Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for the following interns in my office to be granted floor privileges until July 22, 2026: Petra Cernicek, Spencer Killpack, Elise Newton, Megan Terrell, Aaron Bujan, and Isabel Young.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to waive the mandatory quorum call with respect to the Flowers nomination.

Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the basic duty we all took an oath to carry out--and whether we are living up to it.

The U.S. Senate was never designed to be easy. It was designed to be deliberate, to force people who disagree to sit in the same room and work something out anyway. That only works if everyone here still believes in the underlying premise that we were sent to govern no matter who is the President. The goal is not to defeat the other side for its own sake but to do the hard, unglamourous work of running this country together, in good faith, even when we would rather not.

Americans did not send Republicans and Democrats to Washington expecting us to agree on everything. In fact, my constituents would be very concerned if we did. They sent us here expecting us to take the job seriously. That means engaging with the substance in front of us, debating it, amending it, fighting for it on the merits, rather than reflexively blocking whatever comes to the floor simply because of who sits in the White House.

Last week, this Chamber fell short. There is a real difference between principled opposition and blind obstruction, and the American people can tell which one they are watching. Opposing a policy because you believe it is wrong for the country is exactly what this institution is built for. Opposing something simply because you dislike the President and you are trying to jam him when there is international conflict is something else entirely, and it corrodes the very system we are sworn to protect.

I was very troubled to watch every Senate Democrat vote against even beginning the debate on the National Defense Authorization Act, a bill that has, historically, enjoyed strong bipartisan backing.

Now, I am not suggesting Members can't or shouldn't oppose the NDAA when they have genuine concerns; that is a legitimate part of the process. Voting no is often the easy move around here, and I have done it myself when I thought it was warranted. But this looked less like principled opposition and more like reflexive obstruction, a decision to block the process itself rather than engage with the substance of an important bill.

I also think of the SAVE America Act when I say this because it is a case in point. Here is a bill built around a premise that 83 percent of the American people--Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike-- already agree on, that only citizens should decide American elections and that voters should be able to prove who they are when they cast a ballot. This is not fringe. This is not one party's obsession. It is about as close to consensus as the American people get on anything these days.

And yet it cannot get a real hearing on the merits in this Chamber-- not a real debate, just a wall. That is not principled opposition. That is the process itself being blocked on a question the country has largely answered.

Good faith is not a partisan virtue. It doesn't belong to one side of the aisle or the other. It is the minimum the American people are owed by everyone who serves here. They are watching to see whether we can still disagree honestly, argue our positions openly and persuasively, and still find a way to get the Nation's business done. When we can't, when the obstruction becomes the default setting instead of the exception, we are not defending the Constitution. We are quietly letting it fail.

We are stewards of something bigger than any one bill or any one election cycle. We are stewards of a system that only survives if the people who serve in it still believe in doing the work, in doing the right thing, in doing what the Constitution outlines is our duty to the American people. That is what Americans expect of us. It is time we start living up to it every single day, not just when it is politically convenient.

I yield the floor.

(Mr. ROUNDS assumed the chair.)

Reserving the right to object, I will be completely unaffected by the bill the gentleman from Georgia is proposing because I won't be here next year, but I reserve the right to object because there are alternatives.

For example, when I arrived here, I was placed on the Banking Committee, and the Banking Committee has issues that might conflict with my financial assets. So I put my meager--stress on ``meager''-- assets in a blind trust. That blind trust was approved by the Senate Ethics Committee. The specific language was approved by our own Senate Ethics Committee.

I don't know whether the investments that I placed in that blind trust are still there. I don't know whether they sold some and traded them for better investments. I won't find out until next January when I leave here and get my assets out of the blind trust and see what is left.

In other words, there are ways to avoid conflicts of interest in the committees on which we work.

There are also many restrictions on what Members of Congress can do and not do while they are in office. For example, as a rancher in the West, half of my State is public land. I am not allowed by law to have a Bureau of Land Management grazing lease. It is an issue that very few people in the Senate have to deal with, but several of us do, and so we had to divest of that

while no one else has a similar restriction.

Our Ethics Committee and our Rules Committee can ensure that Members comply. A blind trust is sufficient to ensure conflicts of interest are appropriately mitigated.

Further, the House is currently working on the Stop Insider Trading Act, which is another vehicle to address concerns similar to the gentleman's from Georgia.

So this issue is an important issue to bring up, but it should go through regular order so it can be thoroughly discussed.

Another point with the bill under consideration at the moment is the language does not define cryptocurrency. So what is cryptocurrency? Are stablecoins used for payments included? Are nonfungible tokens included? So this language needs clarification.

This should go through regular order. This should go through committee. It should be thoroughly vetted. The language should be clarified. For these reasons, I object.

Mr. President, I object. And excuse me. Let me start with this: I reserve the right to object.

I have respect for the Senator's tenacity in making these arguments, but we are being asked, through this resolution, to accept the most dire narrative that is built on projections and models rather than proven causation. The data cited here conflates correlation with causation.

The U.S. Senate should legislate based on evidence, not based on unrealized projections and fear. The resolution cites a $7.4 billion real estate loss in five southeastern States, between 2005 and 2017, and attributes it to sea level rise.

But we shouldn't forget what also happened during those years. We lived through the 2008 financial crisis and the housing collapse, the worst real estate market in generations. Property values fell across the entire Nation, but they were particularly bad in Florida.

So future projections and predictions are a troubling thing upon which to base legislation. Models are tools, not crystal balls. Models predict outcomes based on assumptions fed to them, and those assumptions can be wrong.

There were many projections that cattle cause climate to be worse. At Oxford, in England, and in Italy, studies were done that changed the projections, and the new projections determined that cattle are good for the environment. They not only are not making things worse, but they are making things better.

So if you change the assumptions and the projections, models can produce a different result. So we should not assume that every model has been fed the right information. We cannot make policy based on worst case scenarios from computer models.

Mr. Chairman, I actually do believe that climate is changing. But even during the Obama administration, when I was on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, we had some witnesses come to the committee from National Labs and testify. And one of them was asked what percentage of climate change is caused by mankind, the activities of mankind. And the response was it is a single-digit number. And that scientist, from a U.S. National Lab, was never allowed to testify in front of our committee again because he gave an answer that didn't comport with the narrative that the administration was trying to sell.

Climate change is happening, and I wish the Senator were making his remarks in China, rather than the United States, where the air is so bad that--I was in South Korea, in Seoul, and one day the weather was beautiful, the climate was beautiful, the air was fabulous. And the next day, you couldn't see two blocks because there was so much pollution.

And I said: What happened here?

They said: We know what our air quality will be in Seoul, South Korea, when we look at what the air quality was in China 48 hours ago.

So it is coming from a very polluted environment.

The United States has been exemplary, since the passage of the Clean Air Act, in cleaning up its air. We have extremely clean air, and especially so since we are an industrialized nation. I am proud of what the United States has done to address the Senator's concerns, but climate cannot be used to address the issue of concern to the Senator. Therefore, I object.

Mr. President, I understand that there is a bill at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. President, I now ask for a second reading and, in order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I object to my own request.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 786, which is at the desk.

I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Wednesday, June 24; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, morning business be closed, and the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Marck nomination; further, notwithstanding rule XXII, the cloture motions filed during Monday's session of the Senate ripen at 11:30 a.m. and that the Senate recess following the cloture vote on the Marck nomination until 2:15 p.m.; further, that if cloture is invoked on the Marck nomination, the Senate vote on confirmation of the nomination at 2:15 p.m., and if cloture is invoked on the Hendershot nomination, the Senate vote on confirmation of the nomination at 5:30 p.m.; finally, if any nominations are confirmed during Wednesday's session of the Senate, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's actions.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, this resolution asks us to accept, without scrutiny, that correlation equals causation.

It is true that premiums are rising, but this Senate deserves an honest accounting of why. Replacement costs are up because Biden-era climate regulations drove up the price of lumber, appliances, and labor--regulations the Trump administration is now working to unwind because of the damage they did.

When it costs more to build a home, it costs more to insure one. That is not a climate story. It is a policy failure story.

If we are serious about lower premiums, the answer is simple: Build more homes that people can afford.

Every regulation that makes construction more expensive means fewer homes are built. Constrained supply drives up values, and higher home values mean higher premiums. That is not a partisan talking point. That is economics.

We don't need more climate mandates. We need more housing. And we can start by getting the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act to the President's desk.

The resolution being offered today offers us a bumper sticker. American homeowners deserve real solutions.

With that, Mr. President, I object.

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the outstanding group of dedicated Americans whose work is often unseen but whose impact will be felt by generations.

As my time in this Chamber draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on the responsibilities I have been privileged to carry on behalf of the people of Wyoming. Among them, few have felt more consequential or more personal than nominating young men and women across Wyoming to our Nation's service academies. Institutions like West Point, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, and the Merchant Marine Academy do not simply train officers; they forge the character of those who will one day defend the freedoms we hold so dear. To have a hand, however small, in sending Wyoming's sons and daughters through those gates has been one of the true honors of this office. For years, I have relied on the help of Dr. Joe McGinley, Dr. Joe Schaffer, Val Rodekohr, Senator Tara Nethercott, Representative Tom Lubnau, Rt. Col. Tucker Fagan, and Ziggy Polinauskas to help select and prepare young people from every corner of our State to serve in America's armed forces.

The work of governing is often loud. Debates are televised, and our votes are recorded, but some of the most meaningful work done in service to this country happens quietly, in conference rooms and community centers by people like my nominations committee who will never see the spotlight. They may not earn widespread recognition, but history will feel the work they do in the careers of the leaders this committee has helped shape, in the units they will lead, and in the country they will serve.

I will be forever grateful for my committee's counsel, their expertise, and their unwavering commitment to Wyoming and our Nation's future. They are truly a part of what makes Wyoming so special, and I could not be prouder to have worked alongside them.

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

Mr, President, I have 11 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate, They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be discharged from further consideration and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the following bills, en bloc: S. 603 and S. 790.

Mr. President, I further ask unanimous consent that the 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.

Mr. President, today I

Mr. President, I have 12 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Pursuant to Rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: