the acronym: SOS.

When you send out an SOS call, right, it is your last chance. Right? You are on that boat. You have tried everything--everything. You tried bailing it out. You tried restarting the engine. You tried plugging the hole. You are done. The only thing left is to signal that SOS call so that somebody in charge will come and rescue you.

I don't know if Shane knew or didn't know what his acronym meant. But Shane Oliver sat out there every day in a neighborhood plagued with gun violence with a sign that said ``SOS.'' And it is representative of the millions of kids all across this country who every single day are sending out an SOS signal to the adults who are supposed to protect them. They are supposed to show up here every day and make it a priority that something like this never, ever happens again--where the kids who live in my neighborhood never, ever fear for their lives walking from their home to school.

That SOS call is being sent out from thousands of neighborhoods all across this country here. That call is being delivered to us. It has been 12 years since we lost these beautiful children and the adults who protected them. And it is about time that we respond to that plea for help.

I yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Fetterman). The senator from Hawaii.

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

Madam President, I would ask that the scheduled vote begin immediately.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to waive the mandatory quorum call with respect to the Kasubhai cloture motion.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, let me make it clear that I share Senator Scott's concern--deep concern--that the recent attacks on former President Trump's life have made it clear that there are security gaps in his protection. What happened in Butler and Palm Beach was unacceptable, and it cannot be allowed to happen again.

That is why this week, Congress is coming together, poised to pass a continuing resolution that I hope the Senator will support that will give the Secret Service $231 million in additional funding to provide the Agency with the authority to spend money at a faster rate so that they can meet their mission, and their mission is ``zero fail.''

I am the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, which is charged with funding the Secret Service. I am proud of the quick work that we have done to identify the funds that can be spent between now and the election and between now and the inauguration to make sure that any gaps are closed.

The reason that I rise on this particular bill, though, is because I don't want to promise the American public more than this bill actually delivers.

This bill says that the Secret Service shall use ``the same standards for determining the number of agents required to protect Presidents, Vice Presidents, and major Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates.'' Now, that may sound meaningful, but in reality, my sense is that that is current law.

Right now, when the Secret Service makes a determination on the provision of protection, it is assessing the protectee's life, their work, their travel patterns, the potential threats, and the risk of harm to that person. The standard that the Secret Service uses is to provide whatever protection level is necessary to meet that ``zero fail'' mission to protect the person under their charge. With a team of experts, the Secret Service determines the level and the type of protection that is needed. That is the process, and those are the existing standards.

Let's be clear. Commanders in Chief--Presidents of the United States--do have certain unique requirements regarding their protection. For instance, the Department of Defense is supplying a traveling Commander in Chief with certain capabilities, chiefly amongst them the ability to stay in contact with our nuclear triad and communication assets necessary for the President to be in seamless communication with the Department of Defense and military command should a crisis arise. That is a unique set of capabilities that a Commander in Chief has, and it goes into the assessment that the Secret Service makes as to the level of protection that the Commander in Chief needs.

They are using the same standard--do whatever is necessary in order to protect the life of the protectee--but Commanders in Chief, because they are Commanders in Chief, have a different constellation of assets that surround them that mean that the standard gets applied accordingly.

So I am not actually going to object. I am not sure that this bill changes anything about the way the Secret Service approaches their mission. They are going to continue to do whatever is necessary in order to protect the detailee, to protect the individual under their mandate. I think the much more substantive thing we are going to do this week is to get them the resources they need. My hope is that all of my Republican colleagues who have been talking about the importance of Secret Service protection are willing to support this increase in funding that the continuing resolution will include.

I will end by expressing my additional hope that we will seek to have a more holistic conversation here about how to protect former President Trump, how to protect President Biden, and how to protect Vice President Harris.

I am ready to move forward with this bill. I don't think it does anything to meaningfully change the way that the Secret Service approaches their job. I am ready to move forward on additional assets.

But we also continue to choose to give weapons of mass destruction to assassins. Other nations around the world don't choose to hand weapons with such accurate long-range capabilities, such powerful destructive force, to these assassins whose brains are breaking.

We also have a constellation of actors in this country who are engaged in a web of conspiracy theories. There is a justification of political violence that exists in this country today--apologies for those people who tried to kill us, attacked us on January 6--that leads many others to contemplate that they will also be let off the hook for their acts of political violence.

So I take the protection of former President Trump and Vice President Harris and everyone under Secret Service protection very seriously.

Let's move ahead with this bill. I don't think it actually solves the problem. Let's pass the additional money so that they have everything they need--the Secret Service--in order to get the job done. Then let's sit down and have a broader conversation about why we have seen this spike in political violence and what other ways Republicans and Democrats can come together.

Only by having that comprehensive conversation about funding, about the lethal means of assassination, about the celebration of political violence that happens in this country will we really do the job that is necessary and help the Secret Service reach their ``zero fail'' mission.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, when I was growing up, I had a pediatrician. His name was Dr. Cartlon. He was kind. He was reassuring. His advice and his comfort meant a lot to my parents, who were young parents and in need of a steady shoulder to lean on

when their kids were born. I remember Dr. Cartlon distinctly even though he retired when I was pretty young, and I remember that he was a really important part of my family's support system. He was an important part of our community and family identity.

My kids don't have a pediatrician; they have many pediatricians. That is because the big pediatric practice that we use decided that it was inefficient and not cost-effective to assign one pediatrician to every family.

Every time we book an appointment, we go see a different doctor at this practice. They are all competent. Our kids are healthy. This very efficient system--it does mean that we probably get in to see a doctor faster than when my parents were trying to find a last-minute appointment with only a very busy Dr. Cartlon. It is an efficient system, but it is hollow. I don't know any of the doctors' names. We have no relationship with one pediatrician. It is clinical. It is not personal. And while we get good care, I admit it leaves you feeling a little bit empty, a little bit alone, as if you are just a number or a name in an appointment book. Without a Dr. Cartlon that you can count on, that experience is a little less assuring.

So I got curious, and I looked up who owns this very competent, very efficient pediatric practice that we use. What I learned is that the primary investor in our children's pediatric practice is Goldman Sachs.

A Wall Street investment bank owning your children's pediatrician would have sounded silly to Americans a generation ago, but today, the role of private equity and hedge funds and big banks in healthcare ownership is one of the most important stories in healthcare, and by and large, it is bad news for patients.

Right in front of our eyes, the defining purpose of our healthcare system is being transformed. Our hospitals and our nursing homes, our hospice care, even our kids' pediatric practices now exist often for the primary purpose of making obscene amounts of money for investors. It is not about keeping us healthy; it is about return on investment. That is what I want to spend a few minutes talking to my colleagues about today.

Historically, you could count on your doctor's office and your nearest hospital to be locally owned, likely to be not-for-profit, and trust that the reason they existed was to make sure that patients got the care they needed. The people that owned the healthcare institutions you counted on lived in your community. They didn't answer to New York private equity firms or Los Angeles investment companies; they were accountable to you, to their neighbors.

That really mattered. It made you feel safe. It reassured you that you or your loved ones were in good hands--because ultimately that is the only thing that matters. When we are at our most vulnerable-- whether that be because of something joyous, like a pregnancy, or something more worrying, like a difficult diagnosis--all we want to know is that the priority at that institution that we or our loved one is at is that we are being taken care of, that the primary motivation of the person taking care of us is taking care of us, but increasingly, that is no longer the case.

Let's just take for today private equity firms--companies that buy up companies, extract as much rent from them as possible, and then quickly turn them over to the next highest bidder.

Over the past decade, private equity investors have spent more than $1 trillion acquiring hospitals, nursing homes, and physician practices. You can see here in this chart that private equity acquired six times as many medical practices in 2021 compared to just a decade earlier, in 2012.

The reach today of private equity in our healthcare system is enormous. Think everything from specialists, like OB/GYNs and anesthesiologists, to generalists, like primary private care providers and emergency services and urgent care. You might not even know that the new doctor you are seeing or the place where you are getting your blood work done is owned not by anybody in your community but by a far- off private equity firm.

To understand why this is so dangerous, you just have to understand what private equity is all about and how it makes a very small number of people a ton of money. The playbook is pretty simple. Private equity firms invest in companies--largely through borrowed money--then flip them for a quick profit to enrich themselves and their investors. It is called buy, strip, flip.

Buy: The private equity firm uses a leveraged buyout normally, meaning they put up a small amount of their own money and borrow all the rest, immediately saddling their new purchase with huge amounts of debt.

Strip: They comb through the balance sheets to find as many cost- cutting opportunities as possible. They lay off workers. They stop paying vendors. They even might sell the land underneath the company that they bought, giving themselves a big one-time payout, leaving the company to pay rent on the space that they used to own.

And then flip: They find a new buyer or they get bailed out by somebody--sometimes even government--and walk away richer than before and completely insulated from any legal or moral fallout from the consequences of their actions.

Short-term profit is the priority, and in the healthcare system, that comes with real risk and downside because at the moment you are most vulnerable, you want to make sure that the priority is taking care of you.

Let me tell you a story to give you a little example about how this works. Prospect Medical Holdings is a safety-net hospital operator, which means they provide healthcare to people who are on Medicaid, people who don't have insurance. Prospect was acquired by a private equity firm in 2010 and currently owns 16 hospitals in this country in Pennsylvania, California, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

Before we get into the details, let's talk about how a private equity firm buys a hospital. They raise capital from investors, but a huge portion of the money they raise, as I mentioned before, is borrowed. So from the start, the hospital that they are buying is millions of dollars in debt, additional debt, and is immediately responsible for generating revenue to pay that debt--debt that the hospital didn't acquire, debt that is on the hospital because the ownership company borrowed the money in order to buy the hospital. Sometimes that means taking a bad financial situation and ultimately replacing it with an even worse one.

So in 2016, this company, Prospect, bought three hospitals in my State--Rockville General, Manchester Memorial, and Waterbury Hospital-- for a total of $150 million. Combined, these hospitals serve about 600,000 patients. They employ about 4,000 people.

For most of the people who live in this area, these hospitals are their best and sometimes their only option. Access to emergency rooms, especially if you live in one of the more rural parts of the State, can be a matter of life and death. Many of the patients are on Medicare and Medicaid, and they might not have access to transportation that would allow them to get to a hospital farther away.

I should note that 80 percent of Prospect's revenues come from Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, meaning this company and the hospitals it owns are largely funded by us, by taxpayers.

These hospitals in Connecticut, I will admit, weren't in great financial shape when they were bought. But they were hopeful that these new owners--these new owners with lots of money at their disposal-- would bring an infusion of investment--that is what was promised--and would help right the ship.

Two years after their purchase, the hospitals in Rockville, Manchester, and Waterbury hadn't seen much of any improvement or investment. In fact, they were beginning to fall into greater disrepair. As the three of them entered some pretty dire financial straits, Prospect didn't make further investments. They took out a $1.1 billion mortgage and made these hospitals the collateral. Surely, they put some of that money--they used the hospitals as collateral. They raised $1.1 billion. Surely, they put that money back into the hospitals to pay for the repairs and improve their financial situations.

You know the story. They didn't do that. In fact, half of that loan-- they used the hospitals for collateral. Half of that loan went to dividends to investors and executives across the country in California, where Prospect was located. And $90 million went straight to

one person, the CEO. Let me guarantee you, $90 million would have made a huge difference at Waterbury Hospital. It would have saved lives. But Waterbury Hospital was used as collateral so that Sam Lee, the CEO, could make $90 million. Next to nothing went toward a single one of the 16 hospitals that Prospect owns across the country. Prospect owes the State of Connecticut $67 million in unpaid taxes. They owe the low- income city of Waterbury, which struggles to pay its elementary school teachers, $10.5 million. None of that money went to pay the taxes they owe Connecticut and the city of Waterbury.

Prospect's CEO made $90 million while his company refused to pay taxes. But maybe, you ask, the CEO really needed the money. Well, he didn't. It is just greed. This guy, Sam Lee, I don't know him, but he owns not one but two luxury homes in Los Angeles. They are worth more than $15 million combined. Each of them has its own pool. One even has its own private basketball court. They are 11 minutes from each other. Sam Lee pillaged three Medicaid hospitals in Connecticut so he could have two mansions 11 minutes apart.

But here is the real problem. Sam Lee isn't the exception; he is the rule.

We just finished up a set of hearings in meetings on Steward Health Care, which used the same playbook as Prospect to run their hospitals into the ground while their out-of-State CEO also cashed out. The hospitals Steward bought in Louisiana and Massachusetts were gutted.

A nurse testified before our committee this month that they put dead babies in cardboard boxes because they wouldn't pay for the kind of temporary coffin that would normally be used for a dead child. The nurses would leave during the day to go to local stores to buy basic supplies on their own dime because they didn't have them in the hospital.

The elevators in these Steward Health Care hospitals stopped working. Why? Well, in this case, it is so that CEO, Ralph de la Torre, who ignored a congressional subpoena to appear before the HELP Committee this month, could buy a $40 million, 190-foot yacht with six bedrooms that costs $4 million a year just to keep in the water--dead babies in cardboard boxes so that a CEO could burn $80,000 a week on a crew and shrimp cocktails and champagne for his private yacht. That is obscene. That is revolting. But that is our choice. That is the healthcare system that our laws currently allow to exist.

What is happening at Prospect and Steward is happening all over the country. I am not saying that every private equity firm is as rapacious as those that I am talking about today. And private equity firms will tell you these hospitals and nursing homes were inefficient before they bought them, and they will claim that the private equity ownership increased efficiency and quality.

But here is maybe the most important thing to tell you. It is just not true. Yes, as I explained with regard to my own pediatric practice, efficiency--profit-maximizing efficiency--is often not good for the well-being or the peace of mind of patients. My kid's pediatric practice is efficient, but it doesn't deliver the same kind of satisfaction and peace of mind as it does when you have a reliable pediatrician.

But, more importantly, there is actually no evidence that private equity ownership increases quality or reduces costs. As I am going to tell you, the evidence suggests exactly the opposite is true.

A recent study from Harvard Medical School asked the simple question: Are patients at hospitals acquired by private equity receiving worse care than patients at hospitals not owned by private equity? Researchers analyzed insurance data from almost 5 million Medicare hospitalizations for 10 years, and the findings were stunning, though not surprising.

After a hospital was acquired by a private equity firm, there was a 25-percent increase in complications for patients. Patients experienced 27 percent more falls, 38 percent more bloodstream infections. The rate of surgical site infections was double that of hospitals not owned by private equity. Those are stunning numbers. This is not patient care being 5 percent worse, 10 percent worse. You are talking about infection rates after surgeries having doubled, just because a private equity firm owns it, rather than the hospital being in the hands of the local community.

Why? When private equity takes over, it is mostly not about the patient. It is about the profit. How do you maximize profit really quickly? You have to do it really quickly because you have to start paying back those loans you took out to buy the hospital. You have to start getting ready to flip the asset. You have to make the rich CEOs even richer.

What do you do? You fire employees to cut costs. You force the remaining doctors and nurses to just see more patients for less time. You cut corners on supplies and equipment. You discharge patients much more quickly if that makes you more money.

OK, that is quality. But what about cost? It turns out that private equity ownership is driving up costs for premium payers and taxpayers. One study looked at what happens when a private equity firm engages in a rollup strategy, otherwise known as buying up a lot of small doctor groups in the same market. That study found that in 8 out of 10 specialities they looked at, from oncology to primary care, the price of care went up after these private equity rollups by as much as 16 percent.

So when private equity buys up a healthcare practice, quality goes down, satisfaction goes down, cost to consumers and the government goes up.

It begs a larger question: How has capitalism gone so far off the rails? How have the rules of our economy become so unmoored from the common good and any conception of morality? No one in this country would endorse the healthcare system in which nurses at a hospital are forced to go to the local CVS because the emergency room ran out of Pedialyte, just so the hospital owner could pay for the expensive upkeep of a luxury boat. Nobody in this country thinks it is OK for a hospital CEO to refuse to pay taxes so he can easily make his mortgage payments on his two luxury homes 11 minutes away from each other.

These private equity CEOs, who are hurting people in order to fund their lavish lifestyles, most of them don't think they are doing anything wrong. They think they are just playing by the rules. And to an extent, they are right, because our government, our culture, and our society have deemed it OK for people to make a fortune even when it comes at the expense of hurting other people.

Listen, there are parts of the economy where maximizing profit aligns with maximizing quality, but healthcare is not one of them. People are dying in these hospitals and nursing homes so that the executives can get rich. That is not right, and we don't have to accept it.

We can build a free-market economy that has guardrails to protect against the worst kind of immoral greed and excess. I don't begrudge anybody making money, but if you are making money off the most sacred parts of our economy, like our Medicaid hospitals, and you are making money basically by funneling taxpayer dollars to your own pocketbook, there has to be a limit.

And, today, I am just outlining the problem. But make no mistake, there are solutions. Congress and the President do not have to accept this trend of private equity ownership in our healthcare system and the abuse that it allows.

For instance, the Biden administration and the FTC, through Chair Lina Khan, are taking these risks seriously. They are filing anti-trust suits against private equity-backed healthcare monopolies.

In the Senate, the HELP Committee, as I mentioned, just finished a hearing on the abuses of that one company, Steward Health Care, and we heard outrage from both Republicans and Democrats on the committee. When that CEO refused to testify--ignored the subpoena--Republicans and Democrats voted to sanction him for that illegal action. Congress can take a stand and limit or restrict private equity or investor ownership of healthcare institutions that receive a bulk of their revenue from Federal programs like Medicare or Medicaid.

Let's be clear. This is not the only problem in the American healthcare system. We have a lot of work to do to increase quality and reduce costs. But this new phenomenon--the

financialization of healthcare and the rapidly increasing ownership of healthcare intuitions by private equity--has happened virtually overnight, with little public discussion, and it has made all of the failures that already existed in our healthcare system 100 times worse. It has been a boon to the private yacht industry, but it has been largely miserable for patients.

It might feel like this train has left the station, but it has not. It is not too late to turn it around. Congress can and should act.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that privileges of the floor be granted to the following members of my staff until the end of December: Isabella Rivera, Amanda Tureaud, Jasmine Hampton, Keegan Bankoff, Olivia Baine, Savana Sikorski, and Colin Wechsler.

Mr. President, in reserving the right to object, first of all, let me offer my thanks to the Senator from Tennessee for all the work that she has done with my colleague Senator Blumenthal to protect our kids online. I am truly grateful for what they have done together, and although she and I have not worked closely together on legislation, I hope that we will be able to find partnerships to work together to further protections for our kids. I mean that sincerely. She and I may not agree on a lot--as you will hear, we don't agree on this particular resolution--but I do hope that we get the chance to work together. I mean that.

I also mean this with all due respect: Let's be clear about what this is. This isn't an effort to solve a problem. This whole obsession with transgender kids from the rightwing is just about picking on vulnerable kids so that adults can make themselves feel big--bullying and harassing kids because it makes adults feel powerful. As far as I am concerned, this whole effort is shameful.

It is important to understand that resolutions like this do not stand in isolation. It is part of a massive campaign by the right to convince Americans that they should fear immigrants, that they should fear Muslims, that they should fear gay children, that they should fear transgender athletes.

The world in which Republicans want us to live is a world where the biggest problems are not low wages or expensive healthcare or addiction or loneliness, but the threats posed to us by people who are of a different race or speak a different language or are of a different sexual orientation or gender identity. It is a massive, coordinated attempt to marginalize people who aren't White, straight, and Christian, and it exists for a reason: to distract you.

I have a ton of close Republican friends in this Chamber whom I work with a lot, but let's be honest. The Republican Party's platform today is maybe the most unpopular agenda of any major political party in recent memory: ban abortion, cut taxes for corporations and millionaires, ban books, loosen gun laws. Nobody wants any of that.

So what do you do if the things you actually want to do if you achieve power are super, super unpopular? You distract them with giant, gross lies, like immigrants are eating our pets, or greatly exaggerated untruths, like our high school sports are under assault from transgender kids.

It is all an effort to hide the ball from the real agenda--abortion bans and millionaire tax cuts--by trying to make you believe that you should spend your entire day, that you should spend your entire life, just being afraid of people who are different from you.

Let me give you the facts, not the fearmongering, about high school transgender athletes, and I will let you decide whether this situation is worthy of hundreds of bills having been introduced by Republicans all across the country and whether it is worthy of debate continuously, over and over again, on the Senate floor.

There are over 6 million kids competing in high school sports today. For the problem of transgender girls competing in girls sports to be a national crisis, what percentage of that 6 million would be transgender girls? Ten percent? Is that a crisis? Five percent? One percent? It is none of those.

Let's take Florida as an example. More than 800,000 students in Florida participate in high school athletics. Before they enacted their ban, how many transgender athletes were in Florida of those 800,000 students? One hundred? Nope. Fifty? Nope. Over the course of 8 years in the entire State of Florida, before their ban, there were 13 transgender high school athletes--13. Those 13 girls were apparently waging a war against girls sports. That is a pretty small army to be waging a war.

You are more likely to be killed by a falling object in this country than to have your daughter compete against a transgender girl in high school sports, but what if she did? I think every State and every school district should decide these questions for themselves. I don't think the Federal Government should get involved. But as a parent, personally, I celebrate those few transgender kids, who often spend their entire adolescence being shamed or marginalized by the kind of small people who push resolutions like this--I celebrate the fact that they get the experience of the comradery and the happiness that come with being part of a sports team. I think that is great. I don't think that is a threat to my kids. I don't think that is a threat to my community or the Nation.

I teach my kids to love everybody, to include everybody, to see people who are different from them--who are a different race, a different religion, even a different gender identity--as potential friends, not as enemies, waging war against them, to be shamed or bullied.

This is an absurd resolution. It is designed to distract Americans from Republicans' real agenda. It is designed to build a culture of fear and mistrust, a culture that I and, I am going to tell you, most Americans reject.

Therefore, I object.

Mr. President, we don't have to fight over everything here. It is OK if, occasionally, we find consensus around commonsense things that we could do together to keep our country safe.

I kind of thought we had consensus on at least the idea that civilians shouldn't be able to get their hands on machineguns.

I understand there are differences between Republicans and Democrats on AR-15s, that maybe not all of my Republican colleagues think that everybody should go through a background

check before they buy a gun. But I thought--I thought--we were all in agreement that fully automatic weapons were too dangerous to be in the hands of civilians; that these are unquestionably weapons of war. They are designed--designed--for mass slaughter, and you just do not need a weapon that allows you to fire hundreds of rounds per minute in order to hunt, in order to protect your home, in order to shoot for sport.

But, apparently, we do not have consensus on the question of whether Americans should have access to machinegun technology because, earlier today, Senator Heinrich--a gun owner, somebody who knows a lot about weapons--came to the floor to ask for consent that we make sure that civilians can't get their hands on a device called a bump stock that allows you to convert a semiautomatic weapon into a machinegun. That is, effectively, what a bump stock does. It allows you to change a semiautomatic weapon, which you have to pull the trigger in order to fire each round, into an automatic weapon in which one physical pull of the finger allows you to fire multiple rounds. It effectively gives you access to an automatic weapon.

I thought we all agreed that automatic weapons, machineguns, should be in the hands of the military. I especially thought we all agreed on that after what happened in Las Vegas.

On October 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire on a concert from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel. There were 500 yards between that gunman on the 32nd floor and those innocent concertgoers. That gunman fired about 1,100 rounds, killing 58 people--58 people--and wounding 500.

When we think about the Las Vegas tragedy, we focus on that number, 58 people. That is a stunning number of people to die in an instant. We don't talk about the 500 people who were injured, many of them with injuries that changed their lives forever--everyone, whether they were injured or not, dealing with trauma that impacted their lives forever.

There were 1,100 rounds fired from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Do you know how long it took him to get off 1,100 rounds? Eleven minutes. Eleven minutes. That gunman was able to fire around 90 shots every 10 seconds. Why? Because he had taken a bump stock and converted a semiautomatic weapon, turning it, effectively, into an automatic weapon.

Even Donald Trump, the biggest backer of the NRA and the gun lobby that has ever been in the White House, knew that something had to change. He put forward a regulation to ban bump stocks, and most of my Republican colleagues celebrated that change. I don't remember many of them opposing it.

But this month, the Supreme Court, packed with pro-gun lobby Justices, most of whom were selected by Donald Trump, ruled that that regulation was unconstitutional. I think they got it wrong. I think they absolutely got it wrong. I think if you look at the plain reading of the statute, bump stocks are illegal, and the regulation proffered by the Trump administration should have been ruled as unconstitutional. But Trump's appointees thought otherwise. They bought the argument of the gun lobby, and they ruled that bump stocks could, once again, be sold commercially in this country.

So we thought that it would be an easy case to make to our colleagues that having seen the regulation proffered by the Trump administration to be ruled unconstitutional, having been offered by the Supreme Court the chance to fix that statutorily, that we could get to that business this week, but we are not because Republicans objected to our efforts to try to pass into law a ban on bump stocks, to try and take away from psychopaths and madmen the technology that allows them to turn an automatic weapon on crowds of concertgoers and get off 1,000-plus rounds in a 10-minute period of time.

What Republicans in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are doing on a regular basis is facilitating the mass slaughter of Americans, handing to individuals whose brains are breaking the tools of mass slaughter, refusing to do the easy, popular, commonsense things to just make it a little bit harder for 58 people to be gunned down, 500 people to be injured in a 10-minute period of time.

No law that we pass will end gun homicides in this country. No law that we pass will completely eliminate mass shootings. But there simply are technologies like the bump stock that turn a mass shooting in which 5 or 10 people might have died into a 58-person slaughter.

It is just true that when you have a weapon like an AR-15 or you have a converted semiautomatic weapon with a bump stock, the slaughter is worse, that more people die. Why on Earth would we choose to hand to these killers weapons that are designed for one purpose and one purpose only, mass slaughter?

You do not need a bump stock in order to protect your home. You do not need a machinegun in order to hunt for sport. The only reason you need a bump stock is to engage in mass murder.

I take this personally because I have lived through an experience of mass slaughter, as has the Presiding Officer. I did not lose a loved one, but I have come to know those families from Sandy Hook like they are family. And I know there is never ever getting over losing a loved one, frankly, whether it be to a gun death by suicide or by mass slaughter. But it makes it harder to deal with the loss of a loved one in a mass killing when you know the people that you elect to positions of high office have the power to prevent the slaughter or at least prevent it from being as bad as it was, and they chose to do nothing.

Republicans complain that this was a political stunt. What about everything that Joe Biden has said and done, what about the efforts that Senate Democrats have undertaken would suggest that we aren't sincere in our desire to prevent unnecessary gun deaths?

We have, over and over again, acted in good faith to try to find bipartisan compromise around changing the gun laws of this Nation. Joe Biden has shown absolute sincerity in his desire to try to keep more people alive. This is not a ``gotcha'' unanimous consent request; this is a real attempt to effectuate what we thought was a consensus that people shouldn't have access to machinegun technology in this country.

Senate Republicans could have agreed to work with us. They could make an offer today to expedite consideration of this bill next week. So the only political decision that is being made here is by Republicans who are opposing a bill that is undoubtedly supported by the mass majority of Americans.

So if this wasn't the way the Republicans wanted to do this, then I am open to other offers because we have passed bipartisan legislation to save lives. There are Republicans who have joined us, most recently, on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

What we know is that when we do come together and pass laws that make it harder for dangerous people to get their hands on dangerous weapons, we save lives.

Urban gun deaths are down by 20 percent in this country. From 2022 to 2023, we saw the sharpest decline in gun murders in the history of this country. In 2024, mass shootings are down over--well, around 30 percent compared to the same time period in 2023.

We are seeing a precipitous decline in gun violence in this country, whether it be urban homicides or mass shootings, and I am not suggesting that the entire reason for that is the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, but you had better believe that is a big part of the reason. You had better believe that when we pass laws that make it harder for dangerous people to get their hands on dangerous weapons, we save lives. And what matters in this country more than protecting the physical safety of your loved ones? What matters more? Nothing. Think about it. You would give anything--anything--to protect your son or daughter from physical harm. You would trade away your career, your savings. You might even give up your own life.

We have an easy opportunity--we had an easy opportunity--Republicans had an easy opportunity earlier today to just make it a little bit harder for the small subset of individuals in this country whose brains have collapsed and believe that the only way to deal with their demons is to turn a gun on others--we had a chance to make it less likely that that subset of individuals would be able to kill 58 people like

what happened in Las Vegas, and we couldn't even come to that consensus.

We are open for business. If this wasn't the way today, show us the way. Tell us how we can answer Republican concerns so that we can get these weapons of war, these facilitators of mass murder, these bump stocks, off the streets.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President and colleagues, this is a speech I have been thinking about giving for a long time. I think it is a speech somebody needs to give, but it is hard. There is some really awful stuff I am going to talk about, things that cut deep when we think about who we are, when we think about how we handle crises and emergencies, about the things we need to do as a human race to feel safe.

I want to talk to you today about what happened on May 24, 2022-- almost 2 years ago--at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX. After 2 years of review, investigation, hand-wringing, grief, and anger, we now have as full a picture of what happened that day as we ever will, and we need to talk about it because it is important.

Here is what we know: 1 hour and 17 minutes after a gunman entered Robb Elementary School and opened fire on two classrooms full of children, 54 minutes after a school police officer got a call from his wife, who said that she had been shot in her classroom, 38 minutes after a 9-1-1 dispatcher told police there were confirmed victims in the classrooms, only then did a team of officers finally enter room 111 at Robb Elementary School and kill the gunman--1 hour and 17 excruciating minutes. The kids inside those classrooms--9, 10, 11 years old--and their teachers waited to be saved by the people whose job it was to keep them safe.

The students in rooms 111 and 112 had prepared for this moment. They had practiced what they should do if something like this were to happen: Drop to the floor. Sit along the walls farthest from the door and the windows. Crouch under desks, countertops--anywhere you could be safe.

They stayed silent--so silent that the officers on the other side of the door thought that there couldn't possibly be children inside. Surely, they would be crying out. But they were doing, in fact, exactly what they were told to do. They were doing their part.

As the minutes went on, outside the classroom stood not 10 armed officers, not 50, not even 100. Outside the classroom and surrounding the school, 376 armed officers were present--outside the classroom.

Inside the classroom, 10-year-old Ailyn Ramos hugged her friend Leann Garcia to stop her from screaming out in pain.

Inside the classroom, Elsa Avila, a teacher in room 109, tried to stay conscious after a bullet ripped through her stomach. Her students whispered to her:

Miss, we love you. You're going to be OK.

They told each other:

Don't let her go to sleep.

Inside the classroom, 10-year-old Khloie Torres and Miah Cerrillo called 9-1-1, begging for help.

Inside the classroom, Khloie and Miah's classmate Kendall Olivarez sobbed in pain as she lay stuck under their teacher, who had already been killed.

As 33 students and 3 of their teachers spent an hour and 17 minutes trapped in a room with an active shooter, there were hundreds of armed adults who stood outside. Doing what? Well, they were doing the things that would naturally occur to you if you heard that a man with military weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition is just around the corner from you on a killing spree. They were scared. They were disorganized. They were panicked. They were frozen. There were good people amongst those 376, but they were all providing natural reactions given the circumstances. But that does not excuse their inaction. Of course it doesn't.

The adults--the adults--in Uvalde had bought into this idea that more security, more men with guns in schools would keep those kids safe. In fact, the Uvalde School District placed so much faith in the ability of armed security to keep schools safe that it had its own school police department. But all of those men with guns didn't protect those kids. The opposite happened.

How on Earth could this happen? How could there be 300 armed law enforcement officers doing nothing for so long as children called 9-1- 1, as parents ran to the school and begged to be allowed in? How could those officers wait 1 hour and 17 minutes when the entire point of having a school police department full of men with guns is to stop something like this from happening?

Earlier this year, the Justice Department released a report to try to answer some of those questions. They spent 20 months reviewing hours of body cam footage, audio recordings, training logs. They interviewed 260 people who were there that day. The final report paints a damning and infuriating picture of what went wrong, and I think it is important to talk about it because it shows how flawed this promise is--this promise that good guys with guns is all that is necessary to stop bad guys with guns.

At 11:35, Sergeant Daniel Coronado heard gunfire and ran inside the school. Another round of shots grazed two officers who had been approaching the classrooms with him. One of those officers kept moving toward the classroom, but he turned back when realized that none of his colleagues had followed him.

Again, this reaction from those initial police officers is understandable. There was a madman inside that classroom. Instinct tells you to run away, not to run toward danger.

Then confusion set in--the second predictable element of an active shooter crisis. Sergeant Coronado relayed an unconfirmed report that the gunman was contained and had barricaded himself inside a classroom, leading officers to believe that they were dealing with a barricaded subject, not an active shooter. Active shooter training says rush into the classroom, but they didn't think it was an active shooter, so they didn't act with urgency.

Eventually, they just couldn't continue to rationalize standing idle because it was a barricaded suspect. They continued to hear gunfire. They learned that one of the officers' wives was shot inside the classroom. They heard over their radios that there were victims. Common sense would have told them that there were kids inside these classrooms. Forty minutes into this massacre, there should have been no doubt what they were dealing with. This was an active shooter. This was the time to enter the classroom, but instead they continued to wait.

Now, part of the confusion was that there was no clear command structure; there was no one to give orders. There were probably lots of men with guns who wanted to go in but were told that

they couldn't. But there really was no excuse. At one point, the officers claimed that they needed keys, but they admitted not a single officer even walked up to the door to check if it was unlocked. Why? Because they all knew that inside that classroom was a young man equipped with military-style weaponry that could kill them--that would kill them the instant they opened that door.

Finally, at 12:50 p.m., 77 minutes after the shooter entered the school, a team of officers breached the room and killed the gunman. Two children still had a pulse when they were rescued. Eva Mireles, the teacher whose husband was on the scene, died in an ambulance that never even left the school.

One gunman, 376 armed officers--1 hour and 17 minutes of avoidable, indescribable horror; 19 children and 2 teachers dead--a colossal failure.

So what does this tell us? What can we learn from this? Because we are commanded to learn something from these tragedies.

I know human instinct. I know we have a biological inclination to want to fight fire with fire. So our first reaction, when we see the threat of a deranged young man with a gun, is to mirror that threat with our defensive reaction. If a gunman steps into a building where our kids are, we want them to be met with equal force: Confront a bad guy with a gun with a good guy with a gun.

At some level, in here, I get that that makes sense. I understand this reaction, because I have felt it. I have had kids in these post- Sandy Hook public schools for the last 12 years. And when we wrote the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most comprehensive gun legislation in 30 years, it made important changes to our gun laws and invested in mental health, but it also provided $300 million for school hardening. So I am on the record supporting putting more security in our schools.

But in the wake of Uvalde and in the wake of all of this reporting, it is increasingly impossible to square this gut reaction so many of us understandably have with reality. It is time for me to admit that to myself. It is time for all of us to admit this publicly.

In 1970, police officers were stationed in just 1 percent of America's public schools. By 1997, 22 percent had an officer onsite, and 43 percent in 2016. By 2019, the majority of schools had a police officer onsite. You can match almost every uptick with a high-profile school shooting.

But despite this exponential increase in armed officers at schools, the shootings have not abated. They have increased in frequency. More guns and more police and more armed security in schools has done nothing to stop this trajectory.

We should have seen this with our own eyes well before Uvalde. When the gunshots started at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, the armed police at the school that day ran away and then argued in court that they had no legal obligation to protect those kids, only an obligation to protect themselves.

But it is not just anecdotal evidence. A study of 179 school shootings between 1999 and 2019 found that there was no association between the presence of a police officer in a school and any reduction in the severity of violent shootings in those schools.

When you really stop to think about this, it does make sense. A shooter with an AR-15 needs a minute or two to get off enough rounds to kill dozens. Even if the armed security officer does the right thing and runs to the gunfire--instead of the natural thing, running away from it--time is on the shooter's side. So it is not surprising that there is no evidence that more guns in our schools keep our kids safe.

What tends to happen, frankly, when police officers populate our schools, is that ordinary school misbehaviors get criminalized, and kids, especially Black boys and disabled students, get arrested for things that used to be dealt with in the principal's office. The police in these schools don't end up stopping mass shootings. They just end up arresting a bunch of kids and ruining their lives.

We can zoom out even further to consider this argument of whether more guns--or more good guys with guns--make our communities safer or less safe. If good guys with guns protected us from gun violence, you would expect States or communities with high rates of legal gun ownership to be safer, but they aren't.

You can probably guess by now that the opposite is actually true. In places with high rates of legal gun ownership, there are more gun deaths than in places with low rates of gun ownership.

There is a difference between what makes us feel safe and what actually makes us safer. The reality is this: More people with guns and more guns do not make our kids safer. That is an uncomfortable truth--I get it--because we want to believe that we can meet force with potential force, and everything will be okay.

But there were 376 armed police officers and security outside that classroom in Uvalde. There were plenty of good guys with guns outside that classroom, some of them steps away from a shooting that was ongoing for an hour, and it did nothing for those kids. Frankly, it made the massacre harder to live with for so many of those parents because it exposed this fraud that told us that we can protect ourselves with more guns.

This is a hard lesson to learn. After Uvalde and Parkland, Texas and Florida just doubled down on a failed strategy. They required more guns in our schools, despite no evidence that it works. In Tennessee, after the terrible Covenant School shooting, the State legislature went even further, arming teachers with guns.

In the movies, a heroic lone good guy with a gun kills dozens of armed evildoers, but that is in the movies. That is fiction. That is not reality. A teacher with a gun isn't going to save our kids. Remember, the evidence tells us, over and over again, that in places with more guns, there are more gun deaths, not less.

But amidst all of this bad news, amidst the failure to learn the lessons of Uvalde and Parkland, there is good news. There are policies that work. In States with gun safety laws--like universal background checks, safe storage, and red flag laws--fewer people die by guns.

In the wake of the passage--the bipartisan passage--of the 2022 gun bill, gun crime is down. Urban gun murders have dropped by 12 percent from 2022 to 2023--the biggest 1-year drop in the history of the country. And 2024 is on pace for another record-setting drop in urban gun crime.

And, this year, the pace of mass shootings is way down as well. Between January and May of this year, there were 29 percent fewer mass shootings compared to the same period of time in 2023.

It is proof that when the primary focus of your efforts is to pass laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, instead of loading our communities up with guns, and putting money into communities to help get at the root causes of violence, you can save lives.

What happened that day at Robb Elementary School is a disgrace. We will never understand--I will never understand--the grief and the pain of those parents who lost kids that day, who watched 376 armed officers wait an hour and 17 minutes to confront that gunman.

What we can do--what we can do--is make a decision to not simply avert our eyes from what happened that day because it is what is easier, but instead study and learn from this tragedy.

Flooding our schools and our communities with more guns won't solve the problem. It won't stop the next Uvalde. What will keep our kids safe is keeping guns--especially the most dangerous guns--out of the hands of dangerous people.

Congress has the power right now to do something about it. We could start, for instance, by responding to last week's Supreme Court decision and passing legislation to ban the conversion of semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. Our kids would be safer, undoubtedly, if it was harder for a deranged psychopath to get their hands on a banned automatic weapon.

The majority of Americans are on our side. They want Congress to act, to pass things like universal background checks, to ban bump stocks. They are sick of us learning the wrong lesson every time tragedy strikes. It is never too late for this time to be different.

I yield the floor.